Five Questions for... JLM Morton

We continue our series of occasional short interviews with contributors and friends of Elsewhere with five questions for JLM Morton, who we featured in our Trespass issue. 

What does home mean to you?

Home, in it’s very truest sense, is the place where I grew up – Cirencester, a market town in Gloucestershire where I wore a groove into the street I lived on, going back and forth to the parks at either end of the street: the now paywalled Bathurst Estate park and the municipal Abbey Grounds with its sweeping cedar tree, elderly mulberry, a lake full of pike that my brother used to catch and the old cold store that looks like an egg cupped by a mound of grass. I couldn’t live there now – there are aspects of the place that I can only stomach in small doses (like a toxic family member) – the showy Cotswold privilege and snobbery, the loafers and chinos, small town social dynamics, the town/gown antagonism with the Royal Agricultural University that led to many a fight in the marketplace on a Saturday night when I was younger. I suppose I found home in the out-of-the-way quiet places, in the ‘maze’ we built as kids in the thicket at the back of the school field, in the den we claimed on the dirt hill at the edge of the car park, in the copse where I snuck out at dawn with a friend to set a fire and fry an egg in the skillet I’d smuggled from our kitchen in a rucksack. Home was also the rivers and brooks that run through the town and in and out of both parks, where I paddled, as well as the open-air pool where I seemed to spend entire summers diving off the board and burning my tongue on too-hot chocolate in plastic cups from the tuck shop. Now, wherever I go in the world, water feels like home to me – I can sit and be with water for hours and never get restless.

Which place do you have a special connection to?

I feel a very special connection to West Africa, a region I spent a lot of time living and working in during the early 2000s and 2010s. I have a background in education, particularly supporting girls and children with disabilities to access school which took me to various places including Nigeria, Benin Republic, Ghana, Togo, Cameroon. I feel a very particular affinity with Sierra Leone – there is something about the people, the colleagues I’ve worked with over the years, that I love and admire. It’s something like resilience but not – everyone I’ve ever met there has always welcomed me with open arms, with a kind of high-spirited joy, a no-f*cks-left-to-give attitude that carries them along and which I find inspiring. I first went there in 2003 just after the civil war ended to work with the Forum of African Women Educationalists. Though excluded from public decision making, what women have done to create nonpartisan community dialogue to advance peace has been extraordinary. The majestic cotton tree that stands in the oldest part of Freetown is the most on-point manifestation of this attitude – associated with the founding of the capital by a group of formerly enslaved African Americans, known as the Black Nova Scotians, who gathered under its shade to pray and celebrate their freedom, the tree is a landmark, revered by the local community for its spirit and historical importance. Sierra Leone is an extraordinarily beautiful country – I especially love the area around Kenema, where the trees look like gods and the forest is all you can see for miles.

What is beyond your front door?

Immediately beyond my front door is a street full of families and elderly folk, rows of houses built on an orchard in the mid-1950s where the springs along the hill still seep up through the kerbsides. Some of the residents have lived here since these houses were built. Beyond our gardens is the A46 road down to Bath. To the back is a steep climb up to Rodborough Common. To the front, over the rooves, Selsley common and a view towards the Severn Vale where the land flattens and on a good day you can see the Forest of Dean beyond the river.

What place would you most like to visit?

I have always wanted to go to Rajasthan, lured in part by the textiles, beadwork and jewellery as well as the desert. I’m really fascinated by the ways women all over the world have used weaving and making as a kind of language that speaks beyond the confines of the written word. It’s a way of transcending boundaries and telling stories that express culture and history which I feel deeply connected to. I come from a long line of textile workers – something I only discovered recently and which explains why I have boxes full of textiles that I’ve collected from around the world that I really have no space for at all but can’t let go.  

What are you reading / watching / listening to / looking at right now?

I’ve been collaborating with the brilliant comic Emma Kernahan and composer Mara Simspon on Lost Mythos, a show that blends the unruly folklore of old, weird Albion and stories from modern rural life, simultaneously embodying and exploring ancient archetypes and questioning our yearning for them. Mara has written a beautiful album, Living Matter, in response to my poems and I’ve got that on repeat. She also did a brilliant playlist ‘Humans in the Room’ for 6Music’s Freakzone which I highly recommend banging on.

I always have multiple reads on the go and my tbr pile is ridiculous. I’ve just finished Isabelle Baafi’s collection Chaotic Good which was thrilling to read – innovations in form and one of those books that make you feel like you’re being let in on a secret that only you will know. I’m now reading Michael Symmonds Roberts’ brilliant and moving memoir Quartet for the End of Time which is about grief and the premiere of Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps to a crowd of Jewish prisoners of war in a deathcamp and its legacy – it feels remarkably prescient. I have also got Jen Calleja’s demented and revelatory Goblinhood on the go, a series of encyclopaedic essays and poems on her theory of goblins in pop culture. I can’t describe it, you have to read it. I’m writing about pilgrimage at the moment, so I’m reading Esther de Waal’s The Celtic Way of Prayer too which is about inner and outer journeying, poetry and prayer / poetry as prayer.

I’ve just binged Narrow Road to the Deep North on BBC iPlayer. Lured in by the love story, I got sideswiped by the turn into the horrors of the Death Railway built by Asian labourers and Allied POWs to connect Thailand with Myanmar, but I thought this was an utterly brilliant drama, one of those ones I can't stop thinking about. I realise I’m being drawn to war stories right now, no doubt looking for answers to our current predicaments. Original novel by Richard Flanagan, the only writer to have won both the Booker and the Baillie Gifford. The way he / the director handle the subtleties of emotion really blew me away. Incredible storytelling.

I keep meaning to get up to that London to see the Ithell Colquhoun show at Tate Britain. Painter, occultist and poet, Colquhoun is getting a long-overdue reassessment. She reminds me a lot of Monica Sjöö, a radical anarcho ecofeminist who played a pivotal role in the peace and women’s movements of the 1970s and beyond. She got her own retrospective in 2023 at Modern Art Oxford and at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Both of these artist remind us that we are not simply one and the other, goddess and god, male and female. Our boundaries are permeable, all matter is vibrant and that nothing comes from nothing, our differences are joyously multiple at many levels and scales. Such is the fecundity and variousness of our planet – that recognising our relationality and radical inter-connectedness, not focusing on our oppositions, is a form of resistance. A callback from the past, a reminder we need now more than ever.

JLM Morton is a writer, celebrant and community arts producer from Gloucestershire in the west of England. Her poetry has featured on BBC6 Music and appeared in Poetry Review, Poetry London, Rialto, Magma, Mslexia, The London Magazine, Anthropocene, The Sunday Telegraph and elsewhere. Her prose writing has won the Laurie Lee Prize, been longlisted for the Nan Shepherd prize and extracts from Tenderfoot have been published in Caught by the River, Oxford Review of Books and Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. Juliette is the winner of the Geoffrey Dearmer and Poetry Archive Worldview Prizes and she is a Pushcart Prize nominee. Her debut poetry collection Red Handed, was highly commended by the Forward Prizes and a Poetry Society Book of the Year (Broken Sleep Books, 2024). www.jlmmorton.com

You can read ‘Over, Across’ by JLM Morton here.

Book extract: Fragments of a Woman, by Emma Venables

Berlin, UNter den linden, 1937 – Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1998-011-01 / Hagemann, Otto / CC-BY-SA 3.0

It is always an exciting day when someone that we know and admire has their book published, especially when it concerns itself with our home city of Berlin. Emma Venables is an extremely talented writer (whose work we are proud to have published here on Elsewhere) and her debut novel Fragments of a Woman is both startling and impressive. Following the lives of five women in National Socialist Germany, I was extremely privileged to be given the opportunity to read an advance copy ahead of its publication this month. 

Exploring themes of identity, nationalism, womanhood and motherhood, trauma and the crimes of National Socialism, this book is unflinching, moving and beautifully written, and for this reader at least posed a number of uncomfortable questions about how we as readers approach certain types of characters and the expectations and preconceptions we bring to someone else’s words on the page. Fragments of a Woman tells stories of Nazi Germany, at a time when there are no longer many around who can share their experiences, and stories such as these, when written with diligence and intelligence, will be increasingly important.

This book holds the reader by the head and makes us look, which we do with both empathy and, at times, horror. It is a fine achievement, and we thank Emma for the chance to share this extract with you… – Paul Scraton

Fragments of a Woman – Chapter 4

By Emma Venables:

Gisela loves the smell of a Berlin bar, loves the smell of stale beer, of smoke, the hint of vodka, sweat, and polish. She loves the sound of good music – the whine of a violin, the tinkle of a piano. She loves the way heads turn when she walks in, even though the men around her, in this particular bar, are not inter- ested in her curves, her flesh, her pulse. A few smile, raise their glasses as she makes her way through the crowd. She raises herself to her tiptoes, looking over familiar and unfamiliar heads to find Volker. She recognises his back, would recognise it anywhere, for he always wears a waistcoat, and tonight his chosen one is her favourite shade of purple. 

She steps left, then right, around the patrons blocking her way. Someone steps on her toe, and she winces, utters a curse under her breath. She wafts a cloud of smoke from her face, scowls at the man responsible until finally she stands behind Volker. She reaches out and rubs his back. He turns, wobbling on his barstool. 

‘Steady on,’ she says. 

He leans back, resting against her shoulder, and gives her an awkward kiss meant for her cheek, but landing on her nose. 

‘Happy Birthday, Gisi!’ he says. ‘It’s 1934, and you’ve been on this earth exactly nineteen years today. And how honoured you must be to share your celebrations with the Chancellor of Germany.’ 

‘Have you been drinking for me or for him?’ she asks, pushing him forward. 

Volker turns, pauses, and squints as if trying to do a difficult equation. 

‘You, naturally, because you know my feelings for you know who.’ 

Gisela raises an index finger to silence him. He shrugs, waves a hand around as if to indicate everyone agrees. Gisela grabs his face between her hands and plants a kiss on his lips. 

‘You’re adorable when your face is all squished up,’ she says, and kisses him once again. 

Volker shakes himself free. ‘And you’re wearing an exquisite dress. Spin for me.’ 

Gisela obliges. ‘Kaufmann’s’ finest. His wife is quite the seam- stress,’ she says, smoothing the skirt of her navy-blue tea dress. 

‘I approve. I love the neckline,’ he says, with a wink.

‘Stop staring at my chest.’ She places a hand to her collarbone. 

‘You know your chest would have to be much flatter for me to feel any fire in my loins.’

They laugh. Volker turns to the bar, and waves for the barman’s attention.

Gisela taps the shoulder of man on the stool next to Volker.  ‘I think that’s my seat.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Don’t worry about it, but you need to move now.’

The man sighs but vacates the stool. Gisela sits down. 

‘You’re shameless,’ Volker says.

‘I’ve nothing to be ashamed of. Besides, it’s my birthday.’ 

Gisela takes a swig of her drink, leans her head back, and smiles at the damp ceiling above. She still feels slightly nauseous from eating the giant slice of cake decorated with a swastika a woman in the street handed her earlier. It’s my birthday, too, she had told the woman, but refused the second slice of cake she was offered. Although, she did take the flower from the boy in the Hitlerjugend uniform. A pink carnation, which she dropped into her handbag and forgot about until she got her purse out in Kaufmann’s to pay for her dress. She had felt around the lining for the loose petals and stem and asked Herr Kaufmann if he had a bin. 

‘God, I’m glad this place hasn’t been shut down yet,’ she says, moving her gaze to the row of bottles behind the bar. 

‘You, me, and every one of these beautiful people,’ Volker says. 

‘But it’s only a matter of time, isn’t it?’ 

‘Don’t get mournful on your birthday, Gisi. You go down, I go down, isn’t that the way it’s always been? Ever since I was six and my mother dragged me away from you because you weren’t our kind of person, and your mother certainly wasn’t.’ 

‘Well, a respectable little German boy shouldn’t play with girls from the gutter.’ 

‘To hell with that. Cheers.’ 

Volker raises his glass and clinks it so hard against Gisela’s that a tiny crack appears in the rim; he runs his finger back and forth over the uneven surface. 

‘I almost got caught on my knees in the Tiergarten the other day,’ Gisela says. 

He wipes amber droplets from his chin. ‘You need to be more careful, Gisi.’ 

‘We were behind a tree, hidden by several trees, actually, but they’re relentless. In the end, I had to leap up, wipe my face, push the pervert I was with into action, and feign a proposal.’ 

‘A proposal?’ 

‘Yes. He was down on one knee by the time they appeared between trees, and I was professing that he’d have to ask my father for I wasn’t that kind of girl. They nodded and left sharply, which is a relief because when he stood up his limp cock was still hanging from his trousers.’ 

Volker’s head rests upon the bar now, and his shoulders shake. He still grips his half-filled glass of beer in his left hand. 

‘Are you laughing or crying? Because at the time I wasn’t sure what to do either.’

‘Both, I think,’ he says, his voice muffled.

Gisela rests her head on Volker’s shoulder. Even here the band strike up a chorus of ‘Zum Geburtstag viel Glück’ in honour of Adolf Hitler. Gisela and Volker remain silent, but Gisela smiles at the sardonic tone she can detect in the voices around her. Applause fills the room. Glasses clink. A barmaid places a cake on the bar. Gisela sighs. 

‘I’ve eaten more swastikas today than I care for. Shall we go?’ she asks. 

‘So early?’ Volker says, sitting upright.

‘I’ve got something to do at ten,’ she says.

‘You’ve got someone to do at ten, you mean,’ Volker says. ‘I suppose I could go and see Hans.’

‘Not home to mama?’

‘God, no. I’ll slip in in the early hours and she’ll never know. She sleeps like an elephant. I’ve really no idea how an elephant sleeps but I presume it’s heavily.’ 

‘I imagine she’s exhausted from all the celebrating today,’ Gisela says, sliding off her stool. 

‘Yes, she was feeling rather exuberant when I left. I had to tell her I was going to celebrate Hitler’s birthday with friends.’ 

‘I’m surprised she hasn’t dressed you in a little brown shirt.’ 

They step out onto Motzstrasse, and Gisela links her arm through Volker’s. She looks up and breathes in the cool air. She likes looking at the windows above, at the light escaping through cracks between curtains, knowing people go about their lives behind walls: that men kiss men, and women kiss women, and the government cannot stop them all. A car’s brakes squeal in another street. Someone opens a window above and the white noise of an un-tuned wireless seeps out. Volker lights a cigarette, takes a drag, and offers it to Gisela. He holds the cigarette while she inhales. As she exhales, she notices two men walking towards them.

‘We just saw you coming out of that bar over there,’ one of them says.

‘And?’ Gisela says, eyeing up their uniforms. ‘My boyfriend and I were enjoying a quiet drink, celebrating the Chancellor’s birthday. Then they broke into song and brought out a cake. Lovely cake. Swastikas and black icing. Looked just like that band on your arm. We all sang for the Chancellor. Then we ate cake.’ 

The men look at Volker. Gisela feels a tremor in his arm. She clenches her muscles, attempting to reassure him. One of them loops his fingers around his braces. 

‘And now my boyfriend’s walking me home to my mother, so we have to go. Good night.’ 

Gisela gently tugs on Volker’s arm, and they begin to walk. Volker stumbles slightly, but she holds him upright. The men do not seem to notice. She listens for the sound of their footsteps receding, determined not to speak until they have moved on. She turns her head a fraction to the right, pretending to admire the doorway of an apartment building, and from the corner of her eye watches them walk in the opposite direction. 

‘Are you OK?’ she asks. 

Volker nods, keeping his eyes on the street ahead. ‘I can’t believe you sleep with men like that.’ 

‘They pay me well, and sometimes they’re quite gentle. It’s as if they’ve spent all their hatred out here and they just want to give affection in bed.’ 

Volker shakes his head. Gisela takes his hand and grips it in hers. 

‘We must be careful, you and I,’ he says. 

He breathes sharply and throws his burnt-out cigarette towards the gutter. 

‘We must be bold and beautiful, as always,’ she says. 

He pulls her towards him, muffling her face against his chest. She puts her arms around him and breathes him in – aftershave he cannot really afford, cigarette smoke, the tinge of sweat – until the buttons of his waistcoat become uncomfortable against her face. 

***

Fragments of a Woman is published by Aderyn Press in paperback £8.99 and is available to purchase from your local bookshop or from the publisher directly. Support independent publishing!

Emma Venables' short and flash fiction has been widely published in magazines and journals. Her short story, ‘Woman at Gunpoint, 1945’ was a runner-up in the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize 2020. She has a PhD in Creative Writing and has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London and Liverpool Hope University.

Film: Single Use Only by Sarah Alwin and Patrick Wray

This piece started with the music, composed and produced by Patrick Wray at the start of 2023. It seemed a little sci-fi to me. Also it conjured for me a sense of Elsewhere, coincidentally the name of this journal, a place other than here. I thought about the places which evoked the early series Star Trek technicolour aesthetic and for me and these were definitely fairgrounds and seaside resorts. These spaces do have out-of-season periods too where the atmosphere changes.

The photographs are from Blackpool, Llandudno, and Sheffield and were all taken by me during the summer and autumn of 2022.

Last year I posted a picture of a sock I was knitting on Twitter and someone asked if I would photograph the sock turned inside out so they could see how I had constructed it. I felt like that was a really personal request, unseemly almost, like being asked to undress, and I resisted. Here I wanted to show some of these images inside out, from behind, as a kind of concession to the potential curiosity about the process, even though you never asked for it.

This is a companion piece to Surprise View.

***

Patrick Wray is an artist and bookseller based in London. He recently published 'Ghost Stories I Remember' with Colossive Press. For more about his work visit his website.
Twitter / Instagram

Sarah Alwin is a special needs and English tutor and writes about domestic space in South East Asian literature. She lives in Sheffield and co-produces and co-hosts a weekly review programme, Radioactive, for community radio at Sheffield Live 93.2FM.
Twitter / Instagram

What We See 04: Sonnenallee Onwards

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Tom Rollins:

“It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it”––only it’s winter now, late cretaceous tail-end of it at least, never ends until it does, sudden and too late. 

And anyway, here and now, the contradictions are grotesque but related to different things, different people. 

*

Passing the old petrol station and the Damaskus Konditorei, a newspaperman trying to interview someone on the street about the ethno-political significance of fireworks and who exactly is it that actually runs these shawarma restaurants, I am distracted momentarily by a man in a tarboush, red-velvet and tassel-topped, who is pushing a trolley full of cardboard boxes along the pavement. It is distracting—an orientalist cartoon for the feuilleton emplotted onto a street named after the sun that somehow always feels cold as concrete. 

But despite others’ best attempts, nothing here takes precedence. This is a mid-morning corso of faces, snatches of conversation, wholesale delivery men forever moving boxes into shopfronts. 

As I keep walking, someone is shouting the prices of vegetables, first in Arabic and then in German. Two young lads, arms interlinked, greet an older man, surprised, with a familiarity that is years old, from another place. “Peace be upon you, uncle, how are your things? When did you arrive?” Theirs are warm, knowing smiles that acknowledge the distances required for this conversation to be happening here. 

*

A Syrian storyteller said recently that, here, “even a plate of hummus isn’t like the plate of hummus [one] knows from back home…a bag of za’atar isn’t either.” 

It is, at the same time that it isn’t. Community that is not quite community, common access. Tied together by a loose thread, a street. 

*

Oh by the way, the other day I was reading my copy of Roth while waiting for the M41 opposite Pannierstr. Roth was either in the middle of describing the city as framed by an apartment window-frame or the other way round. I forget. 

I was holding the book in my left hand, my peripheral vision looking down framed by dragon-skin cobblestones and a smashed bottle of Pilsner Urquell. I couldn’t concentrate. 

And then I heard an Irish guy on a date, waiting at the bus stop, saying, “Well yeah…so the reason it’s called Kreuzkölln is because it’s more like Kreuzberg than Neukölln, the restaurants are nicer, even though it’s still in Neukölln.” 

*

Off the bus, further south, the city’s dinosaur bones start to bear themselves, vertebrae-bumps of cast-iron and brickwork still traceable by hand and foot. 

Two bricks thick, the cobbled trace of the Berlin Wall darts off, crosses a road past a Lidl then takes in a really big breath. Shape-shifting through a 19th-century railway arch, it reappears on the other side, and casually walks off down the pavement. 

The Ringbahn passes overhead, and a new addition to the dual carriageway ringroad is being built underneath it. Somehow in between, an A-road leads south toward forgetful commuter towns. The canal is never far away.

Dumper trucks are shipping the sandy, loamy earth away from a construction site for the new road—how many more of them would it take to uncover all that has happened here?—digging beyond the wasteground shrubs, plastic bottles and crisp packets, past the concrete foundations of the Wall and through the underlying strata of abandoned wire-frame spectacles, rotting leather boots and saxophones, Prussian moustaches, novels about aristocratic romances frustrated in corsets and drawing-rooms.

This is what the graves of dinosaurs look like, the evidence of mass dying, bones on bones. 

***

Tom Rollins is a researcher and writer from the north of England, based in Berlin after several years in the Middle East. He's interested in place and displacement, political geography, walking, and Syria. 

What We See 02: A Meadow, A Park

Photo Vincent Mosch © ZLB

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Daniel Perlman:

The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek is open on Sundays. SoAGB the program is officially called. There are no librarians, they are forbidden to work on the sabbath, but as long as the library hosts events and activities the doors may remain open to the public.

—

The meadow in front of the library is a pleasant place to sit on Sundays and weekdays alike. Staff set up lawn chairs when the weather is fine, hauling them out of a blue storage container. The Frischluftbibliothek it is officially called. In the late afternoon, if you look up from your book, you might see a gray heron flying past Halleches Tor, over the Landwehrkanal.

—

There is a feather-filled stairwell in Hallesches Tor that leads to the U1/U3. The windows confuse the pigeons and they get trapped and some of them die.

—

A lanky, long-faced fellow in stiff dungarees visits the AGB nearly every summer’s day. He sits on the low stone wall that rings the meadow and releases his pets on the grass, two box turtles, then turns his back and smokes cigarettes. The turtles take off as soon as they touch ground, making a beeline for the east. Most are delighted by the reptiles, but some simply snort and get back to work, as if to reassure themselves that they have better things to do than look at turtles. By dint of some internal turtle timer the man always knows when they’ve strayed too far. He strides forth, snatches them up, and rubs their wagging heads on the way back to his seat. Then he puts them down again; the scene repeats. 

—

Sometimes the man trades out his turtles for a remote controlled car which he crashes at top speed into Doc Martens on the sidewalk. 

—

One Sunday at the Frischluftbibliothek a man with a ponytail and cut off sleeves crawls on the ground beside me. He wears a plastic bag over his hand and scours the earth with a diligence I find disquieting. For over thirty minutes he’s at it, picking up debris. At last he rises. He ties a belt around his waist, a red band around his head. Kung-fu masters are permitted to work on the sabbath, apparently. Two children appear, pushed forward by their parents. Punch! Kick! Roll!  One of the pupils promptly quits. The remaining child wavers. Now, kung-fu master, bring your training to bear! Your dignity hangs in the balance! He adjusts his headband, draws a deep breath. . .but his little apprentice defects. Berlin Berlin/Du heiße Braut, how can you be so cruel?

—

When the wind is right, as are the time and the day of the week, smoke wafts over the meadow. Its source is the park next door. Hundreds of people, friends and family, claim their spots and set up their grill kits. Chairs and fold-out tables, footballs and paddles, charcoal semaver, fleisch and sides. Not a kartoffel in sight. An unkempt man ambles from camp to camp, piling his plate high with kebabs and cutlets, gladly given. He is not partial to vegetables or rice and accepts them, if he must, with a look of undisguised disgust. 

—

I sit in this park on a bench and inch from one end to the other to keep in the oak tree’s shade. A panorama of joy around me. I fill up on it greedily.

—

One evening at Grillfläche Blücherplatz (for so it is officially called, after the Prussian General who sent Napoleon back to Paris from Waterloo) I see a woman walk down the path that bisects the park. Sinewy, tanned, wearing faded Camp David, she pauses to admire a plastic pink scooter and even takes a picture of it. I return to my book. Entschuldigung! Entschuldigung! A girl, no older than nine, runs down the woman who is absconding with scooter in hand. I settle in for a session of that favorite local pastime. Bystanding, it is officially called. 

The girl is slight, patient and polite, but it soon dawns on her that this is no innocent encounter. She puffs out her chest, pluck undaunted, and holds her ground against the stranger until, baby on hip, her mother arrives. Surely, now, the woman will relinquish her ill-gotten prize. But no. She takes out her phone. She displays the picture as evidence that the scooter is her’s by right. So brazen is the claim that mother and daughter are rendered momentarily speechless. But only momentarily. Two aunties arrive, crowding the would-be thief. Her plan was to sell the scooter, I think, but who’s to say there’s not a little one in her life in dire need of a gift? She releases the toy and flees.

—

The aggrieved return to their grillplatz, I to my reading. Not really of course. I continue to spy. I hear them tell their comrades what happened. The little girl chimes in from time to time, emphasizing certain details with wild gesticulations. But an even grander gesture is in order. The entire clan rises as one. Young and old, men and women, they take off marching through the smoke, hot on the trail of their antagonist. Somewhere, the ghost of General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher tips them an approving nod.

—

Will they call the police if they catch her? Demand an apology? Cuss her out? It is a moot point of course, she is long gone. Sure enough, a minute later the group returns, foiled, triumphant. 

***

Daniel was born and raised in the USA. He earned his MFA in Fiction from New York University. Currently he lives in Reinickendorf where you'll find him shopping at Penny.

What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

The Old Fishing Village

By Holger Klein:

For us it was once a landmark, the old rusty wind wheel beside the channel connecting the small fishing harbour with a large lagoon, a former bight of the Baltic. The wheel was the first we saw when we approached the harbour on the new road from the west. Once the wheel drove a wooden Archimedean Screw which drained the surrounding wetlands for agricultural use. In our early years, we visited the wheel occasionally, musing how it works. 

The lagoon was separated from the Baltic by a spit which was extending westward over centuries until only the small channel-like outflow was left. During the last decades I often visited the harbour at the mouth of the channel, but it was only a few years ago when I realised that the wheel is no longer visible from the road. Rusty and motionless, it is now hidden behind high trees and only to be seen from the small bridge crossing the channel. 

In early summer, I took the small path (No Trespass!) through high reeds towards the wheel. I was curious if the Archimedean Screw was still in its place, possibly even workable. But there was no way through. The shaft for the inflow was totally overgrown by thick brambles, unpassable in shorts and without a machete. But a few metres away I found a new drainage ditch where an electric pump took over the wheel’s work. 

For me, this wind wheel stands for all the things that changed during the last decades, in the harbour and in the old fishing village about 2 km to the east. It was by the late 1960s when we discovered the village and the harbour, surrounded by lakes, large beech woods and endless fields in the hinterland. 

On our first visit to the village, we took the old small and curvy road leading north-eastward from the main road directly to the beach near a row of green wooden sheds. Here the fishermen stored their gear, mended their drying nets suspended between wooden poles, or repainted their boats. In the shallow bight small open fishing vessels were gently rolling at their moorings, gulls and other waterfowl soaring in the wind. We instantly fell in love with this place and for me it felt like paradise.

On both sides of the village the cliff line changes into smooth shores. In the west lies the former bight with the channel and the wheel, the spit secured by a long dike. Eastwards lies a smaller lagoon, separated from the sea by a barrier beach. It is also a former bight, connected to the sea by a small, meandering outlet. Both lagoons are surrounded by extended wetlands and reed belts, partly protected as bird reserves. 

All along the coast are broad sand and pebble beaches, surrounding the shallow bight with a seabed of sandy patches, big boulders, and seagrass beds. The colour of the water changes according to the weather, offering a range from a dull steel grey over all shades of blue and green, culminating in a tropical turquoise over the sand beds on sunny days. I especially love sunny days when cloud fields are drifting moderately over the sky, causing a pattern of continually changing water colours with different intensities.

One or two years after our first visit my father bought a holiday apartment on the backside of the cliff. Here I spent most of my leisure time for years: First school holidays and weekends, and later, with my own kids, also a lot of our vacations. Right from the beginning I loved to walk the beaches for hours at all seasons, becoming a real beachcomber, a passion I’m still following today. 

However, gradually things were changing. The little harbour was enlarged and is now a marina for leisure boats, the fishery declined step by step, many houses have been renovated and enlarged, and of course new houses and hotels were built. The pub favoured by young people was closed and a spacious golf course was laid out just a few kilometres away. New green sheds were added to the old ones, hosting a sail and surf school and a cosy café. Today there are only one or two part-time fishers left who still use their sheds for the initial purpose. 

The coastline changes gradually too. Due to heavy landslides after strong, eastern gales the cliff retreated metre by metre over the years, an accelerating process due to climate change with severer and more frequent storms and higher sea levels. On the other side, the local campground at the small lagoon was closed, removed and changed into a nature and bird reserve, a place we often visit to observe birds. Not all changes are bad. 

The surrounding landscape changed only marginally. The lagoons are still surrounded by their broad reed belts, the large beech woods not cleared. Like a long swell on the open ocean, the seemingly endless fields are still waving over the soft moraine ridges, partly still owned by local counts. A few weeks ago, I swam together with my youngest brother out into the bight and we realised that, compared to the last decades, from this perspective only marginal changes are recognizable. However, the locals have to make their living and must adapt to the demands of modern tourism and therefore there are more changes to come during the next few years. 

Some years ago, the municipality set up a couple of plates along the promenade, showing old black and white pictures of the village. They were taken in the first years of the last century, about 120 years ago. Some photos show the proper village and we recognized a few things which we could still remember, though they disappeared during the last decades. Other pictures show the old fishermen sitting together on a bench in front of a shed, smoking their pipes and looking over the bay. Other pictures show them mending the nets or processing their catches in a small smokehouse. 

When we stroll through the village, occasionally times are merging. We ‘see’ how it looked a few decades ago and how things are today. It’s like walking in the same place simultaneously at two different times. And whenever I approach the village on the old avenue lined with mighty oaks on both sides and negotiate the narrow curves and the ups and downs of the road, when I pass the neolithic grave-mound to the right and the manor house and the wide view over the great lagoon to the left, I’m the boy once more on the day we discovered the village. 

***
Holger Klein is a retired oceanographer who spends a lot of time exploring the coasts of the Nordic Seas and isles, and is a regular hiker in Lapland.