This place is dedicated to the foot- and traintrip I made from Arnstadt to Lübeck (D), in December 2022.

I baptised the project Weg van Bach, which has a threefold meaning. 'Weg van' in flemish means 'crazy about...', but also 'the road of...' and last but not least 'away from...' as in, this is my own interpretation.

I love walking. While walking it's as if my inner world and the outside world slowly merge into one. The dream of walking from Arnstadt to Lübeck had been lingering in my mind for quite some years, but it was Joost Fonteyne, director of Klarafestival Brussels (B), who is a walking-addict too, that I managed to undertake a threefold endeavour: performing the 6 Suites in one concert with live visuals by Klaas Verpoest (B), re-enacting the walk J. S. Bach supposedly did from Arnstadt to Lübeck as a form of inspiration for my interpretation, and creating an exposition of it all, together with Emilie Lauwers (B).

One afternoon at the Brussels Midi train station, and just after one of the meetings I had with the Klarafestival-team to prepare this trip, I met an elderly lady. She came towards me as she saw my cello case, which I happened to have taken with me - not that I take my cello to all my meetings! Anyway, she walked up to me and started talking about how her mother, who was a singer, had taught her the love for classical music. She told me that she was about to leave for India again, where she was responsible for digging wells for drinking water, in poor areas. Helping people in need, even at her age, was a normal thing to do for her, she said, since she had survived the second World War.

She grew up in a small village near Antwerp, and one day, almost at the end of the war, her mother sent her to her aunt's house in the city centre. As a small kid she loved the city, and didn't think of the war. That evening turned out to be one of the nights Antwerp was bombed by German troops with V1 and V2 rockets. On that 16th of December 1944, many people were killed as one of the rockets hit Cinema Rex. Her aunt's house was also hit, but she survived because her little bed was attached to the roof. She remembered smells, noises, and a fireman who came to rescue her from her nest high up, on three ladders knotted to one another with ropes. She also remembered being tremendously cold because of the water and icy temperatures of December and that a man gave her his jacket, adding "Tomorrow you'll give it back to me, because that's the only jacket I have!".

One evening during my trip, to avoid sitting in my dull hotel room, I decided to go for a walk as the sun was already setting. I walked aimlessly until I saw the sign of a WW2 labor camp, called Mittelbau-Dora. It appeared to be the exact camp where war prisoners from Belgium and other countries, forced to live and work inside the cold and wet mountain, made those V1 and V2 bombs which destructed so much of Antwerp and other cities, and on the date mentioned by the elderly lady at the Brussels train station. A commemorative plate just outside the grim entry of the ridge, erected by the Flemish government, explained the whole story in my mother tongue. Standing there in the December frost, I remembered in a flash the warmhearted lady, and I didn't know what to think.  

December 7, 2022