Postcard from... Beelitz

Photograph: Katrin Schönig

Behind the fences the buildings stand in their beautiful decay. Plants grow between the crumbling brickwork. Trees have taken root where there once was a roof. Cyrillic signs are painted on the door in memory of former occupiers, and more recent artwork decorates windowless rooms from more recent explorers. The Beelitz Heilstätten, south of Berlin, was a sanatorium and hospital complex for less than a hundred years, from its opening in 1898 to the retreat of the Soviet military, who had occupied the site after WW2, in the mid-1990s. Now, as you walk between the buildings you get the feeling it will be visited as a ruin for far longer than it was used to cure the sick and injured.

It is because of our attraction for such abandoned places that there is a newer structure in the forest, a walkway of steel and wood that lifts the visitor high above the treetops. On a sunny weekday in October there are hundreds of people up there, turning their cameras and phones from the views across the top of the autumnal forest to the decaying buildings below and the fascinating glimpse into the rooms and hallways carpeted in rubble. Back on the ground, standing in the shadow of the walkway next to the frame of a building where women once took ‘air baths’ as a treatment against tuberculosis, it really is as if the ruins have been subsumed, very much part of the forest and somehow as natural as the trees, the bushes, and the mushrooms sticking up between falling leaves.

Read more about the Beelitz Heilstätten from our friends at Slow Travel Berlin

Elsewhere No.02 is out now - order your copy here from our online shop

The Library: Lost and Found in Johannesburg, by Mark Gevisser

City of Gold and Empty Spaces

Review: Paul Scraton

After a brief prologue that sets the scene for a brutal and frightening home invasion in Johannesburg, 2012 - a story which will be told in harrowing detail later in the book - Mark Gevisser starts his story with a childhood map-reading game called ‘Dispatcher’ played on the pages of the family’s Holmden’s street atlas of the South African city. The young Gevisser would take addresses from the phone book and attempt plot the course of an imaginary dispatcher moving through the city… Only, it was not that simple and his dispatcher would sometimes come up short due to the seemingly illogical nature of the layout of the maps:

“Sets of neighboring suburbs were grouped - in admittedly pleasing designs - as if they were discrete countries, often with nothing around the edges to show that there was actually settlement on the other side of the thick red line.”

Some of the maps are recreated in the book, showing little islands of streets surrounded by empty spaces, the compass arrow marking north pointing this way and that. And sometimes those settlements on the other side of the red line were not to be discovered anywhere in the book, not even on a different page. For the Holmden’s Register of Johannesburg not only presented the city on the whim of a creative designer, but also erased entire black townships or else presented them as if on another planet. Attempting to dispatch a courier from his home to an address in the black township of Alexandra, Gevisser came up against uncrossable white space. The destinations may have been only two pages apart in Holmdens, but there was no route between them:

“The key plan might have connected the two pages, but on the evidence of the maps themselves, there was simply no way through.”

It might have been geographically inaccurate, but the atomisation of the city through these maps did reflect the divisions between black and white, rich and poor. Through this game played on the pages of Holmden’s in the back of his father’s Mercedes, the young Mark Gevisser begin to come to terms with the reality of life in his home country. It was, he writes, the start of the development of his political consciousness.

This rediscovery of his childhood cartographic games leads Gevisser to take a step further back, to explore the first commercial street guide to Johannesburg published by W. Tompkins in 1890, just a couple of years after the discovery of gold in Witwatersrand. This map was as much a fantasy as it was a reflection of the facts on the ground… many of the neighbourhoods laid out their in neat rows on the map were speculations, and some of them would never even be built. But the most meaningful discovery for Gevisser is the two small patches of land plotted out south of the railway tracks. Like islands in the open veld, one portion was allocated to “coolies” (workers of Asian descent) and one to “kaffirs” (black labourers).

This speaks to the viewer in two ways. Firstly, that “apartheid was embedded in the development of Johannesburg from the very start”. And the second was that all the workforce that would be needed to build this new city could be contained in twelve city blocks. “Here, then, represented by the Tompkins map, is the folly of apartheid capitalism and the reason why it was destined to fail, even if it took a century to do so.”

From this point on Gevisser, not only through his words but also through maps, photographs, newspaper reports and other documentary evidence, tells the story of the city and of his own family, who came from Lithuania as Orthodox Jews and ended up in a rich white suburban neighbourhood in South Africa. He tells the story of his own personal political development, in the bohemian corners of bookshops and bars, of his own sexuality and the lives of gay men under apartheid, and the many, myriad ways in which people were kept apart - and not only through the white spaces on a map.

The writing is gentle and fluid, leading you through the pages like he once led his imaginary dispatcher through the city streets, only with no dead ends along the way. Gevisser is excellent in its descriptive powers and with a creativity that can conjure entire imaged scenes from a single photograph.

In parts it is a gripping tale, especially when we get to the story of an attack on the apartment of his friends whom he was visiting at the time. It is brutal but could, in Gevisser’s own reflections, been worse (and what does that say?), whilst the aftermath paints a less than positive impression of the South African judicial system and the investigatory powers of the police. And while this is going on, Gevisser is self-aware enough to consider the classic reactions of guilty white liberals when faced with such a crime.

In this he is reflecting on contemporary South Africa, contemporary Johannesburg, and how the present - especially the new boundaries that have developed in the city, those new spaces between people that have been thrown up in the twenty years since the euphoria of those first democratic elections - are still being shaped by the divisions of the past. And yet he finds hope for his hometown, despite the continued difficulties and the challenging realities of everyday life, in one of the world’s most complex and fascinating cities.

Mark Gevisser's website

Elsewhere No.02 is out now, featuring great writing on place, reviews, photography, illustration and interviews. You can find out more information and order your copy online here.

Postcard from... Saint-Hubert

In the rain we walked Saint-Hubert’s gritty and gloomy streets. The water ran in streams from the awnings of cafes, hammered against the church roof. All we wanted was a portion of frites, preferably smothered in thick, warming cheese sauce. It was not to be. The chip-shop was closed. We stood outside its locked door and stared at it awhile, the rain creeping in beneath our waterproofs via our sleeves and our necks. We ran for the woods.

Saint-Hubert in the Ardennes is a hunters' town, its roundabouts and bistro walls decorated with stags and wild boar, a town named for the patron saint of hunters (alongside mathematicians, opticians and metalworkers) whose status depended on a vision whereby, at the end of it, he spared the stag. Some hunter. Under the shelter of the forest we explored a game reserve on the edge of town, spying wild boar and deer in a place of protection and celebration yet where we paid our admission in a cafe beneath a pair of antlers, a collection of old guns, and other symbols of the hunt.

We did not look at the menu. Saint Hubertus may have spared the stag, but this was still a hunters' town.

By Paul Scraton
Photo by Katrin Schönig

The places of GRRRR...

This mysterious and intriguing little envelope stamped in Zurich without a sender was in our mailbox at the end of last week.

Turns out it is a little fan mail from Ingo and we want to return the love because we found the sketchy booklet and leporello with all sorts of scenes and even a sort of time lapse from a train window from Limerick, Ireland, he sent us absolutely fantastic. There are loads of sketchy travel memoirs in print and on his awesomely psychedelic and interactive website. I just got lost an hour in clicking through.

Thank you Ingo!

The link once more: grrrr.net

Postcard from... the Hackney Marshes

I thought I was prepared. I had read Gareth’s book, that strange and wonderful exploration of the Marshland, and I thought I was ready for anything. But nothing I had read could have prepared me. Not really. Not for the swarms of the hungry, the discombobulation, the excess. In the confusion, I almost bought a season ticket for West Ham. But then I found Gary, my guide out of the madness, and together we escaped Westfield, and all the while I wondered: Could the entrance to the Olympics really have been built to lead people through a shopping centre? What a stupid question.

We walked. Through the Olympic Park and beyond the warehouses and pop-up bars lining the Lea Navigation. We moved through the Wick Woodland, trying to appear unsuspicious to a pair of policewomen who appeared through the undergrowth. By the wide and epic expanse of the football fields we picked up the Old River, picking our way along an overgrown riverbank that felt miles away from urban life but of course it wasn’t, and we spied shipping containers on the other side of the bank through the trees.

All the while we talked, of walking and writing and of course of Gareth’s book. This was not the marshland of his imagination, of course it wasn’t, but it stirred the imagination nevertheless. We paused to photograph a pylon as the shouts of a goal sounded across the multitude of pitches, and then picked our way through the Middlesex Filter Beds in search of a beer. At the pub we toasted a grey heron, standing among the rubbish that had gathered where the river and navigation divide. A toast perhaps, to Whipple and Hazlehurst. A toast to a walk from the Queen Elizabeth Park to the Princess of Wales Pub. A toast to filter beds and football pitches, bramble-strewn pathways and a pile of shipping containers...

A toast to the Marshland.

By Paul Scraton

Marshland: Dreams and Nightmares on the Edge of London by Gareth E. Rees is available from Influx Press.