The Short Line

Der Bahnhof vom Stadtpark aus gesehen by Axel Mauruszat is licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE

By Alexander Daily:

In the southeast of Berlin’s inner ring there is a gentle ravine that stretches between the hearts of two of the city’s more bourgeoisie quarters. This depression, carved out by long gone glaciers, is of considerable length but not very wide. Its ground being too soft to build on, the decision was made at the turn of the last century to cultivate it into the People’s Park. Trees line the edges of the ravine and further seclude the sloping lawns and playgrounds nestled between them. A curious feature, for a park, is the Berlin subway station Rathaus Schöneberg. This teutonically neoclassical station is truly in the park. The tracks of the subway exit one side of the ravine and delve into the other, sheltered by the stone structure of the station, forming a bridge under which one cannot cross.

As a non-native transplant from the US, I first experienced this curious edifice running at night along a path that follows the curve of the ravine. I became aware of a long, squat cathedral with the gleaming windows of a glass palace. It seemed to mark the end of the valley and I could not guess its purpose. As I drew closer, behind the bright panes the unmistakable mustard-yellow form of a Berlin subway train rolled into view. I chose to continue my run, but I was excited at the prospect of experiencing the station from the inside.

This was a familiar pattern of my early time in Berlin, for there was much to see that divulges the unique character of the city, and making plans comes easy to lonely new arrivals. For a person with no business at or around the Rathaus, however, the chances of riding through the station are slim. The line that services it, the U4, is curiously short. The primary function of its 2.86km and five stations is to connect the quarter of Schöneberg to the wider Berlin network. The days passed, I traveled other routes; moved to a different part of the city. Schöneberg became the only word I had to go on, a clue that stymied me, as another station carries this name. Passing through the busier, almost homonymous station one day, I noticed it is nowhere near as nice from the inside, nor located in a park. Time continued to elapse, but this trip allowed me to eliminate one of two potential candidates from the subway map.

Having narrowed things down, I headed to Innsbrücker Platz, the southern terminus of the U4. Consistent with the diminutive nature of the line, the trains that service it are only ever composed of two cars and depart every twenty minutes. One waited at the platform, the color and length reminiscent of the school buses of my home country. I boarded, and a few minutes later the train lurched and stuttered out of the station. As we rolled into Rathaus Schöneberg I was able to finally experience, with a certain sense of triumph, the low-key sublimity of sitting simultaneously in a Berlin park while in the Berlin underground.

The many parks of Berlin are dependable places to find natural recuperation. It is an understated quality of this city that most every flat has some bit of communal green near it, or a subway station within reach to get there. In their number and variety, the parks of Berlin are also sources of great adventure and mystery. Each has its own quirks for connoisseurs to discover. A sunny day poses a hard question: stick with a reliable known quantity or venture to some new verdant expanse.

***

For the past decade, Alexander has been exploring the more curious corners of Berlin. In addition to trains and parks, the part he likes most about the city is stumbling upon something previously unknown to him.

Portraits of War: Yuriy Seredin

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the sixth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

Though in exile in Berlin since the start of the war, Yuriy Seredin is still in his position as a professor at the Lviv Conservatory. He's teaching remotely. The building itself - with its warm, storied rooms, flanked by pictures of, and played in by disparate figures such as Chopin's disciple Karol Mikuli and the pop star Rulana – sits empty, waiting to be filled with music again.

The carved figures of two muscled, loin-clothed men flank its name on the faded sky blue and pale mustard yellow coloured facade. A stone bandura, the 36 string instrument that stands as a potent symbol of Ukrainian musical nationalism, is below. 

It was Seredin's dad who introduced him to music, who showed him his first chords on a piano, and who realised the young man's perfect pitch when his age was still only just in double figures. He could pick out a melody without trying, there was something natural, an intrinsic musical sense about him. 

But that sense was honed by Eugen Filin, a teacher, pianist and prodigious composer, who'd previously studied and taught at the fabled Moscow Conservatory. Later, Seredin would go to boarding school for young musicians, but it was Filin who was the formative musical influence.

He talks about him with a certain awe, its as if he's in the park with us, off in the trees, listening in to the conversation, somehow. He taught the young man about Orlando Di Lasso and the Flemish school, about the history of polyphonic composition, and he gave him the courage to trust his own instincts. 

Seredin says that Filin changed his life. Though one is in Lviv and the other in Berlin, they're still in touch.

“He basically taught me how to improvise, not like in jazz, but how to play in different styles of classical music. And also he showed me how to play expressively on piano, like when you choose any two sounds and you can play them endless amounts of times, every time differently, emotionally. It's like psychokinesis... the human brain can do amazing things with that.”

It is as a jazz musician that Seredin is best known. His father had bought him a Louis Armstrong tape; it had the hits on it, 'Hello Dolly', that sort of thing, but then came another one, the greats of jazz piano with Fats Waller and Chick Corea and Dave Brubeck. Seredin then discovered Oscar Peterson and Erroll Garner, and, despite a time when he focussed purely on classical music, his fate was largely sealed. 

The first track on Yuriy Seredin's breakout, award winning 2018 album, 'Asylum Search', is called 'Krasne', after the village his Grandmother lived in. A little way east of Lviv, it's tiny and rural, nowadays dominated by the silos of the grain production plant, and cleaved in two by a railway. She was, he says, like a second mother to him, though he remembers the poverty that lead to him spending much of his childhood there. 

His memories drench the composition, and he describes the way they permeate his work.

"I live through this euphoric state when improvising; and at the same moment I am in real time, living through visions. It's like I'm fantasising, and playing that into the instrument... you know, living life through music"

The opening stabs of tenor and alto saxophone are rooted in the traditions of American hard bop – tonally it sounds like 'Eventually', the opening of Ornette Coleman's 1959 masterpiece 'The shape of Jazz to come' – but they are soon underpinned by Seredin's vast, swelling piano parts.

I had thought the record's underlying message was of unavoidable exile. It is called 'Asylum Search', after all – and it was recorded in Berlin, not Lviv or Kyiv - but he says not. He says it's more about the search for solace, for internal peace, a place to be.

"When I was recording this my father was about to die, and what I was playing in the studio was all about this. Thoughts and memories... it was a really personal record. Asylum Search is about looking for a place where you can feel an asylum for your soul, your home in the highest meaning, you know?"

But his search for asylum is no longer metaphorical, internal. He's sat in Berlin watching the war at home. It took a while to adjust, to train his focus, and he says that his relationship with his music has changed. He pours his energy into his piano when he's on stage, he calls it his thirst to express. 

But Berlin's not his home, no matter how he says he does like it. Even if the jazz scene is better than Kyiv's. Even if, as he says, the players are better and more numerous here. 

And he doesn't know how long he'll stay now. He says it depends, depends on the war, and on what's left when it's over. He'll still need to be able to play. He's resigned to being away for a while. 

“Time will tell”, he says.

Yuriy Seredin thinks a lot abut the composition process, and it dominates our conversation. Especially, I think, because it's so much harder to come up with much new material since the war began. 

“I'm still in this position where it's really hard to get into this euphoric state to compose, because all this background stuff is fucking it up”, he says. 

He's polite, and answers all my questions, no matter how stupid they may be. It's the first real day of sunshine Berlin has seen for months, and we are sat in the Tiergarten as birds around us regain their voices and schoolkids give continued exercise to theirs. Police in short sleeves drive lazily around the gravel paths looking for something to do, someone's day to interrupt. 

But there's a sullenness to Seredin, something looming over him, a weight bowing his back. We sit in the shade. He has a thin puffer jacket which he zips up halfway through our conversation. His skin is pale, his hair dark and thick. Though he's probably two metres tall, he reminds me a little of Andrea I Appiani's painting of Napoleon, somehow. His nose is inquisitive, it pokes out of his face, but he points it at the ground between his feet a lot.

His voice is low, and he talks of mental health issues he's faced before the war in his home country began. 

Seredin is happy about the path he now treads (though he's careful to say he's not proud, because pride stunts development), the one that winds between playing and composing and teaching a new generation of Ukrainian musicians at the conservatory. He felt let down by at least one of his professors when he studied there, who barely seemed to care about his charges and their musical development at all. It was as if he was just killing time, dining off his reputation.

He takes music seriously. This is more than being just about melody and arrangement. Shit, he says, he's hardly in it to get rich, and in this he probably has a point. 

But he also knows of music's inherent political power, as embodied by the contemporary recognition of the blind peasants who played the bandura, that strung instrument embossed in stone on the conservatory's front, wiped out under Stalin in the '30s. 

Or by the ideas of its founder, Mykola Lysenko, himself.

Lysenko, who died in 1912, was a composer whose life's work was dedicated to the pursuit of creating a purely Ukrainian canon. He wrote the music for the hymn, “Prayer for Ukraine” still played across the country today, and described as Ukraine's 'spiritual anthem'. There is a story about how Tchaikovsky wanted to stage one of his works in Moscow but the state wouldn't allow it to be sung in Ukrainian, and Lysenko refused to have it translated into Russian. 

So when Yuriy Seredin talks to me of a nascent new project, adding orchestral music to traditional Ukrainian folk songs, he is again following in Lysenko's footsteps. Lysenko published seven volumes of them in the 1800s. 

But there is something unsettling in the darkness Yuriy feels, at the destination his desperation has lead him towards as we talk. He is embittered by the war, and when we speak he is clearly being dragged through the mires of his emotions. It has made him, as he says, “at different moments, disappointed, desperate, sad, bitter and depressed” – justifiably so, of course - but he's closing himself off. 

"After last April I realised I needed to get rid of the influence of any Russian info-space. Because I was a big fan of Russian literature, of Russian music. Of course I speak Russian to some Russians here because they don't speak Ukrainian, and these are people who I know, that I'm quite sure about their okay position regarding the war. I understand from human point of view Russians, who are against war and suffer from hate. For that I pity them. But the thing with collective responsibility, I guess, also remains. But I'm trying to avoid... I stopped reading Russian books for sure, listening to their music. I just want to distance myself from that.”

We moved on after he said this. We talked about composition, about jazz and about Berlin, but I couldn't shift it from my mind. It drew me back again and again.

“I decided that I will never play with any Russians 'til the end of my life, it's just my civil position after what Russia did. It's like... I'm not... I know many people are against the Putin regime and I have friends there, but... like... at least what I'm thinking now, its my - how do you say - not to say my tribute to the victims - that's the wrong word - but in memory of the victims I don't ever want to play in any Russian band or one that contains Russian musicians. I think that's not right.”

Aside from the obvious tragedies of this war it strikes me that this is one of its most pernicious and devastating, and long-ranging effects. The closing off of cultural exchanges, doors slamming shut on other worlds. And I suppose I really just hope at some point he will be able to change his mind.

***

Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

A time of hopeful anticipation

By Ruth Bradshaw:

The park is deserted at this hour, the café closed and the playground empty. The dog walkers and joggers are still sleeping. It is that time after the coldest, darkest part of the night has passed but before the sun has risen. A faint glimmer appears on the horizon and my nervousness at being out alone in the unpeopled early morning is gradually replaced by a sense of anticipation. The darkness will soon be gone. Dawn is here and the sunrise I’ve come to see will not be far behind it.

The only sign of human life is the faint sound of distant traffic and even that recedes when I reach the top of the hill where there is more tree cover. Here it is tranquil but still far from silent. The birds make this space their own with a rush of notes that feels more of a competition than a chorus and, as the light slowly increases, they grow louder still. It is impossible for my inexpert ear to distinguish most of the individual voices, but I recognise blackbirds and robins and hear the occasional cawing of crows accompanied by the shaken cloth sound of their wings flapping. I can only guess at the rest, but I decide that today it matters not what all these birds are, only that there are so many of them singing. 

As it grows bright enough for me to make out traces of the hilly fields and meadows which the park replaced, it is not difficult to imagine that a line of taller trees could mark an ancient boundary. I walk over and lean back against the nearest of these with my eyes closed. It is a mature lime tree, its bark ridged and furrowed with age and experience. The sound of the wind in its leaves is so like gentle rainfall on dry ground that when I open my eyes, I expect to see a soft rain falling.

At this time of half-light, half-night, nothing is quite as it first appears, and the past feels closer. It is the time before this landscape was farmland that I can sense most strongly. In the twilight it is possible to replace the parkland limes and chestnuts with the woods of coppiced oak and hornbeam that covered this part of London for centuries. I think of the sights, sounds and smells of that woodland - the calls of turtle doves and cuckoos, the rich scent of wild garlic, the orchids and helleborines growing among a multitude of other plants - all long since lost to this place.

If I were a visitor in one of those earlier centuries, it would have to be necessity rather than curiosity that brought me here at this hour, something that made me desperate enough to risk the dangers of the woods at night. For even after the wolves, bears and lynx were gone, there was still the threat of robbery or worse. Perhaps I am here to search frantically for firewood to heat food for an ailing relative? Or maybe it’s to find the herbs I need to cure that relative using a knowledge of plants taught me by my mother just as she learnt it from hers. I’m sure I would know that when I find the right plants, I should take only as much as is needed so plenty are left to grow for future use. But would I stop for a moment to appreciate the wildflowers and birdsong on this fine Spring morning? Or would this experience be so commonplace and my fear so great that I would hurry home without paying them any attention? 

The high-pitched screech of a ring-necked parakeet returns me to the 21st century. I am thankful that my survival is no longer dependent on what I can gather from the woods. But I am sad too that I do not have the knowledge needed to do this anyway and sadder still that I will probably never experience a springtime woodland with quite such a variety of sound and beauty as that earlier visitor. My greatest sadness is that I live in a time and a society whose untamed desires have so changed the world, that the future of many species, including my own, is now uncertain. Even now we understand the damage we are doing to the world we don’t seem to be capable of taking only what we need. We must always have more. 

As the light grows, I think of what the future holds for this area. This is not as easy as picturing its past. Not because I cannot guess the impacts of the storms and droughts that already arrive with increasing frequency but because it is too painful to contemplate the uprooted trees and withered plants they will leave in their wake. I know I cannot ignore those threats but, as a new day starts, I focus instead on how green and vibrant the horse chestnut leaves look when backlit by the rising sun. 

***

Ruth Bradshaw works in environmental policy and has been a regular conservation volunteer for over a decade. She is currently writing a book about the value of urban wildlife which draws on both her professional expertise and her volunteering experiences. Her essay ‘Stories of Co-existence’ was recently shortlisted for the Future Places Prize and her creative non-fiction has also been published in a variety of websites and journals including Canary LitMag, The Clearing and The Selkie. When not writing or working, she can often be found in the woods near her home in South London and occasionally on twitter @ruthc_b

Book extract: For the Safety of All – A Story of Scotland's Lighthouses

Butt of Lewis Lighthouse, Na h-Eileanan Siar 

The view from the Butt – the gleam from the lighthouse once cast its glow on the crofthouses and croftland, moorland and machair, sand and shore from its stance on Rubha Robhanais, illuminating the waves of lazy beds as well as those found on the surface of the sea.

We are extremely pleased to be publishing this extract from For the Safety of All: A Story of Scotland’s Lighthouses. In this new book, Donald S Murray explores Scotland’s lighthouses through history, storytelling and the voices of the lighthouse keepers.

By Donald S Murray

Frequently, during my childhood and teenage years in Ness, on the northern tip of the Isle of Lewis, there were reminders of the depth of darkness that existed for centuries around the coastline of this country. 

At night or early evening, a storm might rattle windows, a gust of wind puff above chimney tops. The lights across the house would falter and flicker before disappearing. After that, there would be a scramble for matches and candles, a torch if there was one to be found. A Tilley lamp would be lit, taking a moment or two to ignite and burn before its warm glow added intricacies of light and shade to a room which seconds earlier had been illuminated only by the flame of a peat fire. It was as if we had stepped back in history, into the period before electricity had come to our homes, the ages swirling into reverse for a moment or two. 

And that change was most apparent when we peered out of the window at the rest of the village and the broad stretch of the moor. Apart from the spin and eddy of the Butt of Lewis lighthouse, the stillness of the red light above the Decca Station and the rare sweep of a set of car headlights, all was in darkness. We could imagine the householders performing the same rituals we did – scuttling through the kitchen cabinet or chest of drawers for matches, looking in the understairs cupboard among sheets and blankets for the lamp – before they restored muted light to their homes. This was what might have been seen in these houses if a passer-by had peeked in. The faint glimmer of firelight. The subdued flame of a Tilley lamp. Or perhaps even more dim and pale than any of these lanterns – a wick dipped in the oil of a seabird, seal or whale. An unsteady flicker casting more shade than light into the room. 

The scale of this darkness was one of the factors that made travel around the British Isles difficult for centuries. Difficult enough on land, this was especially the case when boats were the main mode of transport. Until the expansion of road and rail, after all, the seas and waterways were Scotland’s main highways. The seasons intensified travel problems, especially during late autumn and winter. In many ways, the sailors and travellers of these early times lived the opposite kind of lives to the modern city dweller. The latter’s constant use of electric light, whether found in the streets they walk and drive through or within their homes, prevents them seeing the moon and stars above their heads. For those who made journeys either on shore or at sea in the past, there were sometimes contrary issues. The need to observe and navigate by the stars made them focus overhead, leading – occasionally – to failure to see the rocks and skerries that loomed out of the ocean, the unpredictable nature of both depths and shoreline. 

And then there was the unreliable character of light before the arrival of the lighthouse to these shores, a process that began in earnest around the commencement of the nineteenth century. Sometimes, when a storm buffeted their boat, the glow of fire on the coastline meant safety and security for sailors, a harbour where a vessel could be tied up and fastened until that night’s tempest passed. However, there were occasions when their need for shelter and protection made mariners too easily deceived. Allegedly wreckers on the coastline of these islands took advantage of their desperation, ushering them to a shore where the consignment of goods aboard would be plundered, their lives lost. Fires would be lit, and signals flashed, but their boats were ushered only in the direction of danger. Over the course of the nineteenth century and later, the Stevenson family and the Northern Lighthouse Board put an end to these practices. Their lighthouses were charted and mapped. If anything flickered elsewhere, as it sometimes had in the past, it would most likely be a trick or a ruse, a deadly trap. 

There were other hazards in the northern edge of the world in summer. During this season, those of us who live in places like the north of Scotland have the sun as an almost constant companion. Its presence, in some shape or form, rarely leaves the sky, creating a continual twilight, blurring at most to a shade of ochre in the sky. The persistent lack of rhythm of light and dark has its effect on people, making some edgy and ill-at-ease. Insomnia abounds: attention wanders. Storm-clouds and dangers on the horizon can fail to be seen. Mist, particularly on Scotland’s east coast, prone to haar, can obscure and conceal the risks ahead. 

It was this – their awareness of the constant threat of terrors posed by both human actions and seaborne life – that made men begin to build lighthouses, a way of making the existence of both ship and crew more secure and safe. 

***

Donald S Murray grew up under the gleam of Butt of Lewis lighthouse, and lighthouses have remained a continual presence in his life. He is the author of non-fiction, fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Scotland’s islands.  His books include the acclaimed As the Women Lay Dreaming, In a Veil of Mist, The Dark Stuff: Stories from the Peatlands and The Guga Hunters.

For the Safety of All is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland.

Portraits of War: Tahir

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fourth in a series of portraits from our home city, of Berliners affected by the war in Ukraine. You can see all the portraits as we publish them here.

By Jacob Sweetman:

When we speak, a few days after Filippo Grandi, the head of the UNHCR, released a statement,  confirming that “the ugly reality, that some Black and Brown people fleeing Ukraine – and other wars and conflicts around the world – have not received the same treatment as Ukrainian refugees”, Tahir Della is just off the phone to the Polish / Ukrainian border. 

And though he is in good spirits, and flashes a brilliant, American toothed smile, his frustration still shines through. 

Della says from his office in Kreuzberg that people on the ground are just “sick and tired of it now”. He says that there's no support, nor the political will to help people of colour in their time of need, as they try to flee from the Russian invasion. Or for the sleepless volunteers trying to help them. 

They are sick and tired of still having to fight for something so basic, so fundamental. Sick and tired that a moment of solidarity across Europe in support of a people enduring the most terrifying and barbaric of situations, is still mired in the same old bullshit of different classifications being made for different people of different skin colours. 

Such as the free train tickets offered to refugees. As long as they are European.

He knows all too well that, with grim inevitability, racism will always rear its malignant head in the worst of times, too. 

Della and I talk about the Humboldt Forum, the grotesque reimagining of the Prussian Stadtschloss, filled with the fruits of colonialism. In there is a new exhibition, dedicated to Berlin, patting itself on the back for being modern and cool, daubed with “urban art”, which greets its visitors with a statement about how change in the world could be brought about 'holistically', when it ignores the fact that the system itself is at fault. 

The system that put the exhibition together, that rebuilt the palace, the system that put a tiny piece in the corner about the German genocide in Namibia. 

Though we can't call it that at all. 

“It was horrible, everybody accepts that. It was wrong, against humanity...” he says. “But it wasn't a genocide. Because if it's a genocide you have to take care, responsibility. At least, you apologise for it, and you say, okay, what do the people or the country who have been impacted want from us?”

It's like he's in Catch 22.

“We have accepted for a long time that this happened, but we don't want to be responsible for it. We can do things, make announcements, we can sign petitions, just so we don't have to look at ourselves.”

But we come back to Ukraine again and again. It's an extension of the same fight he's been fighting for years. 

Della says that he understands the closer proximity of Ukraine to Germany is a factor. He is German, he was born in Munich, of course he understands. So he's sick and tired, too, that the capacity of Europe to help refugees can be so malleable all of a sudden, when it was previously too stretched to help pluck children out of the Mediterranean to save them from drowning. 

It goes on and on. He doesn't want less help for Ukrainians, it's not a game, he knows how many have died, how many are terrified for their lives there. He just wants the same amount of help for everyone. He's just had two Senegalese staying in his small flat, having come to Berlin before they can to France. Della speaks no French, and they no German, but it worked out okay, he says. They understood each other pretty well.

When Tahir Della was young his American Grandfather told him a story about his own uncle in Louisiana. 

“He was a carpenter for a white company and he was waiting for almost two months to get paid. And when the money still didn't come he went to Baton Rouge to find out what was happening... and he never came back.”

He repeats himself, for even now the story is so tragic, its conclusion so callous, it doesn't make sense.

“He never came back.”

“Nobody knows still today what happened to him...  and the thing that was really moving... or...” He pauses again, for there are really no words fitting to the feelings this brought up in the young Della, in either the English or German languages that he flits between with such a lightness of tongue.

“...there was no structure back then where black people could go and say 'we are missing somebody from our family'. There was no legal body who could go and investigate when somebody is just gone. And that's not even a  hundred years ago, that was in the 40's of the last century.”

It wasn't the only story like that his Grandfather had. But that's why the older man was so proud when Della took his somehow inevitable place - with a spit-bucket and a gumshield and a towel in his hand, and a courageous streak a mile wide within him - in the corner of all the people of colour in his country. 

Now, in his 60's, Della is still there in that corner. 

He was on the board of the Initiative for Black People in Germany (ISD) til 2019 and is their spokesman. He's fought against the continuing riches reaped from colonialism, against double standards and hypocrisy, and against the racism inherent within the system itself, for more than half his life. 

He joined the ISD in the eighties, a group of advocates and activists founded by the likes of the poet, writer and academic, May Ayim, of whose 'daily deflowahin a di spirit,' and
'evryday erowshan a di soul' the great dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson wrote in his paean, 'Reggae Fi May Ayim'.

And now if you walk along the southern bank of the Spree - once the industrial heart of Berlin, crammed with warehouses and factories until it was bombed to the ground, which would then become transformed as clubs like Dimitri Hegemann's UFO sprung up just around the corner, playing techno, black music from Detroit - Underground Resistance, lest we forget! – you will now see Ayim's name, having replaced that of the original Gröbenufer. 

Della says he knew Ayim for years. They were about the same age, they fought the same battles, but drifted apart as she withdrew into herself before her tragic death in 1996. But her role in the organisation was  never forgotten, her soul never completely eroded even if her spirit grew deflowered. Della played a large role in the renaming of the river bank in her honour and he remembers fondly the day they could finally celebrate her immortalisation. 

There were speeches and there was music and the sun was bright in the sky.

“It was a beautiful event,” he says, his sentence dripping with understatement.

He's not one to talk himself or his own efforts up. But the following lines from 'Reggae Fi May Ayim' - 'Tru all di learnin, Di teachin, Rizistin, An assistin, Di lovin, Di givin, Organizin, An difyin' - could have been written about him, too.

He's been doing all of these things since this war began, too. In the face of what he sees as mainstream apathy at best, of ignorance and intentional silence at worst. It's pretty simple, really. 

Ever since his Grandfather told him that story about his murdered uncle, he felt he had little other choice.

Della has worked in theatres, he's driven a cab. Anything, really, he says, to pay the  bills while he concentrates on the bigger things. But mostly he worked as a photographer. It was commercial stuff, he'd shoot for adverts, and he's quick to say  that he has never considered himself an artist, that his view of the world is that of a political activist. But the two  things almost certainly inform each other. He has to be able to view things with a certain detachment. 

He has to be able to let neither his righteous anger nor his natural romanticism get in the way of his vision. He has to be able to explain soberly what he sees, so we can understand it better.

“We have a very small, narrowed narrow view on what racism is,” he says. “For many, racism is skinheads, Nazis, you know...” 

He says that we think it is only about intent, but that this is an act of self-delusion. 

“This is the same for the institutions. The police, they say they cant be racist because they are working according to the Grundgesetz. As many people say 'okay, you know, I have black friends though, how can I be racist?' Or, 'I  live in Neukölln, you know...'

“This is really a problem, because as long as you can't identify or accept that there is a problem with racism, you are not coming to a point where you can deal with it. We have to listen to those who complain, who say they are afflicted by it on a daily basis.”

And now he is facing this new fight, a continuation of all the others that came before, certainly, but complicated by the fact that, though there are organisations similar to ISD in Poland and Ukraine, they are far less established, less significant, less well funded.

And let's be frank; Tahir Della is far from optimistic when it comes to the chances of Olaf Scholz's new government addressing the institutional racism that is affecting tens of thousands of people of colour fleeing the horrors of the war in Ukraine.

He laughs when I ask, spontaneous, loud and true. He makes it seem like such a stupid question. 

It won't stop him trying to do what he can though.

“From the first day on after the beginning of the war it became clear that there was a big problem. I never had thought - honestly, I really didn't expect this. Because we didn't know. We are speaking of 70,000 people. 70,000 people of colour who don't dare to think 'what will happen with us?' 

But even now, knowing everything he knows, everything he's learned in the face of this brutality and of the innocent people caught up in it, he still seems shocked.

“That,” he says, “I didn't expect that on such a scale.”

***
Jacob Sweetman is a writer and sports journalist, at home in Berlin. His work has appeared in 11Freunde, The Guardian, The Berliner Zeitung, Wisden amongst others. His writing about 1.FC Union Berlin can be mostly found here and he has a website here

Emily Sweetman is an illustrator, at home in Berlin. She is a genius, and her work can be seen here

Outer space in Währinger Strasse

By Pippa Goldschmidt:

It was a weekend of dissonances. I’d gone to Vienna to talk about outer space at a symposium held in an arts centre called WUK; a complex of dilapidated brick buildings which started life in 1855 as a railway locomotive factory. This soot-stained evidence of Vienna’s industrial past contrasted sharply with the fancy Baroque palaces for which the city is famous, their gold-and-white decoration gleaming in the early March sunshine.

Amongst the topics for discussion at the symposium was the Outer Space Treaty, a utopian attempt by the United Nations in 1967 to declare that no nation state can stake a claim to any object in ‘outer space’ – wherever that may be exactly, the treaty avoids having to define its location. But in the decades that have passed since it was originally drafted and ratified, many companies have decided they want to stake a claim to objects in outer space, such as asteroids, in order to mine them for metals which are rare on Earth. The symposium agreed that outer space should be accessible to all, and not colonised for the purposes of making rich people even richer and we shared a hope that the future of space exploration might be profoundly different from its past; more egalitarian, less connected to military and imperial aspirations.

The symposium had an online audience, perhaps connected to us by those invisible satellites we were discussing, and I was constantly distracted by my image on a screen just off to one side of me. As I read out part of a short story, so did my on-screen doppelgänger, but she was always half a sentence behind me. When I finished, I watched her mouth move silently before she too stopped and we regarded each other.

The speakers at the symposium discussed the origins of satellites and rockets in metal that has to be dug out of the earth, and described how workers in some of these mines have gone on strike over the dangerous conditions and environmental damage. This juxtaposition between shiny rockets soaring apparently effortlessly into the sky and people working underground was mirrored by the half-imaginary entity of outer space – a legal no-place far above us – contrasting sharply with the post-industrial spaces of WUK and its rusting iron pipes.

Once the capital of a vast empire, Vienna now feels like a city out of time, not quite sure how it can fit into the 21st century other than presenting itself as a theme park with endless statues of emperors and empresses, with the percussive clip-clop of horse-drawn carriages taking the tourists for rides around the Ring, and where these tourists (after their carriage rides) can queue outside traditional cafés to eat Sachertorte or Kaiserschmarrn. Cafés where everything, even the strong and bitter coffee, is covered with a thick layer of whipped cream.

But there is yet more juxtaposition for me personally, and on much smaller scales. WUK is situated in Währinger Strasse, a long street that juts like the spoke of a bicycle wheel out of the city centre towards the woods in the north-west. I had heard of this street before I came here because it is where my grandmother was born and grew up. She left in 1938, one of the few Jewish adults able to get a visa to enter Britain, possibly because she was young and could speak English. Her parents, who had no savings, and were neither young enough to work nor able to speak English, were left behind in Vienna. She never saw them again.

So for me, Währinger Strasse is not a place associated with nostalgia or coffee served with Schlagsahne. When I was young, my grandmother repeatedly told me to visit Vienna, to see the imperial art collections and the architecture; the magnificent churches with shining domes and steep patterned roofs, as well as the Modernist Secession building and the Bauhaus-influenced house designed by  Wittgenstein for his sister. She did not tell me to go to Währinger Strasse and see the apartment block where she spent her childhood, and from where her parents were evicted in 1939 before they were forced into an overcrowded ghetto in the city centre. There her father died, and her mother was deported east.

My grandmother didn’t tell me to go there because she never talked about this part of the family history, but she had written down the address and so I went there anyway.

There was nothing to see, of course. There never is anything to see at these places, their very anonymity heightens the horror. If it could happen here at this four storey apartment block on a bend in the road and with a tramline running past the front door, it could – and did – happen anywhere. I stood and watched the building from the other side of the road, perhaps wanting to see a sign of life. But nobody inside gave me any such sign, the windows remained blank and dark, and so I left.

I returned to my hotel near the busy shopping street Mariahilfer Strasse, and just across the road from the Westbahnhof, the station from where my grandmother would have caught that train in 1938. There is a memorial in this station to the Jewish children who escaped Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1939. But it says nothing about the adults who also escaped. Given how large it was, the destroyed Jewish community of Vienna has remarkably few memorials, the city apparently prefers to dwell on more distant events. And perhaps I do too, after all my main reason for coming here was to talk about outer space, rather than be confronted with what happened to my grandmother and great-grandparents. But the buildings dragged me back down to earth.

When I left Vienna to return home I caught a train from the Hauptbahnhof, which was crowded with refugees from Ukraine. Hundreds of people waited on the main concourse to travel further west; exhausted women, children, old people and pets were all being given food by volunteers. My train, advertised as nearly empty when I booked my ticket at the beginning of February, was now full. I sat next to a teenage girl who slept almost the entire six hour journey to Frankfurt, her pet rabbit in a travel carrier at her feet. I thought of my grandmother and great-grandparents, and cried.

***

Pippa Goldschmidt lives in Frankfurt and Edinburgh. She’s the author of the novel The Falling Sky and the short story collection The Need for Better Regulation of Outer Space (both published by Freight Books), and most recently she’s co-editor (with Drs Gill Haddow and Fadhila Mazanderani) of Uncanny Bodies (Luna Press) an anthology of work inspired by Freud’s uncanny as it reveals itself in the human body, the forest and the city. She’s recently completed a memoir/family history The German Lesson about what it feels like to ‘return’ to Frankfurt, the city her grandfather fled in 1938.

Website: www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

Photo Essay: Fancy Hill, by Rob McDonald

by Rob McDonald:

Though I have lived here thirty years, I have never felt settled in Southwest Virginia. It’s a dramatically beautiful place, the Shenandoah Valley of the Blue Ridge Mountains, but my home, where my sensibilities were formed, will always be the sandy coastal plains of South Carolina. Winding roads and deep-green hollows may appear picturesque in some light, but for someone like me, they mostly feel claustrophobic, isolating, unsettling. Whenever my wife, driving to the store in our first months living here, would round a curve and mistake a distant mountain range for a looming storm, I understood.

There’s one spot nearby that has always felt different, however. I noticed it when I visited for the job interview that brought me to the area in 1992, and I have indulged something close to an obsession with it ever since.  Fancy Hill, as it is known, is listed on the Register of Historic Places because of its inclusion in a group of important 19th-century farms known collectively the “Seven Hills of Rockbridge County.” A roadside marker noting its prominence focuses on the main house, a three-story treasure of 18th-century Federal architecture. But what I love is the field: a 21-acre parcel that rolls beautifully down from the house, then up and off toward a high horizon.

Records suggest the topography is virtually unchanged from when Fancy Hill was claimed, mapped, and cleared by Anglo settlers of the region more than two hundred years ago. In this otherwise craggy valley, it’s an especially open and stirring expanse.  From various points outside the post-and-wire boundary fence, the entire landscape is visible, swelling, stretching and dipping, displaying itself. It undulates, almost musically. I have studied it in different seasons and times of day. I believe I could sketch its contours with my eyes closed.  

One day, I looked up the name of the farm’s current owner and called to explain that I wanted to walk out into the field with my camera, to explore a place I’d thought about and imagined for so long. He was receptive, even understanding. He’d inherited the land and decided to protect it with a conservation easement so, unlike adjacent farms of similar beauty that have been subdivided into mini-estates for the new country gentry, it can never be developed. The whole parcel was leased for hay-making, keeping it arable, but I had permission to come and go as I wished.

With that opening, I spent whole mornings and afternoons traipsing up, down, and across Fancy Hill, making photographs in an attempt to represent the experience.  In the process, I learned some things that had been imperceptible from the periphery.

I found very quickly, for example, that the lay of the land at Fancy Hill is neither as gentle nor as comprehensible as it appears. There are demanding grades and dramatic drops. You walk a distance and grow breathless. There are spots where the rest of the world disappears and you’re upright in a cradle of earth, with only the sky for orientation.  

Also, the ground is surprisingly rocky, sheer stone in spots. The vegetation, a uniform and mesmerizing seasonal green or gold from the fence line, is often a frustrating tangle of grasses, weeds, and briars underfoot.  Walking unsettles all manner of flying, hopping, and crawling creatures, some seen, some heard and reasonably surmised. Droppings and tracks suggest regular visitors to a stream that originates in a cinderblock well-house, runs a bit, then disappears.

Another note:  There’s a stand of trees along the high north boundary that I’d not taken into account in all my years of looking from the fence. My eye had always stopped where the grasses end, but right there stands a broad thicket with impressive oaks that must have been seedlings when Fancy Hill was established.  

I discovered that the finest view of the property is under that tree line. Each peak and trough of the landscape is visible, where it originates and how it plays out.  Mirroring the view from below, the wide field appears to flow outward and down toward the enormous main house, which from that spot looks for all the world like a miniature version of itself.

The perspective is clarifying, like the view from a watch tower.

Fancy Hill, it turns out, is most beautiful in context of this whole place, encircled, defined, and clarified by a dark line running in the distance—not a storm, but the ancient rambling range of the Blue Ridge.

***

Rob McDonald is a native of South Carolina and lived in both Tennessee and Texas before moving to Virginia in 1992. He was awarded a Professional Fellowship (Photography) from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2019-2020 and was a residential fellow in the Visual Arts at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in 2013. Find him online at robmcdonaldphotography.com. Connect with him on Twitter at @RobMcDonaldVA.

Border Crossing

By Martin Ransley:

Often, on Sunday mornings, I’m usually the first to duck beneath the colonnade arch, ascend the steep steps - making the transition from the land of the living to the land of the dead. As if the steps, and hill, the cemetery is built on help those, who believe in such things, that they are already on their way to heaven. Almost all visitors to Highgate Cemetery do exactly same, because the gothic arch at the entrance, linking the two chapels, gently guides visitors directly toward Bunning’s simply designed arch; treading a path mourners have respectfully trod since 1839. 

Once the transition is accomplished, visitors struggle to orientate themselves, as their senses become overwhelmed by the sight, sound, scent, and sheer beauty of the place. Change is sensed immediately; the air cools, light darkens, and from early March there is a scent of wild garlic – not as defence against vampires - there are none at Highgate, but because the ground offers perfect growing conditions, where it thrives in abundance, until its delicate, white flowers begin to fade in late May. Then, surprisingly, there are sounds of life heard among the trees and undergrowth. A blackbird, almost always first to break the dawn with its wistful, melancholic call; then a robin calls out with sweet, cheery short bursts of song. The bittersweet notes of native birds are often rudely interrupted by the squawking of parakeets, which some say, despite beautiful colouring, lower the tone somewhat, and threaten the inherent harmony of place. 

Then there are the stones looming out of the undergrowth: granite, slate, sandstone, marble; occasionally wooden markers in the shape of a cross - sometimes a shrub marks a grave, which flower annually and takes on a significance of its own. These markers signify something – a meaning - a language uniquely theirs. Highgate cemetery is a curious place, and a place for the curious, who, when they enter, embark on a journey, a quest to find answers - each stone, every marker begs a question, who am I, what did I do, am I remembered? That is the purpose of being here – an abiding memorial to remind relatives, friends and visitors of their status, and to pray for them in perpetuity, until an angel, perched above a grave, reaches for her horn and blows. 

Few do, though. Initially a grave is marked with a wooden cross, and remains in place for six months, sometimes a year; allowing the ground to settle before a permanent memorial is erected to commemorate the terminus of the corpse below. That is what the grave is, a terminus, generally understood as an endpoint, and for Victorian believers, signified a final border-crossing– or a first step on the stairway to heaven.  Twenty percent of wooden crosses, though, remain the only indication a burial has taken place. Visits become infrequent and then cease. Perhaps, relatives are reluctant to return to graveside and reawaken recent sorrows, or, maybe, the cost of a stone memorial is no longer justifiable for those faced with an acceleration in the cost of living in this world. Then again, once grief subsides, maybe remembrance occurs in the imagination, and the grave loses its function for contemplation of loss and silent reflection. Memories of the dead emerge randomly while taking the children to school, putting the rubbish out, or maybe not at all, and memories drift - forgotten – lost to history. It is reckoned after fifteen years, no relative or friend visit the stones, leaving them for the curiosity of visitors; those curious of knowing more. 

Suddenly there are splashes of colour - red, yellow, green. A bouquet left on a stone, in fact two, in different sections of the cemetery – graves from a time which no longer exists! No card attached with a fond message or signature. Anonymous. Whoever left them, the living certainly doesn’t need to know who was responsible for floral tributes reaching out through time. More questions for the curious – who, why? Surely not a token of grief – can grief be passed down through generations? 

One possibility is whoever found the stone, had been searching for ancestors, curious about those who had preceded them, and found a name – a continuity with the past linking them – an affirmation of identity, and the laying of flowers, heralds a prodigal return, albeit momentarily, paying a final tribute to an ancestor, a last hurrah of remembrance, one final trump. And what was lost, is now found, and their descendants might tell others what they did and how it was done. Maybe, a reaction will be set in motion – perhaps others will become curious and embark on a search for those who have gone before them and leave flowers in celebration of shared identity and a past, or perhaps not.

***

Martin completed a BA in English Literature at Birkbeck College in 2019 and is a former teacher. He lives in North London and swims, each morning, at a local lido during the winter months. Once spring arrives, he migrates to the ponds on Hampstead Heath. While cycling there, swimming, and then returning, ideas for writing form, which he writes down on his return. Border Crossing is the result of the method, such as it is! He is a guide at Highgate Cemetery.