9 November, Berlin-Pankow

By Paul Scraton:

On this 9 November in Berlin the city is shrouded in fog as we leave our apartment on Osloer Straße. The last few days have been glorious, days made for walking, lingering in the autumn sunshine, but today the weather has closed in as we set off along the leaf-clogged pavement. But despite the change in the weather, I’m starting my week with a walk, a stroll from where I live in Gesundbrunnen across the old Berlin Wall border to Pankow, a deliberate choice for this particular morning, on this particular date.

The 9 November is Germany’s Schicksaltag, its day of fate. As I cross the bridge by the S-Bahn station at Bornholmer Straße I pass by a series of photographs from this day 31 years ago when the border was opened and thousands of people flooded across from the East to the West on the night the Berlin Wall came down. On this date in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm was forced to abdicate in the November Revolution that ended the monarchy in Germany. On this date in 1923, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed in a volley of police bullets in Munich. And on this date in 1938, the November pogrom against the Jews was unleashed, an attack on their synagogues, their property and their lives, during which 400 were killed. In the days that followed, a further 30,000 Jews would be arrested, taken to the camps where many would later perish. 

There is much to remember on this date in this city, and it has brought me to Westerlandstraße. I walk slowly along the pavement, counting down the houses until I reach number sixteen. I could have picked any number of addresses in my home city to walk to this morning, but this is the one I have chosen. In front of the house the leaves have piled up by the entranceway, covering up much of the pavement. I need to brush them aside in order to find what I am looking for, the three bronze cobblestones laid in the ground just in front of the door. Three cobblestones, one for each person: Conrad Danziger. Frieda Danziger. Emil Elie Leyser.

All three called Westerlandstraße 16 home. Conrad was an architect, who lived here with his wife Frieda from 1935. At some point after 1939, in the words of their neighbours who witnessed the event, the couple were “collected” by the authorities and taken to what was called a “Jewish Apartment” on Köpenicker Straße. On 2 March 1943, Conrad was deported to Auschwitz. On 16 June 1943, Frieda was also taken from the city, first to Theresienstadt and then later to Auschwitz. Emil, known as Elie, was their neighbour. He had lived on Westerlandstraße since 1931 with his wife Margarete, his son Leopold, Leopold’s wife Grete and their daughter Karin. Emil was arrested in 1939 and was also deported to Auschwitz on the 2 March 1943, where he was almost immediately murdered. Leopold and his family were deported to Chelmno/Kulmhof, where all three were killed. What happened to Margarete is as yet unknown. 

In front of the house on Westerlandstraße, everything is quiet. I look down at these three stones that represent three lives, all lived here in Berlin-Pankow, all extinguished in Auschwitz. Even the main road at the end of the street seems to be less busy than one would expect on a Monday morning. Perhaps it is the impact of the latest lockdown, perhaps it has something to do with the weather. Kneeling on the pavement, I try to polish the Stolpersteine, these stumbling stones that have been laid for Conrad, Frieda and Elie, the best I can. Across Germany and in other places in Europe where these stones have been laid, others will be doing the same. Polishing and placing a candle or a flower on these tiny memorials laid in the ground. Memorials that put names to the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust. Memorials that help us to tell their stories. 

I make my way back slowly through the back streets of Pankow to Bornholmer Straße, past the last of surviving embassies that were built here in GDR times, crossing the bridge once more above the railway tracks that once served as a border between two worlds. The history of Berlin can sometimes weigh heavy on this city of ours, where every street seems to contain a memorial and every date in the calendar marks some kind of anniversary. So much so that it is often very easy to miss them, to pass by without a second glance or let the dates slip by unremarked. But it remains important to remember, and perhaps today more than ever. 

Although the biographical information on the Stolpersteine is, by design, starkly limited, the Stolpersteine Berlin website has done a fantastic job of creating an online archive of life stories for many of those remembered through these tiny memorials, including the lives of Conrad Danziger, Frieda Danziger and Emil Elie Leyser, who lived at Westerlandstraße 16.

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

***

You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.

On the tourist trail...

By Paul Scraton:

From dawn until late into the evening, long after dusk, they gather on the street beneath our hotel room window. They come for the famous view, the one that adorns the front covers of guidebooks sold in a multitude of languages in the town’s souvenir shops; the one that features on postcards of the town in spring sunshine and winter snows; the one that provides the backdrop for an early 1990s computer game. It’s the view of the town that appears at the top of the town’s Wikipedia page and is the number one sight on Tripadvisor. 

It is also the title picture for this piece. To the outside world, this view is Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and beneath our window visitors to the town gather, waiting patiently for their turn at a safe social distance, to take their own version home with them. Only, as our hotel receptionist could tell us, this summer there are far fewer amateur photographers than there might normally be. 

The world doesn’t need another piece of writing about how strange this summer has been, but on a long trip south from Berlin to the Alps it was actually possible, on the high passes and hanging valleys, on the ridge line and down by the lake, to feel as if nothing was actually happening. Walking in the mountains it was possible to pretend, if only for a while, that the world was as it was before. But in between, in those places that form the highlights of many a grand European tour – Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Rhine Falls – it was clear that this was a summer like no other.

Perhaps in any other summer, right in the middle of school holidays and the peak tourist season, we wouldn’t have even bothered to brave these places. Because of course, like all travellers, we like to think we are different to those crowds of tourists who follow the well-trodden trail through the checklist sights, ticking them off before shuffling back onto the air-conditioned coach. Indeed, these are the places we strive to avoid, even though they have become wildly popular for a reason, whether for their beauty, their location or simply the stories and the place in our culture they hold.

We are tourists too. We travel to escape the everyday and to see new things. This is our chance. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber we walk the city walls and soak up the atmosphere of the old town as a thunderstorm rolls in. At the Rhine Falls we follow a group of Dutch motorcyclists, sweating in their leathers, down the steps to where we can see and feel the power of the water rushing by in front of us. In Neuschwanstein we realise that even a pandemic cannot stop of the lure of this fairytale castle on the hillside, as all the tours are booked up and the only option, the friendly young man in a facemask tells us, is to join the queue at six in the morning and hope for returns.

But the absence of crowds is unsettling too. These are places that live from their visitors. What happens if they don’t come back? We cannot know what travel and tourism will look like in the short to medium term, let alone further into the future, but in Rothenburg ob der Tauber empty shop fronts on the main street tell the story of businesses that haven’t made it out the other side of the pandemic. And what we also can see is that it is not just about coronavirus. The clues were there on higher ground. Beyond the current situation, the climate crisis requires that we rethink all aspects of our lives, including how we travel. In the mountains it was possible to feel like none of this was happening, but it was only if we refused to look closer.

A guesthouse called ‘Glacier View’ has long been a misnomer, as the ice has retreated around the corner. It’s out of sight and will soon disappear entirely. Local newspapers write of dangerous rock falls on the high peaks, of unstable ground caused or at least exacerbated by climate change. And as the cable car carries up higher than our legs or mountaineering skills could ever manage, we can’t help but wonder what a ski season looks like without any snow?

We might have been able to escape the pandemic by climbing ever higher on the trails, but the feeling that up there things were as they ever were is just an illusion. We can’t go back, even if we would like to. The real question is – where do we go from here?

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Irreplaceable – an interview with Julian Hoffman

We are extremely pleased to hear that Julian Hoffman – longstanding friend and contributor to Elsewhere: A Journal of Place – has been shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation. Julian has been shortlisted for his book Irreplaceable, in which he visits habitats around the world that are under threat and which is described on the Wainwright Prize website as being ‘not only a love letter to the haunting beauty of these landscapes and the wild species that call them home, including nightingales, lynxes, hornbills, redwoods and elephant seals, it is also a timely reminder of the vital connections between humans and nature, and all that we stand to lose in terms of wonder and wellbeing.’

To mark the shortlisting of Irreplaceable for the Wainwright Prize for Writing on Global Conservation, we spoke to Julian about his book, the places he visited and the people he met, and the work that is being done and needs to be done to prevent the further loss of such special and important places.

Interview by Paul Scraton:

Elsewhere: One thing that strikes the reader even before you sit down to get stuck in to Irreplaceable is the diversity of places you visited in the course of your research? Was there one particular place that can be seen as a spark for the project, and how did you come to selecting the places to visit for the book?

Julian Hoffman: The spark for the entire book was the Hoo Peninsula in Kent. Slotted between the Thames and Medway rivers, this extraordinary span of glorious marshland, tidal creeks and ancient villages was threatened to be turned into Europe’s largest airport by a proposal championed by London’s then mayor, and now British prime minister, Boris Johnson. The development would have devastated the peninsula, eradicating a massive expanse of protected bird habitat, as well as levelling three entire villages and their 13th century churches. It would have stolen so much of what makes the place so special. But what inspired me to write specifically about the plight of that threatened place was the resilience, bravery, passion and persistence of three people who were doing everything they possibly could to save this home ground of theirs for the benefit of both human and wild communities. So that was the beginning, the Hoo Peninsula; and that day in the company of these three residents was the day when I suddenly understood what loss in the natural world meant. Because so often we measure loss numerically, through so many acres of destroyed woodland or meadow, or by how many millions of breeding birds have vanished from the skies of Europe. But through the stories of these people, and the complex, interwoven beauty of the place and its wildlife that they introduced me to, those numbers became real, visceral and relatable. They were suddenly transformed into the vibrant reality of lands, waters and lives that would be ravaged by the project.

After that, I realised that to approach the issue of loss in the natural world, and more importantly the potential for resistance to that loss, required a global perspective if I was to do it justice in any way. Because these issues affect human societies and nature across the planet. I also wanted to document as many varying habitats as possible, because biodiversity and the flourishing of communities are utterly dependent on a spectrum of functioning ecosystems. So I followed up stories of threatened islands, coral reefs, mangrove forests, tropical jungle and tallgrass prairie, while also consciously investigating what urban nature and green places mean too. And finally, the other important criteria for selecting the threatened places was my desire to trace their stories in real time, exploring them alongside the brave individuals and communities seeking to protect them. Which meant only writing about those places still actively threatened, where no final decision had been made regarding their future. Sadly, this also meant that some places I’d originally intended to include in the book had to be left out because they were destroyed before I could even get to them. These are places that exist solely in memory now for the human and wild communities that once knew them.

Elsewhere: Some of these places are very small… perhaps even unknown to people who live within a couple of miles of them. Can you give our readers a sense of why such places are so important and, as in the title of your book, why they are Irreplaceable?

JH: It didn’t take long to realise that the size of a place bears little relationship to its depth, or to the quality of connection fostered there by people. Our attachments to place can be founded on the small and intimate as easily as the expansive and remote. And for a world in which more than half its human population is urbanised, it’s critical that we pay more attention to small green spaces in cities and local suburban sites. In some respects, it’s taken us a pandemic to recognise just how essential these unsung places are. A recent survey by the Campaign to Preserve Rural England revealed that over half of respondents said that during lockdown they had a greater appreciation for how important local green spaces are for a community’s health and wellbeing. And yet these are precisely the kind of places that are at greatest risk of being destroyed, regularly threatened with being turned into car parks, luxury housing and commercial interests. And with the British government’s new slogan of ‘Build, build, build’, the situation will only get worse, when green spaces of enormous importance to local people will be regarded as expendable and sold off for development instead of being preserved for the benefit of the wider community. Between 2007 and 2014 alone, only four of 198 applications to close allotment sites were rejected by the Secretary of State. So even though allotments are absolutely protected in UK law, the other 194 were destroyed. And with their loss, as with any loss of green space in a city, nature suffers another shrinkage of real estate in which to dwell alongside us, and that world of potential connection close to home, where we often first come into contact with nature, is further eroded. And critically, for those people who lack access to green spaces further afield for socio-economic reasons, these small, unsung, nearby places are often vital for their wellbeing.

Elsewhere: One of the words we’ve heard a lot in recent years has been the idea of “wilding” or “re-wilding.” What role, if any, do such projects have in the struggle to save endangered places?

JH: I think rewilding is critical to the return of natural abundance. By leaving space for vital, elemental processes to regain their fluidity and wild expression, we enable a greater flourishing. And just as importantly, between rewilding and what in North America ecologists call ecological restoration is the opportunity to right some of the wrongs and heal some of the wounds we’ve inflicted on the world’s lands and waters. To rethink the direction that our neo-liberal economic and political systems have taken us, recalibrating our value of what matters in the process, so that the healthy functioning of ecosystems and the prospering of wild communities is part of our everyday deliberations when considering human wellbeing. 

It’s a complex and emotive issue, and there are purists and non-purists to further complicate matters of rewilding, but what is fundamentally exciting about the prospect is how it offers the chance for imaginative leaps to be made, reconnecting us to species, landscapes and places that have been thinned of so much of their meaning because of our intensive industrial, agricultural and extractive practices. Actions that have led us to a world of separation and estrangement. But enormous possibilities for restitution exist, like the Kent Wildlife Trust’s plan to bring bison to within walking distance of Canterbury to aid in the creation of woodland habitats and their multitude of ecological niches. Or like the fantastic community rewilding projects that are taking shape in Scotland and elsewhere, bringing together landowners and individuals with varied backgrounds and interests in the pursuit of a more inclusive and wilder landscape. It’s not the answer to all the issues, of course, and many of our richest seams of biodiversity, such as wildflower meadows, which have declined by a devastating 97% in the UK since the 1930s, are critically dependent on human influence, but rewilding should be seen as one of the many major tools we have to reanimate the planet’s green and blue spaces. And just as importantly, it’s imperative that we simultaneously rewild the heart in a way that makes kinship with other forms of life a natural part of being human.

Elsewhere: What struck me when reading Irreplaceable was how the stories of these places and their futures were deeply interlinked with the people committed to defending them. Can you share something of what it was like to meet such people and also whether what you saw and heard from them changed your own feelings about endangered places?

JH: From the very beginning of the book I wanted people to be at its heart. I think the separation between people and nature can sometimes be replicated in nature writing and film-making that either actively seeks to exclude humans from the scope of the work or creates an artificial island of fecundity, reinforcing not only a distance between species but also a false narrative about how well the natural world is doing. But with Irreplaceable I wanted to make the interconnection between people, wildlife and place a fundamental aspect of the story. Because in order to repair this world of wounds, in Aldo Leopold’s stark phrase, we need to deepen that weave. And what I discovered in my journeys to threatened places, where I sought out ordinary residents as much as ecologists and conservationists, was the profound capacity we have for attachment with the natural world. The people I met there – taxi-drivers, soldiers, teachers and nurses – were actively enlarging the idea of home while trying to defend a place of importance, so that it included the more-than-human in its embrace. It was a deeply moving experience for me, but also wonderfully joyous, welcoming and inspiring being in their company. They showed me that positive, transformative change is possible.

Elsewhere: And have you heard back from any of them as to how they feel about the book?

JH: Yes, I have. And each time it was a really emotional experience after all the anxiety of wondering whether they felt I got the stories they’d entrusted me with right, which often included their own personal worries and vulnerabilities too. But the response has been overwhelmingly positive. Last November I was involved in an event for the Sheffield and Rotherham Wildlife Trust on the theme of trees and irreplaceable ancient woodland and they’d invited the group of people I’d spent time with who were doggedly seeking to protect the ancient woodland of Smithy Wood, with 850 years of continuous wooded history, from being turned into a motorway services off the M1. I hadn’t seen any of these people since 2015 when they shared their stories of this woodland with me, and although we were now in a concrete venue in the middle of the city you could still sense that intricate world of trees and leaves and roots around them. And by sheer coincidence, that was the same day that we learned that Smithy Wood was most likely to be spared. And it reminded me that although four years had passed between our meetings, while I had been writing about other threatened places in the world, their fight to save that irreplaceable ancient woodland had carried on throughout that entire time. So it’s been an incredible honour getting to know such resolute people.

Elsewhere: So often it feels like positive environmental stories come down to the commitment and hard work of individuals or small groups. What do you think governments and other institutional bodies need be doing if we are to stop the loss of the places you write about?

JH: Firstly, and most importantly, to listen. I was amazed by just how many people in my journeys felt a connection to the natural world and green spaces in one way or another. And yet their concerns are largely ignored. The almost complete lack of attention given to environmental issues in its broadest sense during election campaigns and debates is a sign of how low down the list of priorities it is for most politicians. For many of them, particularly on the right, though by no means exclusively, the philosophy of perpetual economic growth is hardwired into their souls. They can’t see around it; neither what it costs in terms of other measures of wellbeing or how it’s a trap, a hamster wheel you can never escape from. All you can do is keep building, extracting, devouring. None of which is a destination in itself, just a way to keep the wheel spinning sufficiently that you can convince yourself you’re actually going somewhere. But listening to others’ concerns, especially when they don’t conform to your vision of the world, and absorbing exactly what scientists are saying about the devastation that climate change and biodiversity loss will cause, is absolutely imperative. And if they won’t listen, then it’s up to us as citizens to be far more pro-active when it comes to voting for parties and politicians who will.

Elsewhere: In a book like yours, where the situation can so often seem desperate, it can be hard to find hope. But I found Irreplaceable extremely hopeful even if not every struggle will be successful. Did you feel hopeful after writing this book and how do you feel now?

JH: I remember right back at the beginning, just after experiencing the Hoo Peninsula in 2013, wondering where the trajectory of the book would take me. Would it be a deep dive into grief, or an angry rant about the destructive power of capitalism? Would it be an elegy, or a tome of hopelessness? I really had no idea back then how the journey would unfold, but it didn’t take long to witness and recognise the enormous potential and capacity for positive action when people stand up for what’s right. When people work in cohesion on behalf of something bigger than themselves, uniting around an idea, a place, a wild species. This is what I came to call radical hopefulness. When the word hope is understood not in a passive context, which is what we all commonly do, but as an active verb. A verb that makes change possible solely by acting on it. So, yes, I remain hopeful, in the sense that I experienced what is not only possible on my journeys but actively happening in communities throughout the world right now. During the dark days, these are the stories I hang on to.

Elsewhere: As great fans of your work, from your writings for various outlets (including Elsewhere!), and your books The Small Heart of Things and Irreplaceable, the last thing we need to know is… what’s next?

JH: Thank you, that’s very kind of you to say! Like countless people around the globe, my plans were upturned by the pandemic. Which meant the book I was intending to write had to be shelved, at least for the foreseeable future, as the journeys, stories and interviews I’d pinned it on could obviously no longer happen. But in the wake of that disappointment, as I had a spring and summer at home instead of one on the road, a new vision for a book took shape. It’s called Shelter, and while not specifically about the pandemic it of course has everything to do with it. The idea emerged out of that need to stay in place, but also from an urgent sense of solidarity with other forms of life seeking to dwell in safety and security. For the past two winters, up to 14 wrens have roosted on especially cold nights in a long-abandoned swallow’s nest above our front door. To have them that near to us as we slept, and to watch them drop out of that shelter at dawn each day, often into a world of swirling snow, and then return at dusk from separate directions, has been one of the most extraordinary and enlarging experiences of my life. Just as they were departing their shelter for good in early spring we were entering our own due to the pandemic, so the book is really about living in a shared world – our mutual, fragile and astonishing shelter we call Earth – a personal exploration of wild lives nearby and how we might go about creating the psychological and emotional space for co-existence. 

***

Irreplaceable: The fight to save our wild places is published in paperback by Penguin. 

Beside and beneath the water, Hamburg

By Paul Scraton:

We walk through the Speicherstadt between red-brick warehouses, home to trading companies dealing in carpets and tea, as well as record labels, new media start-ups and advertising agencies. We are not alone. On the bridge a tour guide tells his group the story of this port city, and the outdoor cafes by the bridge linking the warehouse district with the city centre are packed with every table taken. In Berlin the return of visitors has been slow, and it appears they have all come to Hamburg. 

Socially distanced queues lead up to the entrance of the Elbphilharmonie… no concerts today but tours and visits to the terrace with its views of the Elbe and across to the cranes and ships of the port. On the raised promenade beside the elevated Baumwall U-Bahn station, hundreds of people move back and forth, in search of the perfect photograph of the new concert hall or perhaps a late morning fischbrötchen and an early glass of Astra beer. At the St Pauli Landungsbrücken the piers are also busy, as people move between ferries and trains, take their seat at a restaurant with a river view or find their land legs after disembarking from a harbour cruise. 

We escape the crowds by going underground, taking the stairs until we reach the bottom of an eighty foot high entrance hall. Somehow we missed the entrance to the lifts, manned by guards in facemasks, bringing the cyclists and pedestrians down to the start of the old Elbtunnel. No cars are allowed down here right now, as renovations continue, and there are not so many of us making the crossing to Steinwerder on foot or bike. It is cool and calm in the tunnel beneath the river, although hard to imagine that giant ocean-going vehicle transporter, bound for Morocco, that would have passed over our heads had we been down here just a few hours before.

At Steinwerder we take the lift back up to the surface, wandering around the building to a lookout point with its kiosk selling fish rolls and an ice cream van. People use the tunnel to go to work or get home, but on this Monday in July it felt like most had made the crossing for no other reason than its novelty value, to look at the city from across the water. And, perhaps, in these strange, distanced times, to get away from the crowds above. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

We walk across the fields to the old village just before tea, and we see that the stork has returned. The nest is on top of the brick chimney above a workshop that is now an art and community hall between the supermarket and the Schloss. But the stork is in the fields, taking languid strides across the rutted ground, while a hooded crow watches on from a safe distance.

Another returnee to the village: the artwork that stands in the middle of the pond, part of a 42-km walking route that links Wiesenburg with Bad Belzig. The artwork represents all the lost and abandoned villages of High Fläming. Those destroyed in the Thirty Years War or left as ghost villages as industry shifted, swallowed by the forest. Each winter the artwork is taken away to protect it in case the pond waters freeze, and each spring it is brought back. The lost villages found once more. 

In the Schloss gardens, the anglers sit along the banks of the ponds, easily maintaining social distance with their umbrellas and low stools, trailers pulled by bicycles and plastic bottles of water and beer. 

At dusk I watch the bats dance between the houses above the gentle orange glow of the street light. I stand on our driveway and look up and down the street. A number of houses are empty. Shuttered and waiting for someone new. A generation change, our neighbour said. 

The new house that we pass on our walks is beginning to take shape. Walls and and a roof. Windows and doors to come. The old tumbledown shack that was the only structure on the once-tangled and overgrown property now has a shiny new big brother. 

The path through the forest follows the old dry valleys formed by the last Ice Age and leads us to the next village. It is there we spot the first swallows of spring, pinging this way and that as we walk down past the houses with their neat gardens to the sandy track out the other side. We’ve never been this far before, and the path leads up to a lookout point that offers as close to a view as you’ll get in Brandenburg without climbing a castle tower or a wooden walkway high above the trees. 

Our neighbouring house has been gutted, the remnants of the old lives lived between those walls piled up in the garden. The things that were left behind when they sold it. Old travel cases and trunks. Hunting trophies. Garden gnomes. The new neighbours are working on it around their jobs, on evenings and weekends, working hard and making good progress. The kids play on piles of sand as the adults pause for a beer and we say cheers across the top of an overgrown hedge. 

In the window of the village library, closed since March, there is a line-up of books: Albert Camus’ The Plague. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera. David Wallace Wells’ The UnInhabitable Earth. The librarian has a sense of humour.

In the garden the cherry blossom comes and then the cherry blossom is gone. 

On a walk along the art trail we come to an open door on the edge of a field. In the middle of the 19th century the village of Groß Glien had 42 residents. Now all that remains of the village are the ruins of the church foundations a few steps from the work of art, enclosed in a tangle of brambles and young trees.

At the top of the Hagelberg, a five kilometre run from our house, I’m at the highest point in Brandenburg and the smallest Mittelgebirge in Germany. Or perhaps it is the second highest. It seems that there is a debate, involving places on the borders with other states and rumours of earth movers in the middle of the night in order to take the crown. No matter. It’s so peaceful on the hill it is hard to imagine this is the site of a bloody battle that, in 1813, took 3,000 lives. 

Outside the supermarket the asparagus stand is erected. Beelitz is not far away. They sell white and green asparagus, offcuts for soup and punnets of strawberries. A plastic screen stands between us and the friendly woman who weighs our purchases and takes our money through a small gap at the bottom of the barrier. 

On a run out from the village I see what I think might be wolf droppings, but there’s no internet connection on my phone to check so I take a photograph for later. The results of the research are inconclusive. 

We hear the sirens first. Then see the first engines passing by quickly on our road. Over the fence we hear our neighbour say that he should go down to the station and see what’s what. There’s barely been any rain for months, and the forests are dry as a bone. Twenty minutes later the engines return, slower now, as does our neighbour, ringing his bicycle bell as he turns into the drive.

The latest coronavirus information is posted outside the town hall. The number of new infections, of those who have died, useful telephone numbers and relaxations to contact restrictions. Other notices include planning permission for an extension to the supermarket, and on which days the military will be conducting live fire exercises in the restricted zone. 

In the remnants of the old GDR factory on the edge of the village, the police find two thousand cannabis plants in an old warehouse. Three men are arrested. 

Most mornings a red kite hovers over our garden and most mornings I wonder if it is possible that there is a more beautiful bird. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

On a midweek morning, in these strange and anxious days, I go for a walk. Sometimes it feels like all I can do. I cannot concentrate on the words I would like to read and write. My eyes ache for something other than the gentle glow of a backlit screen. The sun is shining and our pavements are wide. In Berlin it is springtime, our balcony full of the sound of bees delivered to a neighbour by mail order. I head out into the city.

My walk takes me south from where I live in Gesundbrunnen, crossing the route of the Berlin Wall into Mitte before following a familiar route through Rosenthaler Platz to Hackescher Markt and Museum Island. The first stretch feels reasonably normal (whatever that means right now), with kids on scooters, joggers and dog-walkers, and apartment dwellers escaping the inside for sunshine on a bench. Apart from the playgrounds being locked up, it feels like it always does.

Closer to the city centre, it is all a little more eerie. The hotels around Rosenthaler Platz are darkened. The pavements are empty. It is a reminder not only of current events, but in a strange way of the changes that took place over the past two decades in these neighbourhoods, ones that perhaps we did not notice while they were happening. Without the tourists, the hotel and hostel guests and the AirBnBers, the population is diminished. As I walk, I wonder how it would have looked on these streets had these contact restrictions and ban on tourist stays in the city happened twenty years before. 

In a recent essay for Literary Hub, the walker-writer Lauren Elkin explored the idea of what we remember when we walk the city, reflecting on the idea that “[w]e city-dwellers are recording devices, forever observing the micro-adjustments time works on our neighborhoods, noting what used to be where, making predictions about what will last and what won’t.” 

This is always true, I think – although sometimes we don’t notice as much as we should as the city changes around us – but as I walk through a Berlin that was stalled about a month ago and only just starting to move again, the question of what will last has become more urgent than ever before. Will these hotels ever reopen? The restaurants and bars, where chairs were lifted onto tables all those weeks ago and have not been down since? The clubs, where only ghosts dance, behind their heavy, locked doors?

And we think of the stories from the hospitals and care homes, we read the testimonies of the key workers and we see the numbers going up and up and we think not only of what will last but what we’ll have lost.  

We walk the city to remember. 

On Rosenthaler Straße I pass the place where we used to go drinking in the basement of a junkyard and the bar on the corner that never seemed to close. One is an adventure playground now, a place where my daughter spent afternoons during primary school. The other belongs to a hotel that was built on what was still an empty space when I first moved to Berlin. I walk down this street all the time, but usually I am going to or coming from somewhere, to meet my daughter from school or my partner after work. I don’t remember much then. But today I do.  

At Hackescher Markt I bump into a friend. We don’t hug and stand a distance apart as we talk about how everything is, at work and home. We ask about our respective partners, families and what our daughters make of it all. It feels like we are the only two people on this street, a place where normally crowds bottleneck at one of the few locations where Berlin actually feels like a proper city. We say goodbye without the normal gestures of farewell. We don’t say that we should try and meet up soon. That we should hang out sometime. It all feels awkward. Strange. 

Down by the river I watch as the sun catches tiny waves caused by the wind and realise that it is not only people who are mostly missing from the scene, but also the river boats. There are no cruises out on the water, no sightseeing to be done even though the weather is fine. The city by the river has a different sound now. Birds and distant traffic. The laughter of a little girl on her bicycle. What’s missing are the engines of the boats and the commentary in different languages that crackles through loudspeakers before drifting off on the breeze that blows in between the grand old museum buildings at the water’s edge.

My route home takes me close to where my partner and I first lived together and the playground by the tram tracks, as empty as on a freezing winter’s day. I walk along the route of the Berlin Wall, the no-man’s land emptier than I have ever seen it, apart from maybe the last time I was here during the anniversary celebrations, when it was blocked off to allow the safe arrival of politicians and other dignitaries, who did their own short stroll to remember, from the black car to the chapel.

There are not many here to remember today. Those people who are out and about are all moving. No-one lingers, to read the memorial boards or look at the photographs. At the corner of Bernauer Straße the bakery is open, and I pause on the pavement to let a young woman in a face mask, cup of coffee in each hand, cross in front of me. When we walk we make predictions of the future. Of what will last. No-one can say how long our city will be like this. What version of Berlin will emerge on the other side. We do not know how much loss and sadness we will have to deal with along the way. 

A few blocks from home, a small group of workmen are putting the finishing touches to a new bar that is currently not allowed to open. But still they paint the window frames and inside tables are being laid out and the first drinks have been added to the shelves behind the bar. The day that it opens will be some party, but we don’t know when that might possibly be. The only thing is certain, I think as I turn the last corner, is that the city that welcomes it will not be the same as it was before. 

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019).  

Memories of Elsewhere: The White Arch by Paul Scraton

In these times when many of us are staying very close to home, we have invited Elsewhere contributors to reflect on those places that we cannot reach and yet which occupy our minds… first up, our editor in chief Paul Scraton:

Above my desk, taped to the wall, are a series of photographs and postcards. There is an illustration of the Cow and Calf Rocks on Ilkley Moor, not far from my mother’s house. There are photographs from the Baltic coast, taken during the writing of Ghosts on the Shore. There is a picture of myself and my daughter Lotte, on the night train that was taking us from Paris to Berlin. And there is a small painting of a rugged coastline in Wales, waves breaking beneath a white arch and the faint outline of a rocky outcrop, swathed in clouds, in the distance. 

Like the books on my shelves, these postcards and pictures are triggers of memory. Of journeys taken and the places along the way. Some of them are places visited but once while others are more familiar, locations that have acted as stage sets for many moments at different times of our lives. They are places we return to physically and we return to in our imagination. We remember and, now more than ever, we look forward to when we will see them again.

The small painting of the Welsh coastline has at its heart Bwa Gwyn – the white arch of the Rhoscolyn headland. Since I was a child, the white arch has been a destination. It is not far, perhaps a forty-five minute walk from the house where my Uncle and Aunt live, depending on which route you take and how much time you spend exploring the coves and the beach along the way, or admiring the view from the coastguard lookout point from where, when the weather is right, it feels as if you can make out the walkers on the ridges of Snowdonia right across Anglesey on the Welsh mainland.

It’s a walk I’ve made so many times I cannot remember. But I can picture moments, still hear snippets of conversation; I can remember the first time I ever dared to walk the narrow path above the arch, the sea on either side of me as kayakers rocked and rolled in the swell, waiting their turn to pass beneath. This stretch of coastline, like all stretches of coastline, has its share of stories and legends, the mythology of Saints and the tragedies of the open water. They mingle with the personal stories, those we experienced and those we heard second hand, from family members and friends. The stories pile up on top of each other, adding texture to the place like the heather and gorse on either side of the worn footpath, soundtracked by the waves, the distinctive call of choughs by the cliff-edge and the whirring blades of a sea rescue helicopter. 

I look at the painting of the white arch above my desk, along with the postcards from Prague and Gdansk, the photographs of Rannoch Moor and the Baltic coast, and I think about what it is about certain places that means they remain with you even after you’ve left. It is, I think, about how they make you feel, from the people you meet or those who travel with you, the atmosphere of the cliff-top path, the wide city street or the narrow alleyway, and the stories you hear and the ones that you write for yourself. 

I look at the painting and I am walking again, out from the house and across the fields, around the headland and skirting the beach. Through the houses on the far side, the path rises up to the lookout point and from there I can see the mountains and the islands, the ferry leaving Holyhead and the route of our walk. Bwa Gwyn is not far away now. The path drops down and swings round. Past the place where we once saw the wild goats, clinging to the grassy slope. A little bit further and the white arch will appear before us. The sea is rough. The sea is calm. The white arch stands above it. The white arch is waiting. We’ll be there again. Soon.

***

Paul Scraton is the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His first book to be published in German (translation by Ulrike Kretschmer) is Am Rand, about a long walk around the edge of Berlin. It is out this month from Matthes & Seitz.