Another immense loss of cultural assets!
07/20/2021
What looked like a bad Hollywood disaster movie last week is unfortunately a sad reality. Hundreds of people lost their lives in the masses of water. Thousands lost everything they owned. They are now left with no idea what to do next. For many, the insurance situation or their personal financial situation does not allow them to make a smooth new start.
As I was personally affected with my family on August 15, 1997, I can assess this situation a little better than someone who, thank God, has never had to experience anything like this himself. Within minutes, everything you have worked for for decades sinks irretrievably into the wet muck. So we too had to see around a third of our photo archive, which had been collected over three generations, buried in muddy water for ever and ever in a very short space of time.
Now, in Germany, Belgium, Holland and Austria too, there are many of these individual fates with huge losses. Cultural assets that people have collected for years and wanted to preserve for posterity are lost forever. Some historic cars and motorcycles have certainly been devastated to such an extent that restoration seems impossible or pointless. In our municipality of Sachseln, for example, a Lancia Stratos was completely flattened by the masses of water on the ceiling of its underground parking garage.
The state wants to offer help, especially now that the election campaign is raging. That's all well and good, but I know from my own experience: at the end of the day, everyone is on their own. It is never possible to insure everything, and then there are the many non-material values that are worlds beyond an insurance sum estimated at material value.
My heart goes out to all those affected and I wish them all a great deal of strength for their new start.
P.S. The photo published above shows the 1997/1998 New Year's card, on which we hinted at what things looked like back then ...
