Event: 20th century hotel writers – Darran Anderson and Marcel Krueger in conversation

People in the hotel

“The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out (shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses) are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering blink out their greeting. Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child; I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid—and between us we put on such a consummate performance that the notion of merely checking into a hotel doesn’t even raise its head.” – Joseph Roth, “Arrival in the Hotel”

by Marcel Krueger:

I am not going to lie: I really like hotels. There is something very appealing about entering my room after I've checked in, unpacking my bags, setting up my laptop, notes and reference books I require for the piece of writing I'm working on the desk, and beginning to fill the blank canvas that a hotel room presents for each new guest, even if it's just for a brief stay. Checkout will come soon, my presence erased by the cleaning staff and the room again turned into a blank canvas for the next guest. Hotels, after a fashion, can provide us with a  fresh start whenever we visit. Or with an escape, to a a temporary home turned into a room of one's own by the magic of the “do not disturb” sign. And that applies to any hotel, regardless if it's the Grand Hotel des Londres in Istanbul or a B&B franchise behind the train station in Lüneburg.   

Of course, I am aware of the fact that being able to avail of a hotel on my travels is a privilege. And there are many other aspects of hotels that have nothing to do with the romance of travel or creative work: of being used as emergency (or permanent) accommodation for homeless people and refugees in the Republic of Ireland; of the Hotel Lux in Moscow becoming a trap for exiles that had fled Nazi Germany and being transported from here directly to the GULAG and the murder basements of the NKVD; of the Hotel Europa in Belfast becoming the “most bombed hotel of Europe” during the Troubles; of both Tito and Serbian war criminal Arkan using the Grand Hotel Pristina, the latter and his gang posting a sign at the main entrance of the hotel that read: “The entrance is forbidden for Albanians, Croats, and dogs”.

Hotels have always fascinated writers, as places of refuge and as setting alike, so it is no wonder that especially the first half of the 20th century is rife with books and stories set in hotels. I therefore honoured that one of my favourite Berlin hotels, the Circus Hotel on Rosenthaler Platz, has invited me and one of my favourite European writers, the mighty Darran Anderson (who was just awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction), to talk  more about our favourite 20th century hotel writers and their books. And we'll not only talk about the likes of Joseph Roth and Vicki Baum, but also about the real-life hotels that influenced them. 

“I have been here for long enough. If I stayed longer I would be unworthy of the great blessing of being a stranger. I might degrade the hotel to a home if I no longer left it unless I had to. I want to feel welcome here, but not at home. I want to be able to come and go. It’s better to know that a hotel is waiting for me here.” – Joseph Roth, “Leaving the Hotel”

READING: FAVOURITE 20TH CENTURY HOTEL WRITERS
DARRAN ANDERSON AND MARCEL KRUEGER IN CONVERSATION
Monday 26th June, 4 pm, Circus Hotel Lobby. Free event. 
Rosenthaler Straße 1 
10119 Berlin 

What We See: Joseph Roth and Our Berlin – A call for submissions

On the 11 March 2023 at Lettretage in Berlin, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is co-hosting an evening of discussion about the writer Joseph Roth and a series of readings inspired by his writing. We are looking for writers in Berlin to join us at the event…

"What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs; a small boy playing with marbles on the sidewalk. He watches the purposeful bustle of the grownups all around him, and, himself full of the delights of idleness, has no idea that he represents the acme of creation, but instead yearns to be grown up; a policeman who fancies himself as the still point at the center of a whirlpool of activity, and the pillar of authority—enemy to the street, and placed there to supervise it and accepts its tribute in the form of good order."
—"What I See," Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth keenly observed the Berlin of the 1920s in his now-classic feuilletons, short reports on the city scene. How might he have seen Berlin today? We're looking for work that – like Roth – explores life in Berlin today, from the playful to the political. So whether you have read Roth’s pieces on Berlin or not, we are looking for contemporary short nonfiction pieces, scenes and sketches, mini-reportages and place-based essays about Berlin.

Together we will create a portrait of a city.

Need some inspiration? How about writing about one of Berlin’s underexplored curiosities, or unusual approaches to familiar places? Eavesdropping in one of the city’s many watering holes, at the barbershop or in a hotel lobby? A late-night visit to the train station or moving through the city by public transport? A profile of Berlin’s outsiders or newcomers? An early beer as the corner pub opens its doors to the morning sun?

All of these are the starting point for one of Roth’s Berlin stories, and he would certainly find plenty to write about if he were to use them again today.

Your submissions can be previously published or unpublished, but we would need you to be able to read at our event on the 11 March. We would also love to showcase the selected unpublished pieces here on Elsewhere as part of a Joseph Roth / Berlin series.

The details:

Language – English
Word Length – 500-1000 words
Send to – JosephRothToday@gmail.com 
Deadline – 24 February 2023
Eligibility – Must be available to read at Lettretage in Berlin at 7 PM on 11 March 2023

Who are we:

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, born in London, grew up in New Jersey (USA). His writing has appeared, among other places, in newyorker.comHypocrite Reader, and The Bad Version, which he founded and edited from 2011-2014. He has written on Joseph Roth for both Majuscule and Slow Travel Berlin. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California.   

Julia Bosson is a writer originally from Ojai, California. Her work has appeared in publications such as BOMB, VICE, Guernica, and the Believer, among others. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Program, DAAD, and the MFJC, she has been awarded fellowships and residencies from LABA Berlin, the Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Catwalk Institute. She currently teaches writing at the Cooper Union and resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is at work on a novel about the life and journalism of Joseph Roth.

Paul Scraton was born in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books for Influx Press including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany's Baltic coast (2017) and the novella of the forest In the Pines (2021). He has written for New Statesman on the life and work of Joseph Roth and his next book explores the place of the forest in German cultural identity via a long walk in the Harz mountains, following in the footsteps of Heinrich Heine.

Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and critic from Australia. His reviews and essays—including one on Joseph Roth's urban miniatures—have been published by The Guardian, The Baffler and the European Review of Books among others. He is currently Books Editor for the print monthly Exberliner.

Limin-alley at Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

By Sara Bellini

“A successful city is an entity that is continually reconfiguring itself, changing its social structure and meaning, even if its contours don’t look very different” writes Deyan Sudjic in The Language of Cities. By successful, he means a city that is lively and functioning, where citizens not only feel safe and secure, but they feel like they belong. Well-maintained structures and infrastructures connect and serve people’s lives and “legible, handsome, easily negotiated public spaces make the individual feel part of something that they share with the rest of the city”.

The conversation on how we imagine the future of the city is at the core of Imagine! Belfast, a free festival about politics, culture and activism, promoting under-represented voices and equality. The annual event is now at its seventh edition and will run from the 22nd to the 28th of March, featuring talks, film, music, drama, readings, exhibitions, discussions and workshops. Highlights include an interview with Noam Chomsky and the possibility to pitch in ideas on how to change Belfast in the initiative Build Belfast Back Better. Due to the pandemic, all of the events are online, which means that anyone living elsewhere can join, with special exhibitions taking place in real life. 

One of them is Limin-alley, a group exhibition where eight local artists and designers are called to create site-specific pieces in “entries” (alleyways) across South and East Belfast. The project is a collaboration between 9ft in Common, developing a Belfast Alley Map, and Liminal [Space] Belfast, a platform for pop-up exhibitions in liminal spaces. The locations of Limin-alley, the alleyways between Belfast’s terrace houses, were chosen because of their potential for civic activism, due to their very nature of in-between spaces, neither completely private nor exactly public. The artworks will be on display between the 25th and 28th of March and will be introduced with an online talk by project partners Amberlea Neely, Aisling Rusk and Meadhbh McIlgorm on the 25th. Images of the exhibition will be available on the website of Liminal [Space] Belfast after the end of the festival.

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Image: Imagine! Belfast

Although Limin-alley and the whole festival are Belfast specific, the themes and ideas are easily relatable. During the pandemic, as a consequence of the lockdown, the social fabrics of our cities have changed. The way we use public space has changed. The way we perceive togetherness. Even the way we experience the places we’ve always deemed safe, our own houses, where suddenly we have to spend more time than we deemed possible and at the same time we have to follow strict rules about whom we can allow in or about whom we can visit. Now more than ever, we need to imagine what could be and how we share our collective spaces, both physically in our cities and metaphorically in determining who gets to express themselves in politics, culture and public life.

To find out about all the events and to donate in support of the non-profit organisation behind the festival, please visit Imagine! Belfast
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Online Event: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

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Join Elsewhere editors and contributors on 14 December for an online reading and discussion on wanderlust and memories of elsewhere, the places we’re longing for and those we are separated from, whether by time or distance. 

The starting point for the discussion are a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year (see links below) and we are really looking forward to bringing together Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton to talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year.

To register: For Zoom login details, please send an email to paul@elsewhere-journal.com and he’ll send you the info you need to join the event.

Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere
14 December 2020
6pm in Dublin & Cambridge / 7pm in Berlin 

For updates, please also follow the Facebook event page if you are on the platform, or follow us on Twitter

Read the essays by our panel from the Memories of Elsewhere series....

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

About the Panel...

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

Marcel Krueger is the books editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books, including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the forthcoming novella In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021).

The Banshee and the Roundabout - Online talk with Helena Byrne and Gareth E. Rees

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This coming Sunday, November 8th, Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger will be talking with Irish seanchaí (storyteller) Helena Byrne and writer Gareth E. Rees (who has just released the wonderful "Unofficial Britain", you can read our review here about the importance of scary/unnerving/bizarre stories and folklore today, and what makes a place "haunted". They will also talk about the importance of urban legends in comparison between Ireland and the UK, a fitting theme for a gloomy November Sunday. The talk will take place on Zoom and is free to join, details below:

Sunday 8 November
5pm UTC

https://zoom.us/j/97900297948
Meeting ID: 979 0029 7948

Helena Byrne is a singer, storyteller, actress and songwriter, and for the past ten years has combined her passion of music and singing with her love of Irish folklore, performing as a seanchaí (storyteller) and singer for audiences of all ages across Ireland and further afield. Akin to the travelling seanchaí of times past, Helena performs regularly in the US and interweaves tales of Irish folklore and history with traditional Irish songs and wonderful insights into an Ireland of days gone by.

Gareth E. Rees is the founder of the Unofficial Britain website and author of Car Park Life (Influx Press 2019), The Stone Tide (Influx Press, 2018) and Marshland (Influx Press, 2013). His weird fiction and horror have been published in Best of British Fantasy 2019, An Invite to Eternity, This Dreaming Isle, The Shadow Booth: Vol. 2, Unthology 10 and The Lonely Crowd. His essays have appeared in Mount London, An Unreliable Guide to London and The Quietus.

Facebook Event Page

Michael Schmidt at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin

Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) by Michael Schmidt

Ein-heit (U-ni-ty) by Michael Schmidt

By Sara Bellini

When I think about the photography of Michael Schmidt, I think of Berlin. I think of his shots of Wedding* and of the Werkstatt für Photographie (Photography Workshop) he founded in Kreuzberg* in the 1970s. But you could argue that what really captures the attention in his photos is not the subject, but the way it’s presented.

Michael Schmidt was a policeman and a self-taught photographer. Some of his first notable works were commissioned by the Berlin Senate or districts of the city, as if the city commissioned him to reflect on itself. If we look at these series, like The Working Woman in Kreuzberg (1975), we see a documentary style, which became more and more abstract over the years.

The exhibition at Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum für Gegenwart is the first retrospective in Michael Schmidt’s native city in over twenty-five years. It encompasses forty years of photography, between 1965 and 2014, and it shows Berlin shifting from the post-war period to division to a re-unified city, tapering out in his last project on nature. Cityscapes, portraits, backyards, human bodies, pigs and apples find their place in the rooms of the station-turned-museum. From Wedding to Kreuzberg, from Waffenruhe (Ceasefire) to Ein-heit (U-ni-ty), from Stadtbilder (Cityscapes) to Lebensmittel (Food), from Frauen (Women) to Selbst (Self) to Natur (Nature), each project and aspect of Michael Schmidt as a photographer is there. And yet he always evades our complete understanding at the last moment, as if our reading of his work was never exhaustive.

Natur (Nature) by Michael Schmidt

Natur (Nature) by Michael Schmidt

I would recommend following the chronological order conceived by the curators to fully appreciate a changing city as well as Michael Schmidt’s evolution as an artist; from black and white to sporadic colour units to pictures of pictures and cropping techniques. From ‘The Wall’, that makes it clear where and when the image belongs, to a close-up on an anonymous wall that could be anywhere. I find it somehow poetic that Michael Schmidt’s final art book, published when he was already seriously ill, focused on the beauty of nature, transcending the urban landscape and ultimately human life itself.

The exhibition will reach first Paris and then Madrid in 2021 and will end in Vienna in 2022. Berliners will be able to see it until January the 17th, wearing a face mask and after buying a time-slot ticket - online or at the venue. Check out the SMB website for up-to-date opening hours and health measures. 

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* Wedding and Kreuzberg are districts of Berlin

The Other Side? – Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

Kathy Prendergast, BLACK MAP SERIES (Bulgaria), 2010, ink on printed map, 94.4 x 131.7 cm (Detail)

By Anne Mager:

Anne Mager is a curator and arts manager living in Ireland and Germany, and the curator of "The Other Side - Borderlands in Contemporary Irish Art", which runs at the Dortmunder U until March 2020. We are extremely pleased and proud to be able to publish her introductory speech from the exhibition opening in December:

Until recently, I felt that I was able to count myself among a lucky generation that in childhood and adolescence saw the disappearance of more and more borders: not only the Berlin Wall in the autumn of 1989, but also fewer and fewer border controls that were interrupting vacation trips by family car to Belgium, France, Spain and other countries in the eighties and early nineties. In retrospect, and from the perspective of December 2019, it seems almost naive that, like many others, I naturally assumed that this was the direction in which Europe will continue to steer; that the removal of borders, customs duties and the further dissolution of the internal barriers of the EU is something positive and that newly opened borders should remain open. How sobering, no, how shocking it is to finally understand, a week after the disastrous UK elections, that many people do not share the same sentiment.

I moved to Ireland a little over three years ago, to the small town of Dundalk located exactly halfway between Belfast and Dublin, two capitals in two countries on the small island of Ireland and only two hours by car or train from each other. The border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland runs exactly halfway across this route, just a few kilometers north of Dundalk. Anyone crossing this border today is often surprised by what cannot be seen: there are no border guards, no security checks or large warning signs and no passport controls on the train either.

In many places one is not really sure where the border runs at all. The head of the regional Arts Council once told me that he crosses the border around seven times when he drives his daughter to her weekly ballet class. Of course, this was not always the case and until the nineties this section of the border, idyllically situated in the Cooley Mountains and in the middle of a fjord, the Carlingford Lough, was under strict military surveillance. Numerous attacks took place here and anyone who's car broke down in the border strip in the 1980s was at risk of having it being blown up by British security forces, according to the official security rules in place back then.

The Irish border opened with the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. The de facto arrangement to date: the border is still legally there, but in fact it does not hinder any traffic in both directions. It is not there and yet it exists. And even three years after the first Brexit negotiations, there is still no way of knowing exactly what will happen to what exists de jure and which is de facto hardly noticeable. But it is also a fact that a new EU external border will soon run here.

This will mean much more than inconvenience due to passport controls and more complicated customs regulations – which may also affect the transportation of this exhibition back to Dublin, London and Newry.

The conflict and also the peace in Northern Ireland are not only a complex but also a very shaky affair, and the shadows of the past have buried themselves deeply in cities like Derry and Belfast. As co-director of a Belfast exhibition space and as an somewhat outsider, I am always amazed at the contradiction between this "not there and yet existing": of course there is peace and it doesn't really matter in everyday life whether you are Protestant or Catholic. And still, the so-called Peace Walls, which are higher than the Berlin Wall ever was, are still standing, separating Catholic and Protestant districts and neighbourhoods. Finding my way around the city when I started working here, it was not uncommon for Google Maps to guide me through streets at night where I suddenly found myself in front of the locked gates of these walls that had been open all day. On official forms, funding applications and surveys, you are always asked to which community and confession you yourself or e.g. the exhibition visitors belong, just to make sure that this sensitive balance can be maintained. It is a fragile peace, in many places the conflict is still bubbling to the surface and the violent past has confusing and often contradictory social consequences, which I – like many others – still try to understand.

But what other form of expression is better suited to deal with complexity and contradictions than art? In my curatorial work and in this exhibition in particular, it is very important to me to use artistic positions not as an illustration of a topic or concept, but rather as an opportunity to approach the complex, the confusing, the unseen and overlooked, and at best to change perspectives.

The first position you will encounter in the exhibition is that of Enda Bowe. In Love’s Fire Song, he photographed young people on both sides of the Peace Walls before and during the symbolic, politically charged annual bonfires. The artist deliberately refrained from depicting political symbols or overly clear classification criteria. Rather, his work is about the ordinary and everyday, about what connects us, but also about how we shape future generations.

The question of how to deal with conflict and terror across generations also plays a major role in Willie Doherty's works. As in many of his other works, the setting for the video installation “Remains” shown here is his hometown Derry, also a border town, which has gained a sad reputation as the site of the Blood Sunday massacre 1972. Willie investigates the relationship between landscape and memory across generations and, unfortunately based on true facts, tells the story of a father who is supposed to bring his son and nephew to a site where both are to undergo kneekapping, a punishment method of the Provisional IRA, which is still in use today and which the narrator, the father, had already suffered before.

Sean Hillen brings together the horrors of the so-called Troubles, different levels of time and reality, Irish landscape and pop culture motifs in a completely different narrative and with a completely different, very analogue technique. In his delicate collages, he combines his own documentary images of the conflict with utopian imagery, often in a bizarre and yet irritatingly humorous way.

Kathy Prendergast's cartographic works are also miraculously utopian and poetic. Something wondrous happens when she paints over every-day street maps with black ink for her Black Maps series: she shows in a very reduced but all the more vivid way what happens when we overcome borders. Through artistic elimination and transformation, she succeeds in overcoming power structures and clarifying the subjectivity of maps and subtly questions topics such as identity and location.

This exhibition takes the Irish border as a starting point to reflect on political conflicts and social separation. It was therefore all the more important to open up the view beyond national borders. And that is exactly what Jesse Jones does in her video work "The Other North" from 2013, in which she connects the traumas of Northern Irish and South Koreans in an haunting way. It is a very special honour for me to show this work which connects two divided countries here in Germany, in the thirtieth year of reunification.

Dragana Jurisic’s book and photo project YU: The Lost Country also takes us beyond national borders. The Serbian-Croatian photographer, who lives in Dublin, went on a photographic search for traces of her homeland, a country that no longer exists, and reminds us of how fragile European peace can be.

It is precisely this change of perspective, this view of the supposedly "other" that the exhibition "The Other Side" would like to invite you to. To show that there are more similarities than differences both on a political and on an individual, personal level. I would like to end with a quote from John Hume, who received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the Irish peace process. Enda Bowe kindly brought the opening sentence of the following quote to the exhibition:

“Difference is the essence of humanity. Difference is an accident of birth, and it should therefore never be the source of hatred or conflict. Therein lies a most fundamental principle of peace: respect for diversity.”

Exhibition website

What's On: Nature Unwrapped, Kings Place, London

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

Chris Watson, recording Orcas, Ross Sea, Antarctica (c) Jason Roberts

By Sara Bellini

This month, London’s own King’s Place launched Nature Unwrapped, twelve months of events revolving around the topic of nature and our interaction with it. The first evening saw artist-in-residence Chris Watson and activist George Monbiot comparing the soundscapes of healthy and suffering ecosystems, featuring music by Ewan McLennan.

The programme encompasses contemporary, classical and folk music, as well as storytelling, screenings and illustrated talks. Some musicians previously featured on Elsewhere will be there, namely Cosmo Sheldrake in February as well as Kitty Macfarlane during the Wild Singing weekend in March, in collaboration with the podcast Folk on Foot. A few events are already sold out, so you might want to book your tickets soon!

King’s Place is a multi-arts venue in King’s Cross dedicated to music, comedy and talks. They host various festivals, such as the London Podcast Festival and The Politics Festival, and their year-long flagship series Unwrapped, which last year was dedicated to women and music.

Website