Diligence in the Snow

Photo: Marcel Krueger

By Marcel Krueger:

I sit on my island, in winter, and the antigen test is negative. 

Winter in Ireland rarely means snow, but always wind and rain. From November on, storm after storm rolls in from the Atlantic, often making ferry crossings and fishing dangerous or near impossible, and howl around my house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. I was born in October, so autumn is my favourite season yet winter following is a close second. I always wallowed in the dark and the cold, as for some reason I do not seem to be afflicted by seasonal affective disorder; or maybe a reverse one: I don't like heat, or the summer.  I have no issue with maintaining a work rhythm in winter, and sometimes even feel I write better, with the fireplace lit and a glass of whiskey at hand admittedly, but it is the muggy heat of summer that drains all my focus, motivation and attention. And where for others it might be a time for a lake or park picnic with friends or to have a few cold ones by the beach, it makes me only want to lie in a dark room with air-conditioning until October arrives. 

For me, winter is never about the hope of light after the dark, never about the return of spring. It is always about the dark itself, and the chance of introspection it provides. In recent years I often think about what we humans do in face of adversity and hardship, and how the pandemic has brought to light how our greed and fear of change seem to make it impossible to react properly to these challenges, much more than I would have ever felt possible. As I write this, people in democracies everywhere in Europe are out protesting the need to adhere to science and proclaim that they live in a dictatorship, on a continent that has seen so much real oppression and totalitarianism in the last hundred years alone. 

South of Dundalk, in the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin, hangs one of my favourite winter paintings: “The Diligence in the Snow” (La diligence dans la neige) from 1860, created by French socialist and realist painter Gustave Courbet (1819 – 1877). If you look at the upper half of the painting, there is only an empty landscape, the east of France - on occasion Courbet added “Montagnes du Jura” to the title - stretching out to the horizon in grey and white, under an equally grey and white sky, indifferent in its monotony. There are no houses, no smoke from chimneys rising into the sky, and the light portrayed here is the undefinable greyness of winter - it could be anytime from later morning to early evening.

The human chaos and drama is confined to the bottom of the painting, where a stagecoach struggles through high drifts of snow pulled by two oxen and two horses, the two oxen in front struggling with their necks down, one coachman riding atop one, slumped down and blowing on his hands with a whip held in the crook of his arm. Behind them one horse rises up in its bridles, the other, exhausted, has already sunken to the side. The coach itself, weighted down with large chunks of snow on its roof, seems to be in the moment of foundering, dangerously tilted to the right. Another human figure, the second driver perhaps, has fallen face down into the snow hurrying towards the horses, and a woman and a man behind him, the passengers, are already left behind the capsizing coach. The man reaches out an arm towards it as the woman, the last in this chain of unlucky ones, holds on to the arm of the man. There are four or five houses depicted close by, also almost sunken into the snow, but no help is coming: there is no smoke rising from their chimneys either, the windows dark.   

Gustave Courbet,'The Diligence in the Snow' © The National Gallery, London. Sir Hugh Lane Bequest, 1917. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

What I like about the painting most is its duality, and, after a fashion, hopelessness. One moment you're hurrying along in the warm cabin of the coach swaddled in blankets looking out at a beautiful scenery, the next moment everything secure and safe is brought crashing down around you and the beautiful scenery you thought only to exist for your merriment becomes something dangerous, something threatening to kill you. 

If you live in winter, regardless on what hemisphere, you know this. You are acutely aware of the fragility of human existence, of it's often sudden and violent end in dark and windswept places, and are reminded of that fact every year when the first storms of the seasons make ferry crossings impossible.

I don't wish for winter to end. 

If we manage to kill it, which seems a distinct possibility given our rising temperatures and our incapability to do anything against the climate catastrophe here in Europe, what will make us pause and take a breath? If there is only an eternal summer, will we not manically keep on drinking and eating and using up whatever is left while the rest of the world already burns and those we abandoned making their way to us to partake in our frantic feast before it all goes to hell? 

I think we all need to learn to adjust to winter, even its dark and hopelessness. I was actually happy when in February 2021 the tail end of Storm Darcy  brought with it snow and wind for all of Ireland. Not much snow, just enough to dust the cockle fleet in the harbour and the scrapyard on the quays, but the three days it lasted may have given me more joy and hope than anything humans gave me in the 12 months before that. 

In the midst of winter, I did not discover an eternal summer, to paraphrase Albert Camus, but instead the conviction that we can't carry on as we've done before. As strong as the urge is to re-emerge from the pandemic into a world where nothing has changed, this is wishful thinking. Doing as we've always done and rejecting science is what brought us here, to a time of rampant viruses emerging from burning rain forests and thawing permafrost, of floods and death and people fleeing a heating global south. Those of us in the midst of winter, in deep ice and snow and hiding from the storms howling outside, we need to preserve and protect these moments of stillness and contemplation. Otherwise we will just watch the coach founder and find ourselves in a hostile place, with no help coming. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

Dispatch from Olsztyn: My Two Towers

By Marcel Krueger:

In 2019, I was selected as the official writer in residence of Olsztyn in Poland by the German Culture Forum for Eastern Europe and lived there for six months. I wrote about my experiences on the official writer in residence blog www.stadtschreiber-allenstein.de in German, Englisch and Polish (thanks to my official translator a.k.a. my Polish voice Barbara Sapala) and also for the Elsewhere Journal. This November was the first time since the start of the pandemic that I made it back to the city. 

It is cold as I arrive under a low-hanging November sky. As I alight at Olsztyn Zachodni, the former Westbahnhof of Allenstein, the light over the city resembles dusk, despite the fact that it is 2pm. This is the first time since February 2020 that I'm visiting the capital of the Polish voivodeship Warmia-Masuria. But I know my way around, just like my family knew their way around before me. Up the road from the station is the red-brick Jerusalem Chapel from the 16th century, and a cross commemorating the 1866 cholera epidemic is set in front of the entrance. Opposite the chapel is the steep Królowej Jadwigi – Queen Jadwiga Street. Until 1945, this was Pfeifferstrasse, named after now-drained Pfeiffer Lake at its bottom. House number 10 was built in the late 1920s, an unassuming yellow building with two floors. This used to be the house and office of my grand-aunt Ottilie and her husband Emil Pomaska, who ran a haulage firm here. At this house in 1940 my grand-uncle Franz Nerowski, a spy for Poland, was arrested by the Gestapo and led away to incarceration and execution. But I’m not going there today, and instead shoulder my bag and set off down the street on the other side of the station, towards the city park and the ever-rushing Łyna river, the large red-brick castle from 1353 looming over it, and to my favourite building in Olsztyn: the Wysoka Brama.

What makes us haunt a place? A sense of familiarity, of knowing our way around? An extended network and community, the knowledge that we have friends in a place far from home? Or that a place is providing us with inspiration, with food for thought, and allows us to discover new aspects of it - and ourselves - every time we visit?

All of the above is true for me in the case of Olsztyn, but maybe the strongest allure of the city for me is the fact that I am forever drawn to places with multiple identities, where simple nationalistic stories and touristic whitewashing are absent. The port city of Dundalk in the Republic of Ireland, where I live, is also a border town, called "El Paso" during the conflict in Northern Ireland as it had strong Republican ties and the IRA used it as an R&R area, but for centuries before that it was the last outpost of English might in Ireland, protecting the Pale from the Ulster Irish. Its colloquialisms and idioms are mostly of English nature, brought here by migrants from England who came to work as part of the military or for the administration. On my street in Dundalk is a reminder of that, so-called Seatown Castle, which is actually the tower of a Franciscan abbey founded around 1240. The abbey was ransacked by invading Scots in 1315, and the majority of what remained of its buildings were destroyed in the early 17th century. The grey-green, lichen-covered tower of Seatown Castle is the only remnant of that abbey, today looked after by Dundalk City Council. Whenever I want to be reminded of the fractures and fault lines of Irish history, I take my tea mug to my back garden and look at it. 

Just like in Dundalk, I have a tower in Olsztyn. During my time as writer-in-residence I lived in an apartment in the old town, and from my living room window I was greeted every morning by the red brick gate of the city. The Wysoka Brama or Hohes Tor or High Gate is the only remaining gate of the three medieval city gates, originally built in 1378 and brought into its current form in the 15th century. In 1788, it became an armory, in 1858 it was converted into a prison, and in 1898 became a police station. Until 1960, one of the tram lines of the city passed through it. Today it also has a glass mosaic of the Mother of God facing the old town, given to Olsztyn by pope John Paul II when he visited in 1991. And just like Seatown Castle, it has lost its original purpose - there is no city wall any more, and you can even walk around the gate to get into the old town. 

But like Seatown Castle, for me it represents the many layers of history here: Olsztyn was founded by Teutonic Knights in 1349 on the hills above the Łyna, became part of the Kingdom of Poland in 1466 and, after the first partition in 1772, part of Prussia. The French defeated a Russian army in and around the city in 1807 and Napoleon paid a visit to the old town, and in 1871 it became part of the German Reich and the province of East Prussia. It was home to a multicultural community of Germans, Poles, Jews, Warmians, one with its minor conflicts of course, but one where the divisions of nationalism were maybe not as acutely felt as elsewhere. That all changed with the Nazis in 1933, and ended with a half-destroyed city and the flight and expulsion of many Germans in 1945. Today however, the city is a pleasant place, and I feel a sense of familiarity and, yes, joy, as I walk to my holiday apartment that coincidentally also has a view of the High Gate. I feel that Olsztyn, a place that was a military and working class city when it was Allenstein in East Prussia, a place that did not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretended to be more important or better than, say, Danzig or Königsberg, is again an administrative and working class city today, one that does not need to flaunt its unique selling points and never pretends to be more important or better than, say, Gdańsk or Warsaw.  

In my garden in Dundalk, I can smell the ocean and feel the weather coming in from the Irish Sea. The fact that I live on an island is then often extremely clear to me, and with it comes a sense of security and detachment, a feeling that I am in a good place that is somewhat benevolent towards me and keeps the worries of the world at bay, for the moment. Dundalk lies on an old flood plain and will not fare well in the future floods of the climate catastrophe that seem to be almost certain at this moment. From my holiday apartment in Olsztyn, I looked out at the Wysoka Brama on the night of my arrival. It was illuminated by spotlights, but the cold fog of November crawled in over the old town down from the Łyna and diluted the brightness, made the rest of the world seem detached from the place I was in. There and then, in the old medieval town on a hill and in the shadow of its tower, I felt the same insularity as I do in my old town by the sea in Ireland. I was safe up there, for the moment. 

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

A Year Walk

We return in 2020 with a piece from our books editor Marcel Krueger, on a walk in Ireland to reflect on the year gone and what is to come:

Setting sail
From a crushed rooftop
Fathoms deep
Shallow as a raindrop
- Down, The Tides

On one of my last days in Ireland in 2019 I set out for the mountains. I park my car in the car park of the Lumpers Pub in Ravensdale north of Dundalk, in the foothills of the Cooley Mountains, and set out on the Táin Way, the 40-kilometer looped trail across the Carlingford peninsula. But I'm not trying to do the whole loop in a day, or even half of it. This will be my final walk in Ireland this year, before I travel to the continent to celebrate Christmas with my family in Germany and France, and I want to walk up one of the hills that I've always bypassed on previous walks here, the 370-metre The Castle. It had been raining all night, but when I set out there's only a low-hanging, dirty-grey overcast sky and a few raindrops coming down. I walk up the small road that leads from the car park to the trailhead, past suburban houses decorated with Santas and sleighs and yapping dogs in the garden.

I first encountered the Swedish folk tradition of Årsgång, or year walk, playing an atmospheric game with the same title on my phone. Typically a year walk had to be done on Christmas or New Year’s Eve, during the night. Almost all regional variations involve having to spend a full day inside a dark room, not allowed to talk to anyone or eat or drink. At the stroke of midnight one should head for church. If the year walker managed to follow certain instructions and to solve particular challenges (such as potential encounters with supernatural beings), they would catch glimpses of what would happen the following year. I always tried to do a proper year walk myself on New Year's Eve but have failed so far, and so I guess my short excursion into the Cooleys today will have to do as substitute. It will give me ample time to reflect on both past and future, and encounter enough things in my life that might represent a challenge. 

I travelled a lot in 2019, maybe too much. I drank many beers and ate cheap airport food and put on a good few kilos, and I can feel it as I huff and puff up the steep trail that leads to the forest halfway up the hill. But due to the weather I have the trail almost for myself, and after half an hour I settle into my own rhythm and am promptly rewarded with a fine view past Drumisnagh and Trumpet Hill west of me towards Dundalk Bay and Dundalk town itself. The cloud cover is still a good hundred meters out and there is the sun glittering on the Irish Sea, so I can make out the spidery Dundalk pile lighthouse from 1853 in the bay, the curve of land at Soldier's Point on the Navvy Bank, one of my favourite locations in town, and St. Helena's Park just around from where I live. It feels good to have the sea and the mountains close. 

I'm writing professionally (as in somebody paying me to publish my words on paper or the internet) for ten years now, but 2019 was the first time I felt that my writing might make a tiny impact. People have started booking me and my words as part of academic conferences, readings and workshops, and it seems, unbelievable for self-taught history nerd like myself, that my knowledge is worth something, that I somehow can assist others in sharpening their understanding of the world. I published a magazine featuring many amazing writers living on the island of Ireland, gave a reading at the Leipzig book fair for the first time in my life, spent five months as the official writer-in-residence of wonderful Olsztyn in northern Poland, gave talks and readings in crumbling Prussian palaces from the 17th century, in a 16th-century water castle in Wroclaw, an academy set up for cultural dialogue between the Baltic states just 10 kilometres south of the Danish border, Northern Ireland's best independent bookshop, the modern library in the city of Gelsenkirchen, and in the birthplace of legendary German writer Wolfgang Koeppen in the lovely seaside town of Greifswald. It was a good year.

Like always when out walking alone, I feel a certain dread. I tried, but I can never fully and innocently seem to enjoy scenery just for itself - my imagination is always in the way. I see hidden gathering places of Neonazis in rural Brandenburg, skeletons of previous wanderers in the gorges of Crete where sheep have died, phantoms in the Irish mist. I enjoy these moments of childish dread up to a point, but then on the other hand it seems I have read too much W.G. Sebald to look at a nice place without seeing tragedy and horror. 

It is the same today. The higher I get, the more the rain clouds close in and the dark patches of conifer forest on both sides of the sandy trail seem ominous and menacing. Maybe, because of this dread that is the constant companion of many walks, it also feels as if the scales will soon need to tilt, that my personal triumphs need to be balanced by tragedy. In recent years I have the feeling that more and more misery heaped upon the world by old white men, and I'm often at loss at what to do about this. I go out and as often as possible tell my small stories about my grandmother and my granduncle and how Fascism and totalitarianism ruined their lives and killed them, and I try to write as much as possible against the rising tide of ignorance and hate that encroaches on us all, but I don't know if that is enough anymore. I often feel like the proverbial 'small chubby Berliner who tries to stop a catastrophe with a typewriter', as Erich Kästner called my favourite Weimar Berlin writer Kurt Tucholsky, a dedicated anti-fascist, once. I'm a small chubby bloke on a hill in Ireland and equally helpless. 

My dismal contemplations are interrupted by a jolly group of hikers in all colours of the Goretex range coming down the hill towards me, who must have made their way from the other side of the peninsula and covered 25 kilometres this morning - compared to my measly ten up and down a hill. They cheerfully wish me good morning and ramble on, maybe towards a late breakfast or an early pint. The scales tilt up again.

The friendliness of the locals also reminds me of the beauty of living in a small, working-class town like Dundalk; that it does not ask anything of you, but if you immerse yourself in the community it provides a lot, a lot more than other, more urban or 'sexier' places. And maybe through my travels this year this has become even clearer to me. The place I live in has all I need. I have a house with a fireplace and a cat and a room for all my books and plastic skulls and pictures of rusting ships, a lovely independent bookshop down the road of which the owner is a friend of mine (everyone needs bookseller and librarian friends is all I'm saying), all the pubs in the world, the harbour and the sea two streets down the road and a peninsula with a mountainous spine to walk in. And it provides you with a place to come back to and be yourself.    

I emerge from the treeline, cross a fence and enter the clouds. The wind is strong here, just 300 meters above the sea, and I have to put on gloves and set up my hood. I can only see a few meters ahead, the trail, the heather and the bog all shrouded in grey. I stomp on, trying to find the parting in the ways that will lead me up to the summit of The Castle. As if foreseeing the bad weather today, it is indicated by a series of stakes leading up the hill. But to me, even though I know that these have been put there to aid walkers, they seem more ominous and eery, Irish totem poles. 

The destination of my year walk is not a church, but a wide grassy summit with a small cairn. I look around and see nothing but brown-green bog a few feet in each direction and hear nothing but the wind screaming into my face and battering my waterproofs. I look right into it, in the direction of the unseen sea, and once more realise that I like living in the North as it reminds me of mortality. 

In January 2019, across Carlingford Lough in the Mourne Moutains, just a few meters higher then I am now, Robbie Robinson and Sean Byrne die. In separate accidents, both lose their way due to clouds and fog and are killed by exposure in the ice-cold winds howling down the mountains. And there it is, another reminder that death comes for all of us, and because of this we all should work together, for abstract concepts like peace and love and keeping the planet alive, but also for keeping the border in Ireland open and the communities in the north and the south linked to each other, and to help people in need anywhere we come across them, on the streets of Dublin or the beaches of Greece. In my life, and especially 2019, I made the experience that unity is always better than fragmentation, that solidarity is always better than ostracism. But standing on the hill in Ireland alone, looking into the wind, it seems that many people are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, and eaten up by nothing with the hope to take their cheap wealth and gadgets with them when they die, to paraphrase Charles Bukowski.   

Before I walk back, down the hill to my car and back to the old crooked house in Dundalk where I have to pack my bag for my travels, I lean into to the wind and look down the surprisingly steep seaward flank of The Castle, which drops away into nothingness. The clouds obscure everything here, both the bottom of the valley and the future.  

***

Marcel Krueger is the Books Editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His writing has been published in numerous places both online and in print, and he is the author of Babushka’s Journey: The Dark Road to Stalin’s Wartime Camps (I.B. Taurus, 2017) and the upcoming Iceland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (I.B. Taurus, 2020). You’ll find him on twitter here.

The Joy of Bookshops: Roe River Books, Dundalk

A return to our irregular series, featuring some of our favourite places in the world: bookshops. Today, our books editor Marcel Kreuger pours over the shelves of the wonderful Roe River Books in Dundalk, Ireland:

Like libraries, independent bookstores to me are safe places. There is, of course, a materialistic aspect to their existence, but I’ve not yet encountered one merely dedicated to cold hard cash. Instead, independent bookstores are places where book lovers, amateur historians, budding poets and the local writing group can meet, browse and order (obscure) books, and talk everything literary with likeminded humans. And that might apply for small-town bookstores even more than to those in the metropolis.

Roe River Books is such a place. The only independent bookstore in Dundalk, the capital of County Louth in the Republic of Ireland with roundabout 30,000 inhabitants (and my chosen hometown), Roe River Books is the brainchild of Tom Muckian, book lover and thespian in his free time.

Roe River Books is my second stint as a bookshop owner. I ran the imaginatively titled Dundalk Bookshop from 1987 to 1992, before becoming a planning and design consultant. In 2007, a client asks me to survey the building which housed Carroll’s Educational Supplies, an institution in Dundalk where generations have bought their school books. My client informs me that he’ll likely be selling the business on after the summer season. I half-jokingly say to him not to sell it without talking to me first and thirty minutes later, I have a book shop again.

Roe River Books still sells schoolbooks (crucial in a small town like Dundalk) but that does not mean that the range is shallow. Tom, a huge fan of thrillers and the fantastic (especially the books of John Connelly), stocks a broad range of classics of the occult like Lovecraft, Bradbury and King and, of course, a lot of Irish Noir like Connolly, Ken Bruen or Stuart Neville. Fitting for a ‘town bookshop’, local interest also plays a huge role.

We sell quite a lot of local historical publication – people are always interested in the history of their street or direct neighbourhood, and so we are also always willing to stock independent or self-published books by local authors.

Tom sees an independent, brick-and-mortar shop as the antidote to the fast, consumption-orientated world of online (book) shopping, as place to linger, a place to appreciate the magic of books. No wonder that Roe River Books self-identify as ‘luddite booksellers’:

The Amazon River is the longest in the world and its online namesake seems to want to take over the world. The Roe River once held the record as the shortest river in the world. I like the idea of being the polar opposite of that online giant. We may not have every book in print but we might just have the one you need.

Come May this year, Roe River Books will move into an even bigger premise a few houses down the road that will even offer a coffee dock (one of the best smells in the world, coffee and freshly printed books) and potentially an expanded programme of readings, acoustic concerts and readings groups. And it will still remain a safe haven for book lovers from everywhere.

You can find Roe River Books online here, and in the real world at 77 Park St, Townparks, Dundalk, Co. Louth, Ireland.

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?