In the midst of the doldrums, this fullness bursts: In “Bare Life”, the bestselling travel author Andreas Altmann focuses not just on a single trip, but on 31. The book brings together his reports from several decades. A kind of best of. Even a legacy? In any case, the lyrics have one thing in common: Altmann’s relentlessly blunt, often humorous style. A big horse is a giant beast, and in the face of a Himalayan pilgrimage, Altmann has phallic associations, which is why he writes of an icy penis as the highest goal of the faithful. It is a matter of taste whether you like this incorrect flippancy, but Altmann’s success on the book market at least proves him right.
He likes to travel unconventionally, for example accompanying a pilot on illegal flights
In any case, he has experiences to report that are rarely on the list of travelers: visiting a chief in Ghana, witnessing a fire dance in Macedonia, accompanying a pilot on illegal flights in Kenya. On these occasions, Altmann describes the landscapes so vividly that one has the feeling of having been there oneself. It is not without reason that several of his reports and books have won journalistic and literary awards.
However, one question already arises from the first pages: are these texts still up-to-date? Or to put it more precisely: Shouldn’t they have actually never been up-to-date? The image of women that Altmann draws in his reports is almost always the same: “shapely” beings that are pretty to look at – and are therefore only referred to as “the bare-legged one”, for example. Altmann notes with joy that “whistling is still allowed” in Havana, and tells how a young student’s “graceful buttocks” came to light. For him, women are no more than objects.
Corruption is part of the DNA of Mexicans, the author claims
But not only their description leaves a stale aftertaste, but also the generalization of people. A thousand years of fighting for survival has made the younger generation of Icelanders less self-pitying, corruption is “part of the national DNA” of Mexicans and dark-skinned people are particularly capable of suffering. Reducing whole groups of people to a single characteristic shows ignorance and is not least insulting.
So it’s fitting that Altmann claims it only takes a day to move around like a local. Admittedly, he manages to find the less touristy paths – for example, by convincing an acquaintance to attend an illegal cockfight with him. However, not necessarily out of journalistic interest: the fight is described in detail, but the inherent problems are left out. In each of his reports, Altmann finds exciting protagonists who confide in him, which he in turn exploits for his own needs. For example, he admits to endangering a helpful Cuban in order to be able to spend the night in his apartment with a woman.
Again and again it becomes clear that some of the reports were first published decades ago. But there are also many ideas in them that are just as old as the texts. Maybe that didn’t attract negative attention in the context at the time – but is it really necessary to publish them again in a collection without comment? In the foreword, Altmann hopes that his book will act like an aphrodisiac on the desire to travel – instead, it regularly leads to joy that certain things are finally a thing of the past.
Andreas Altman: Bare life. Piper-Verlag, Munich 2022. 304 pages, 17 euros.