The city of ice: reportage from Longyearbyen in the Svalbard islands

The first thing you learn in Longyearbyen is that part of life happens elsewhere. Because everyone has left something somewhere else: a daughter who finishes growing up on the mainland, her parents’ old age, a country in flames. Here one is neither born nor died: in the local hospital there are no delivery rooms and women at the end of their pregnancy are invited to get on a plane to give birth in other hospitals.