Migration is one of the basic forms of human existence and perhaps the most primal of all – long before sedentarism. At all times, humans and pre-humans have set out, imitating the movements of their animal ancestors and their motives for going, or adding new forms and reasons. The search movements of the elephants of the African savannah between the drinking water of great river courses during the rainy season and hidden accesses to aquifers during the dry season anticipates the great seasonal migration of the North American natives, who moved from winter camp to summer camp and again to winter camp in rhythm with vegetation and food supply. The numerous waves of hominids migrating from Central Africa toward the Near East, Europe, and Asia anticipate the conquering campaigns of seafaring colonizers in the so-called “Age of Discovery.”

“We are all nomads,” I once heard the most unlikely person say in a burst of poetry – a farmer and family man in the Swiss Diemtigtal, where one usually finds the most sedentary of all sedentary lifestyles. But this person was apparently in a deep crisis of meaning and life. On the large farm on the northwest slope of the Niesen chain, which he had built up together with his wife, he lived only like a ghost with a midlife crisis. His two sons had to replace his labor. He earned money as a bus driver instead. ■