Portraits of War: Emmanuelle

Illustration by Emily Sweetman

This is the fifth 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:

Emmanuelle Chaze says she'll never forget the night of the 24th of February when she got the call from French national radio.

'Be ready,' they said. 'It has happened'. 

She'd been at the Munich security conference the week before, she'd heard both the platitudes and the pleas for help. Chaze already knew the invasion of Ukraine was a fait accompli, but still.

“My immediate thought,” she tells me, “was about the people that would be displaced.”

People say to her all the time that because of her years of study into the lives of the Huguenots - persecuted and driven out of Catholic France to scatter themselves across Europe, putting down roots that persist to this day – it makes sense that Chaze spends her professional career reporting on migration, on refugees, on the human stories of degradation and fear that take place at international borders during all too unexceptional times. 

Chaze catalogues those spaces where war spreads out its wings, the hinterlands of our most invidious, inhuman actions. Though she says any link to her academic past is coincidental.

She grew up in France, but close to Germany. She speaks several languages and is learning more. They come easily to her, as if disregarding the lines drawn on maps supposed to keep us all apart. And maybe it is just another coincidence, but she does go on to say that, actually, 

“I don't really think anything happens just by chance.”

She says all this in the cafe in the swollen, gilded belly of Dussmann's Kulturhaus, as officious waiters fuss around inadequately sized tables and the goldfish swim placidly in the blue tiled pond behind us. We are at the heart of the Friedrichstadt, part of Berlin founded by the Huguenots. 

We are also only a stone's throw from the Tränenpalast, the former crossing point between what were once called East and West Berlin.

Coincidence or not, there is at least a certain synchronicity here. 

Last year, Emmanuelle Chaze stepped on board a boat for the first time in her life to set sail into the Mediterranean for seven weeks to report on the crew's desperate efforts at rescuing refugees cast out to sea. She faced tragedy on that boat, as she also saw occasional moments of the best of humanity. She got to know kids, eight, nine year olds, pulled from the sea; they played with her camera, they smiled into its lens.

So she was ready, mentally, to go to the Polish / Ukrainian border when the call came on the 24th.

But she took a few days to prepare before heading for Hrebenne. She needed time to find out what was really going on. She needed to make sure she had security, sorting out the practicalities, like a hotel far enough away so she didn't use up nearer rooms necessary for refugees or volunteers. But she was still one of the first there, early enough to witness everything falling into place, seeing the evolution of the border town as the crisis developed

The first report she made was before she'd even reached the checkpoint. Her fixer (though she says she hates the term) thought she was mad.

She had five minutes until she was live, the feed already running in her ears. She simply put up her tripod and started narrating the scene; a usually busy motorway almost empty; a few parked buses in the distance at the Ukrainian border; the bitter cold, it was minus 15; the people who had made it this far with bowed backs, sunken faces and lowered heads, looking, as she said on live TV, completely exhausted.

She says that she's not seen anything like it before, it was like a film. It was eerie, frightening.

“People were coming one after the other, and they were looking at their phones for directions, like you would in a city when you're a tourist. But they all looked like they hadn't slept for days. And I know those people, because I've been on other borders...”

She's told the stories of people in Calais and Lesbos, too, places at the very edges of other conflicts.

“...And seeing them there in that otherwise fairytale like scenery is strange. Western Poland is really pretty,” she says, trying her best to describe images so discordant that they only really made sense as she slowly talked us through them.

She didn't do any interviews with refugees to camera at all that day. She couldn't do it to the people coming across. There's a time and a place, she says, even if it would have made better news. So she worked, she tried to keep warm. She tried to keep her equipment functioning. 

Talking about the seven weeks on the boat - an experience that she says changed her life forever - she mentions the camaraderie of the crew. They were professionals, honest and blunt, as they have to be, because they have to trust each other, their lives depend on it, even if they can't always get along. And she talks similarly of bonds between fellow journalists whose silent understanding is forged through a common experience most of us could never comprehend.

That of a border during wartime.

After coming back from Hrebenne she spent a few days back at home in Berlin, before heading back, this time to Medyca. She wasn't alone. All sorts of people are drawn to these weird, tragic places.

There are, at first, local, then national then international TV channels, elbows out, vying for position. Different newsrooms wanting different stories for different audiences. There are volunteers, well wishers, fixers, locals too. 

There are thrill seekers and amateurs trying to make their names with footage who the serious journalists won't mix with because they are unprofessional and take risks that no-one should, and who the serious newsrooms won't touch any more, not with a bargepole. 

Then there are the profusion of well-meaning incompetents, bogged down in the mires of their own bureaucracy. NGOs like the UNHCR who had to apologise for being late to Medyca, but whose gazebos sprung up like mushrooms after the last frost, that will stay there for months now, years maybe, as the border situation becomes normalised like so many others around the world.

Then there are the refugees themselves, different movements of different people, arriving in stages, sometimes according to status, sometimes to chance, and at others to the realities of the war itself. 

She talks about the first groups often to arrive. In some ways they are the lucky ones. 

“So at first there is the relief, 'we are safe'. But then as soon as they get some rest and a shower, proper clothes, they realise that now with that comes the deep humiliation that you depend on someone else... Nobody wants to be a refugee.” 

This is why, she says, people are already returning to Ukraine in ever greater numbers.

She also met young men in their early 20's who'd been living in Poland, on their way back into Ukraine to fight the Russians, noting that this was one of the toughest, most moving encounters she had out there. They were at least well prepared, which cheered her slightly, but not entirely.

For they also knew they were probably going back to die.

She says the people who are drawn towards the borders are also not always altruistic. Some will always see opportunities to exploit other people's misery, like the human traffickers, vultures, circling. She fails to hide her disgust. 

Chaze works all the time, and it’s only afterwards, when she goes home, that she can begin to try and sort out things in her head. She says she'll have to 'try to tie herself down', only half jokingly, because the clashing of images, of feelings, of emotions, and of helplessness come up against her impossible drive to work, work, work. 

After she got off the boat, people thought that she'd go mad during the two week quarantine in Sicily, but they'd missed the point that this was necessary, just as her conversations with other journalists on her return from the Ukrainian / Polish border with other journalists were. She needed to decompress, to process everything she had seen, to put things in some kind of an order. 

The first thing I asked when I got in touch originally, was how she deals with what she's seen, how it doesn't make her tear her hair out, how she doesn't end up punching the walls or crying in the streets.

She answered that she was actually asking herself the same question at the time, but she still didn't know, really. 

“I just do what I do,” she says as if it's the easiest thing in the world. 

“You know everybody was so shocked by the pictures [of Mariupol] over the weekend - and they are absolutely shocking - but if people are surprised, I wonder what they imagine happens during wars. Because the sufferings of the Ukrainians are the sufferings of the Syrians that we could see happening for years if we opened our eyes. So now, just because it happens on the continent more people are touched and are receptive. 

“But a war is a war,” she continues. “It's atrocious. Innocents die. A few days ago there was a bombing in Idlib in Syria, and the father could only recognise his child from the shoes he was wearing. This is happening right now, and its always happened and unfortunately always will because we aren't changing.”

I say that this is where she comes in. This is where she makes a difference, where she is important, because no-one else is telling these stories. She disagrees, though.

“None of us is irreplaceable,” she says.

***

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

Beachy Head: trauma and transformation

By Julius Smit:

I'm standing on Beachy Head, a chalk headland rising to 531 feet/162 metres above sea level and despite intermittent spring sunshine, there's a sharp wind coursing over the wide open space. Beachy Head is known as the highest chalk sea cliff in Britain. It's found west of Eastbourne in East Sussex, on the south-east coast of England. The name originates from the corrupted French beau chef meaning 'beautiful headland.' The writer and walker Richard Jefferies wrote about the place in 1883 in an article aptly named The Breeze on Beachy Head. 'The great headland and the whole rib of the promontory is wind-swept and washed with air; the billows of the atmosphere roll over it.' I agree. I too am wind-swept and washed with air. The headland is visited and walked on all year round, more in good weather than in bad, but even in November mists or strong February winds, the site can make you refocus on yourself and your sense of existence. It can turn you inside out.

Local inhabitants and visitors from all over the globe are attracted to the area for its space, height and the views: to gaze out across the light of the English Channel with a post-Brexit vision, to imagine the land mass of Europe beyond the horizon. It's a place of meeting and transience, evocation and conversation. It's also a darker place given the number of people who come here to end their lives. On average twenty people a year throw themselves over the edge. On one of my previous walks up here a man with tears in his years walked past me and muttered that someone had gone over. Division of land masses, division of existence.

The Beachy Head Chaplaincy Team, set up in 2004, is a volunteer led organisation whose members are trained in skilled crisis intervention support. Members take regular patrols along the length of this coastline ready to save lives and help anyone in need. I often see them on their walks dressed in their high-viz jackets. The headland is an 'edge place', physically and psychologically, signified by the number of wooden signs conspicuously announcing in stark white lettering 'Cliff Edge'. In the past, friends and relatives used to leave bunches of flowers with written card notes attached to the thin wire fence which runs at intervals alongside the cliff edge. Sometimes, small crosses have been placed in the ground near to the spot from where the deceased person jumped. In 2018, Eastbourne Borough Council decided in its wisdom to remove these memory tokens and shrines, no doubt in a move to counter a site favoured for suicide in favour of encouraging more positive tourism. 

On this Sunday afternoon I feel pivoted between air, land and sea, and I think of Caspar David Friedrich's painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog for not only seeing what's around me but also what's within me. Admittedly there's no fog to be seen, but the vast sky with its scudding clouds makes me feel insignificant on the land's design.

A road not far away runs past the Beachy Head public house, the Countryside Centre with its shop and rotating exhibitions and a large car park. A public telephone box bears a prominent sign stating that the Samaritans are always there, night and day, to receive your call. They are there to listen. Listening. At the beginning of the Cold War, Beachy Head was chosen as a strategic site for a government radar installation. An underground bunker was built and by 1954 the 'looking and listening' site was fully operational. It was only around 1960 when decisions were made to wind down the activity that the complex was eventually demolished.

Although concrete slabs and grass have now covered over most of the surface evidence, traces of the operation are still around if you know what to look for. As I walk around I notice a ring of metal barriers with Keep Out notices has been erected around a grassy mound, part of which has been ripped apart exposing smashed concrete slabs. I go closer to investigate and can just make out a narrow flight of rusty metal rung steps leading down into an underground darkness, no doubt once an entrance to an operations room monitoring codes and signals. It's not only the height I must be aware of, but also what's under my feet.

There's more to the breeze on Beachy Head than is realized, as it's one of the prevailing natural forces which continue to batter and pummel at the chalk cliff, wearing away half a metre of land a year. Regular news reports in the local press announce alarming splits near to the cliff edge, followed later by reports of large rock falls onto the beach below. Emergency barriers are then erected and the Cliff Edge signs are moved once again. The visitors walk around and the land moves. All notions of stability are questioned on this 'edge place.'

During WWII, Beachy Head was the last land formation many aircrews saw on their missions to occupied Europe. To mark their operations a large memorial block of granite has been placed on the headland with images and inscriptions relating to the work of the squadrons. Now, in place of aircraft, there are regular meetings of a paragliding club whose members are often seen exploiting thermals, floating and soaring above a once defensive landscape, attached to their curled coloured fabric wings like surreal insects. I've often heard their 'music' as they swished above me.

I'm not tempted today by the ice-cream van parked strategically in one corner of the car park. It has a small queue of customers desirous of icy satisfaction. I turn away and start on my walk back home. On the way down I spot a discarded plastic printed arrow, black on yellow, a reminder of last year's annual autumn Beachy Head Marathon. Yes, add runners to the mix. All is movement, all is flux.

***

Julius Smit is a photographer, poet, zine maker and a member of the Walking Artists Network - Website

The invisible border

“Where does Togo start?”

My guide looks out across the steep scarps of Ghana’s Volta Region, a vibrant green landscape that folds and curves like velvet curtains. His eyes trace the ferrous-red roads scratched between the hills before settling on one of the villages nestled in the valleys.

“It is that one,” he says, smiling shyly.

I return the smile and point my lens in the direction indicated, the reflections of the corrugated roofs leaving a temporary blind spot on my retina. Snap snap. Camera returns to case and we share another awkward smile.

We both know he guessed. He doesn’t have a clue where his country ends and its neighbour begins.

Why would he? The border is almost meaningless here; someone else’s line marked out decades before, when the Europeans carved up a continent to their uninvited whims and ideas. It matters little in the day-to-day living of life. While one side is Francophone country and the other Anglophone, the shared Ewe language is the one used to talk to friends or family who happen to be on the other side. And an ECOWAS passport allows for easy, visa-free movement across the whole region (a privilege that no one here would ever think of giving up through a plebiscite).

The name of the hill we are on – Mount Gemi – is another colonial legacy. This is not an Ewe word, not even Twi, but a contraction of the German Mission that came here to share the word of Christ, leaving a cross on its summit. Perhaps there would be a little more acknowledgement of the boundary if the Europeans had been a little more decisive, but it has shifted many times since then. Mount Gemi’s summit was once in a country that no longer exists, German Togoland. Little wonder that most ignore it.

We leave the summit and its cross behind and set off back to Amedzofe. Most of the village’s residents are watching the local football team’s match – are the opponents Togolese? – but we continue past the pitch to the village square. Ghanaians wait for the cooler evening air to meet with friends, thus avoiding the worst of the daytime heat. This respite comes a little earlier in this hilly country – we’re at around 600m – and even though the sun is still out, Amedzofe’s older inhabitants are already congregating in stone seats, waving as we pass.

Adjacent to this rendezvous point is the small visitor centre. Inside, my guide diligently asks his boss to identify exactly where the border lies. Maps are withdrawn from a large wooden chest and the obliging superior shows me where we are, then where the border is. My guide wasn’t too far off, and his face displays a mix of pride and relief. It’s around five miles away, the boss-man says; shall I take you there?

I thank him and decline. Time to move on; there are more hikes to be had further along this invisible border.

*

The border is much closer at Wli (pronounced ‘Vlee’, another linguistic leftover from the Germans). There’s even a checkpoint at the end of one road from the village, where the guards will happily mark your passport with Togo’s stamp and let you potter about in another country for a while, all for just a few cedis.

A more popular activity for the growing numbers of tourists – mostly young volunteers who comprise Europe’s present-day, less disruptive mission to Ghana – is to the double-drop Agumatsa waterfall, the highest in West Africa (although not the only one to claim this title). An easy path meanders through fruit farms and forest to the lower falls, where you can swim in the plunge pool and sip coconuts after. But I opt for the harder route along the steep-sided cliffs of this natural amphitheatre, which leads to the upper falls.

It’s a steep, sweaty climb, and its unpopularity relative to the signposted lower route is evident as my guide hacks constantly at the overgrowth – grasses, vines, saplings – barring our way. Eventually, after ninety minutes of slipping and sliding, swishing and swearing, we reach a viewpoint overlooking the hidden upper falls. Any waterfall is a captivating sight, but this one is flavoured with exoticism by being glimpsed through a thick frond of creepers and ferns. And it has further novelty to its name: the water leaves Togo, crashing down an 80m drop into Ghana. A truly spectacular border crossing.

The path continues beyond the viewpoint, and at some point along it enters another country. But there’s no border post, no fence, no wall up here; nothing except a leaf-covered footpath and a neat stack of felled trunks, about a hundred metres ahead.

Are those in Ghana or Togo?

I don’t bother asking out loud this time. It’s just forest.

*

Only when the border is close to running out of land does it assert itself. Lomé snuggles into the corner where the line meets the sea and here, things are done properly.

I’ve always wanted to walk across a national border. Perhaps it’s a legacy of growing up on an island, where our neighbours are all a boat ride or tunnel away. And Ghana/Togo indulge me in style. Late one Friday evening, two hours after departing the heat and hustle of Accra, a taxi drops me in Aflao, a town whose main purpose is to wave goodbye to those leaving the country or welcome those arriving, the lines of snack stalls ready to provide sustenance on their way.

From here, I proceed on foot beneath a crumbling arch, Ghana’s signatory black star on top, and wait for a stern border guard to scrutinise my passport for … what, exactly? Once waved through, I approach his Togolese counterparts. They usher me through without question; it’s late, they’ve evidently checked enough passports for one day. I raise a hand in acknowledgment and walk into another country.

Now this is a border. There is change, distinction, separation. A city springs up immediately around you; no suburbs, no urban sprawl, at least on this side. Just a few metres from the neatly farmed fields that surround Aflao are high-rise buildings, crowded streets and that distinctive scent of city tarmac warmed by tropical heat. There is a busy hum of horns and engines, the chaos of a thousand people in each street, an urgency that only urbanity provides. It feels a long way from Mount Gemi and Wli, where the border is little noticed.

Other changes, too. Motorbikes, largely absent in Ghana, zip all over; the bread sold by street vendors is long and crusty, not soft and stodgy. And the language of the capital, into which people from all corners of the country pour, is the communal French, local languages reserved for when you meet someone from ‘home’. Yet just a few metres back that way, barely a word of French is understood. I hail a motorbike, ignoring the common-sense warnings about riding on one without a helmet, and struggle to summon enough schoolboy French to get me to the hotel.

*

Two days later, my brief sojourn over, I walk back across the border. The same taxi driver is waiting, as agreed, and we soon head west.

‘Do you know how the border is marked beyond the checkpoint?’ I ask.

‘It is a fence, I think. Yes, a fence.’

‘Do you know how far it goes? Because I was in Wli a few weeks ago and there isn’t a fence there, so I wondered where it stopped.’

The driver gives me a bemused glance in his rear-view mirror, then turns up the radio so that it is loud enough to drown out any more daft, irrelevant questions from the back seat.

***

Tim is an editor on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Love In The Time of Britpop. You’ll find him on twitter here.          

Borders and their consequences: Introducing 'the corridor'

Image: Vera Drebusch

The Corridor is a new project from Ireland exploring borders and their consequences. One of the founders of the project is the Elsewhere Books Editor Marcel Krueger, who we asked to introduce the project and the first events and actions that will be taking place in the coming months:

Who needs borders anyway?

For a year now, my wife Anne and I live in Dundalk in Ireland. We moved here for a variety of reasons: to live and work in a smaller town away from the molochs of Berlin and Dublin (where renting out has become impossible anyway), to live by the sea, to be close to my office. We knew that we would be moving next to one of the main Brexit-faultlines, the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The longer we live here, the more we've become fascinated with the history of our new hometown and worried about what the future might hold for the communities north and south of the border. As a writer & journalist and a curator & arts manager coming from a country which was defined by a border for several decades, we now want to explore the area through both our fields of expertise, and have created 'the corridor'.    

'the corridor' is an interdisciplinary and discursive project that which explores borders and their political, social and cultural consequences through a series of public talks, screenings and exhibitions. With artists from all fields, historians, sociologists, contemporary witnesses and other experts we want to discuss the history of the Irish border and the future challenges of the upcoming EU border for this area. Our first event series is a collaboration with the 1. Deutsches Stromorchester (1st German Electrophonic Orchestra), and you can find more details on our website. Coming events will include a fish dinner with fishermen from both sides of the border initiated by German artist Vera Drebusch, and an exchange about walking borders between Elsewhere editor-in-chief Paul Scraton and Irish writers Garett Carr and Evelyn Conlon. 

To paraphrase Jan Morris, if race is a fraud, then nationality is a cruel pretense. There is nothing organic to it. As the tangled history of the corridor between Belfast and Dublin shows, it is disposable. You can find your nationality altered for you, overnight, by statesmen far away. So who needs borders anyway?