Event: 20th century hotel writers – Darran Anderson and Marcel Krueger in conversation

People in the hotel

“The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out (shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses) are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering blink out their greeting. Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child; I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid—and between us we put on such a consummate performance that the notion of merely checking into a hotel doesn’t even raise its head.” – Joseph Roth, “Arrival in the Hotel”

by Marcel Krueger:

I am not going to lie: I really like hotels. There is something very appealing about entering my room after I've checked in, unpacking my bags, setting up my laptop, notes and reference books I require for the piece of writing I'm working on the desk, and beginning to fill the blank canvas that a hotel room presents for each new guest, even if it's just for a brief stay. Checkout will come soon, my presence erased by the cleaning staff and the room again turned into a blank canvas for the next guest. Hotels, after a fashion, can provide us with a  fresh start whenever we visit. Or with an escape, to a a temporary home turned into a room of one's own by the magic of the “do not disturb” sign. And that applies to any hotel, regardless if it's the Grand Hotel des Londres in Istanbul or a B&B franchise behind the train station in Lüneburg.   

Of course, I am aware of the fact that being able to avail of a hotel on my travels is a privilege. And there are many other aspects of hotels that have nothing to do with the romance of travel or creative work: of being used as emergency (or permanent) accommodation for homeless people and refugees in the Republic of Ireland; of the Hotel Lux in Moscow becoming a trap for exiles that had fled Nazi Germany and being transported from here directly to the GULAG and the murder basements of the NKVD; of the Hotel Europa in Belfast becoming the “most bombed hotel of Europe” during the Troubles; of both Tito and Serbian war criminal Arkan using the Grand Hotel Pristina, the latter and his gang posting a sign at the main entrance of the hotel that read: “The entrance is forbidden for Albanians, Croats, and dogs”.

Hotels have always fascinated writers, as places of refuge and as setting alike, so it is no wonder that especially the first half of the 20th century is rife with books and stories set in hotels. I therefore honoured that one of my favourite Berlin hotels, the Circus Hotel on Rosenthaler Platz, has invited me and one of my favourite European writers, the mighty Darran Anderson (who was just awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction), to talk  more about our favourite 20th century hotel writers and their books. And we'll not only talk about the likes of Joseph Roth and Vicki Baum, but also about the real-life hotels that influenced them. 

“I have been here for long enough. If I stayed longer I would be unworthy of the great blessing of being a stranger. I might degrade the hotel to a home if I no longer left it unless I had to. I want to feel welcome here, but not at home. I want to be able to come and go. It’s better to know that a hotel is waiting for me here.” – Joseph Roth, “Leaving the Hotel”

READING: FAVOURITE 20TH CENTURY HOTEL WRITERS
DARRAN ANDERSON AND MARCEL KRUEGER IN CONVERSATION
Monday 26th June, 4 pm, Circus Hotel Lobby. Free event. 
Rosenthaler Straße 1 
10119 Berlin 

The Borders of Winter – Reading Ukraine

Photo by Maksym Diachenko on Unsplash

By Marcel Krueger: 

Despair and sadness, this is what I first felt when waking up to the outbreak of war in Ukraine. The thing that I had made dark jokes about just the day before with a Polish acquaintance with relatives in Ukraine, a thing that felt like abstract posturing with words and guns, had become bitter reality, a war in the middle of Europe. As our editor-in-chief Paul wrote in the latest Letter from Elsewhere, “in a time like this our small journal of place doesn't seem to really matter all that much.” 

As the Books Editor of Elsewhere, I do think that reading continuously and widely can help us prepare – up to a point – for violent change, and help understand where it is coming from and why. The more we inhabit positions and points of view of others, the more we understand some of the multitude of currents at play in Europe today – and in the case of Ukraine, the fierce independence of its people. I have compiled a list of Ukrainian authors past and present for everyone interested in learning more about the country, but this is purely based on personal reading experience and by no means an exhaustive list. 

As writer and editor Kate Tsurkan writes in her review of Andriy Lyubka’s “Carbide” and Oleg Sentsov’s “Life Went on Anyway: Stories” in the LA Review of Books:

This has always been the beauty of Ukraine — its diversity. If you walk through the downtown area of any major Ukrainian city, you can hear conversations in more than one language at the same time. Each region possesses its own unique character, its linguistic blends; what brings Ukrainians together, despite these so-called differences, is a greater sense of Ukrainian identity, which has triumphed over years of conflict.

When you look at Ukraine today and the complex history of the region, you will also find that many crucial European literary voices come from here: Joseph Roth was born in Brody, Paul Celan in Chernivtsi, Bruno Schulz in Drohobych. Because of this diversity I have also included Polish voices in this list, due to the special and not always easy relationship between these two neighbouring countries. 

Ukrainian as a literary language first emerged into a wider European awareness in the 19th century, but this was not a language spoken in all areas of society of an area of Jewish, Polish and Ukrainian people, all ruled over by Imperial Russia. As Anne Applebaum puts it in her essay “Calamity Again”:

The Ukrainian language, as well as Ukrainian art and music, were all preserved in the countryside, even though the cities spoke Polish or Russian. To say “I am Ukrainian” was, once upon a time, a statement about status and social position as well as ethnicity. “I am Ukrainian” meant you were deliberately defining yourself against the nobility, against the ruling class, against the merchant class, against the urbanites.  

The two key figures from that time are Taras Hryhorovych Shevchenko (1814 – 1861) and Lesya Ukrainka (Larysa Petrivna Kosach, 1871 – 1913). Taras was born into poverty but as a gifted and self-taught painter and poet (and later attendant of the St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts) laid the groundwork for Ukrainian as a literary language. Lesya, who published her first poem at 13, became the first female literary voice writing in Ukrainian and has become, after a lifetime of prolific publishing poems, prose, essays and dramas, a symbol of national pride: hence her honorific last name Ukrainka, “The Ukrainian”. One of her best-known poems is “Contra Spem Spero” from 1890:

On this poor, indigent ground
I shall sow flowers of flowing colors;
I shall sow flowers even amidst the frost,
And water them with my bitter tears.

Chyhyryn from the Subotove road, 1845 by Taras Shevchenko

The Russian Revolution and the end of World War I also brought an end to the empires that had ruled what is Ukraine today, and with it, on the one hand, chaos and revolution, and on the other an explosion of Ukrainian culture. The Ukrainian War of Independence, in which Ukrainian forces fought Poles, Germans, White Russian Forces, Rumanians and French, lasted from 1917 to 1921 and saw the creation of first the Free Territory of Ukraine, the Ukrainian People's Republic and the West Ukrainian People's Republic, and later the whole of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic as part of the Soviet Union. Ukrainian writing and self-expression was at first supported by the Soviets, and so a whole generation of fresh Ukrainian voices emerged in that time, including writer, playwright and musician Hnat Khotkevych (1877 – 1938), writer Valerian Pidmohylny (1901 – 1937), poet and translator Mykola Zerov (1890 - 1937), and writer and critic Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska (1868 – 1941). 

This first modern generation of Ukrainian writers however only published and flourished for a few years. At the end of the 1920s, when Stalin had replaced Lenin as the head of state of the USSR, a new cultural policy was enacted and Ukrainian publishing increasingly suppressed. All of the members of the new Ukrainian avantgarde were arrested and executed or, in case of female artists like Liudmyla Starytska-Cherniakhivska, sent to the GULAG where they also perished. Named after an anthology published in 1959 by Polish writer and activist Jerzy Giedroyc (1906 – 2000), these writers became known as the “Executed Renaissance”. The result of this purge was also that there were hardly any Ukrainian literary voices documenting the Holodomor, the catastrophic famine of 1932/33 induced by Stalinist policies that killed an estimated 3.5 million people.

Another writer that perished in the Stalinist terror was Odessa-born Isaac Babel (1894 — 1940), Jewish-Russian writer, journalist, playwright and revolutionary best known for his “Red Cavalry”, a fictionalised account of his time with the 1st Cavalry Army of the Red Army during the Polish-Soviet war. In 2016 the Pushkin Press first published his stories about his sea port hometown in the early 20th century in all its shabbiness and glory, translated by Boris Dralyuk:

Odessa has sweet and wearying evening in springtime, the spicy aroma of acacia trees, and a moon overflowing with even, irresistible light above a dark sea.

The beginning of World War II saw even more calamity heaped upon Ukraine. In September 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and occupied the eastern parts of the 2nd Polish Republic, adding it to the territory of the Ukrainian SSR. In 1941, Nazi Germany in turn invaded and occupied what they called “Reichskommissariat Ukraine”, and in the years that followed the region saw increased fighting not only between occupying forces, the Red Army and partisans, but also many horrendous crimes of the Holocaust being carried out on the territory of Ukraine, including the infamous Babyn Yar massacre in Kyiv. There was also a policy of ethnic cleansing enacted against the Polish inhabitants of Volhyina by the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which killed thousands of Poles between 1943 and 1945. One of the victims was Polish-Ukrainian poet Zygmunt Rumel (1915 – 1943) who grew up in Kremenets, and two years before his death had published the poem “Dwie matki” (Two Mothers):

Two Mother-Fatherlands have taught me speech -
In the bloody braid of a berry-blossomed dew -
So that I could break my heart into two halves with pain -
To make my split heart cry like a voice...  

After the end of the war the suppression of Ukrainian expression and literature continued, and dissident writers like Vasyl Stus (1938 - 1985) and Yuriy Lytvyn (1934 – 1984) died in Soviet labour camps. Only after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and Ukrainian independence in 1991 did – like the literature of neighbouring Poland – modern Ukrainian emerge again. Ukrainian writers started experimenting with form and styles, a reflection of the changes and challenges of a newly independent nation, and at the same time addressed themes of memory and identity within the context of the violent history of the region – even more so after the momentous changes brought in by the 2014 Euromaidan protests and subsequent invasion and occupation of Crimea and the wars in Donbas and Luhansk. Ukrainian writers today address the ravages of war and the landscapes of history and memory, often with the help of comedy and dark humour.

Vladimir Rafeenko (born 1969) is a Russian-language writer from the city of Donetsk in the Donbas who now lives near Kyiv. His novel “Mondegreen”, the story of a refugee from Donbas, translated by Mark Andryczyk, was published by the Harvard University Press in February of this year, and his short story  “7 Dillweeds” translated by Marci Shore can be read on Eurozine. 

Lyuba Yakimchuk is a poet, playwright, and screenwriter also from the Donbas region, and her long poem “Apricots of Donbas”, translated by Oksana Maksymchuk and Max Rosochinsky, was published by the University of Washington Press in 2021.

stitch the wounds on your building
with white bandages cover up
black burns on its pelt

with a hand — just don’t twitch —
shield the gaping mouths of windows
so marauders won’t get in

Serhiy Zhadan (born 1974) is one best-known contemporary Ukrainian poets and writers who has published widely in the English-Speaking world, and also the frontman of ska band Zhadan and the Dogs. In his 2017 novel “The Orphanage”, translated by Reilly Costigan-Humes and Isaac Wheeler, the narrator tries to retrieve his nephew from a children’s home on the front lines.

Żanna Słoniowska (born 1978) is a Polish writer and journalist originally from Lviv in western Ukraine, and her 2017 novel “The House with the Stained Glass Window”, translated by Olivia Lloyd-Jones, tells the story of her hometown through the eyes of four generations of women living under the same roof in a house noted for the enormous stained glass window of the title. 

Andrey Kurkov (born 1961) is originally from St Petersburg and after a stint as prison warden and journalist has become a full-time writer of novels and screenplays. His tragicomic 2002 novel “Death and the Penguin” about a writer, his pet penguin and the mafia, became a bestseller, and in 2014 he published a diary about the Euromaidan and the Russian invasion. His 2020 novel “Grey Bees”, translated by Boris Dralyuk, tells the story of the conflict that has engulfed Ukraine in the last years through the eyes of a mild-mannered beekeeper, and has just been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. An excerpt can be read on the Calvert Journal.   

That was the first spring of the war. And now they were in its third winter. For almost three years he and Pashka had been keeping the village alive. They couldn’t very well leave it lifeless. If every last person took off, no one would return. This way, folks were sure to come back – either when all that nonsense stopped in Kyiv, or when the landmines were gone and the shells stopped falling.

Again, this list is only a spotlight on Ukrainian writing past and present and I hope it serves a segue into more fascinating writing (and reading) from a country under siege that deserves all the support we can give. Many thanks to Kate Tsurkan, editor-in-chief of Apofenie, who instigated this piece and who is currently holding out in Chernivtsi in Ukraine. You can read her wonderful portrait of her hometown on the Calvert Journal, and Apofenie is a great place to start discovering more writers from Ukraine. Many thanks also to Jesse Lee Kercheval who started a wonderful thread on Ukrainian writers on Twitter. Slava Ukraini. 

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.

The Library: The Heeding, by Rob Cowen and Nick Hayes

Read by Marcel Krueger:

One and a half years into the current global pandemic, and we now see the first publications of what you could call “Coronavirus Lit”. After a run on Camus' The Plague and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year when it all started, now contemporary writers have begun to engage with the pandemic itself, with quarantine, isolation and living through it - with a varying degree of success. One the one hand there are inspiring projects like the online and offline The Decameron Project of the New York Times Magazine, which brings together such diverse writers like Rivka Galchen, Colm Tóibín, Margaret Atwood and Yiyun Li, on the other German novelist Thea Dorn's whiny Trost. Briefe an Max (Confort. Letter to Max) which barely misses becoming an anti-lockdown and anti-vaccination manifest while pretending to be highbrow literature. 

The Heeding, a collaboration between writer Rob Cowen and illustrator and graphic artist Nick Hayes can definitely be considered Corona Lit, and is thankfully of the inspiring variety. The book contains 35 wonderfully illustrated poems and spans the pandemic from spring 2020 to spring 2021, but this is not a lockdown diary (even though it picks up contemporary themes like the Black Lives Matter movement), but a book about the world as a whole and our place in it. As Cowen says in the introduction, when referring to the trauma World War II his grandfather lived through:

"This book is born out of a different time and trauma, but perhaps it might likewise be thought of as a collection of things, of findings and workings out - if not conclusions - around our relationships with nature, ourselves and each other at another moment of profound change."

The theme of the poems varies immensely, from moors and allotments to living in quarantine with children, family grief, isolation and loneliness to anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists and drinking songs, nicely bookended by two poems about duels between hawks and their prey. Nick Hayes' illustrations complement the poems perfectly: the first image the reader encounters before said first poem is a hawk in flight that practically explodes from the page, and really gave me pause. 

The only weak point of this wonderful book is the – for me – sometimes too widely meandering subject matter of the poems. While this wide-angled approach is something that definitely works in Rob Cowen's prose work Common Ground, where walking a part of the edgelands makes the protagonist explore all sorts of interconnections and layers of history, the poems in The Heeding sometimes feel disjointed. But then, is disjointed not what we all felt at some point in the last twelve months? 

What I like about this beautiful book is that it treats the Covid-19 pandemic not as a once-in-a-lifetime event that we all have to make it through to get back to like everyone was before. It references extreme heatwaves and human failure to show humility in the face of nature, and that makes it more an example of the first contemporary plague literature than a look back at a unique event. As I write this the plague is still ongoing, and there are countries on the planet that have not even seen one single vaccine dose making its way there. And as things stand, this will not have been the last global pandemic in our lifetime - it's just a question if we can learn to better tackle these in the future. There will be more floods and droughts and heatwaves and fires and bumbling politicians failing, but maybe we can find hope and inspiration to face and change these in books like The Heeding. Or if not hope, then at least compassion for our fellow man and nature. It is sure needed. As Rob Cowen says in his poem ‘The End of This (Drinking Poem)’:

Pass me a glass. Give me courage
to start over. And be better.  

***

The Heeding is published by Elliott & Thompson.

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.

The Library: Thin Places by Kerri ní Dochartaigh

By Marcel Krueger:

According to German writer Heinrich Böll (1917-1985) and his "Irish Journal" first published in 1957, "the people of Ireland are the only people in Europe who have never invaded other countries [...]". Since the publication of his book, this view has been the mainstream view of Ireland from Germany for decades, fuelled by countless media campaigns of Fáilte Ireland , the Irish Tourism Board: a twee, harmless island of green fields, dramatic cliffs and pubs with open fires, peopled by jolly fiddlers, naive artists and buxom ginger maidens. The dark and martial history of Ireland as a whole is often swept under the glossy rug made of postcards or Instagram reels from the "Wild Atlantic Way", or only ever mentioned if it can be commodified and packaged into something visitors can consume, like swashbuckling stories of Grace O'Neill or the conflict in Northern Ireland only made accessible through guided tours of murals and "Peace Walls". The fact that Ireland did invade other countries, its soldiers employed as mercenaries by European powers for centuries, or that its people have been slaughtering each other for a hundred years with bullets and bombs, is all glossed over. 

I hope that many people from Germany will read “Thin Places” by Kerri ní Dochartaigh, which in its complexity addresses the violence all over Ireland, and offers a way of understanding and a potential way out of the spiral of violence that engulfed the north of the island for so long. Coincidentally, the German feuilleton often uses the term Seelenstriptease, literally a “soul striptease”, for a work of art, a book, an interview, a movie that reveals deeply personal and intimate details about the creator of that work, or the subject. I don't really like the word, but it is the first I thought about when finishing Kerri's wonderful work, that this book is very much a soul, and a country, stripped bare.

The book is about many things: Brexit, place, trauma, alcoholism, grief, hope and fear, and uses the structure of memoir to follow the life of the writer: from her growing up as the child of a Catholic mother and a Protestant father in Derry/Londonderry, firebombed out of her home during the “Troubles”, the civil war in Northern Ireland between 1969 and 1998, and then moving away to Scotland and England before finally returning to her hometown in her 30s. Whereas the many excellent essay collection that have come out of Ireland in recent years, like Sinéad Gleeson's "Constellations" or Ian Maleney's “Minor Monuments” use personal stories as starting points to establish the theme of single essays, "Thin Places" is a book-length essay in itself, one that drifts of into certain themes but always circles back to the main structure of handling trauma - and failing in doing so.

This is not a book that is easy to read. Not because of the complexity of writing or the darkness it explores, but because it does not offer easy escapism, or just food for thought that makes you utter "Interesting!" and then put it aside. Many things that Kerri writes about in here are so profound and moving that I literally had to pause after a few paragraphs, put the book down and explore what her words had caused inside of me. Sometimes I got confused by the many places and (life) times the author jumps back and forth between, but then the key themes and the overall structure remain clear and always allow the reader to climb back in.   

This island on which I was born is a wild, ancient and stirring place - a place so ethereal as to take a given moment in time and bathe it in the light of something divine, a place that was eternal and holy long before those words ever had need for voicing. [...] Ireland - this ethereal and mythical island, set down in the heart of the ravenous, tumultuous Atlantic Ocean - is black, too, coal-black, as black as to be the making of the crows. Black is the colour of many of our true loves' hairs on this island but it is also the colour of sorrow and fear - of mystery and the unknown, of so much death, and of the unimaginable depths of our grief.

The book ends on a note of hope, with the image of the winter solstice and the conviction that there is always light ahead when it is darkest, but I don't think that that is necessary. Looking at the pictures coming from Northern Ireland in April 2021, it is clear that the important thing here is balance, balance in the peace process and the self. There are only ever small victories possible for all of us, and we have to fight every day so that the needle does not  tilt back to the dark side again. “Thin Places” is a deeply personal work of art and at the same time a timely portrait of the (still) hurting island of Ireland that everyone should read. Especially in Germany.  

***

Thin Places is published by Cannongate.

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.

Bitter Meadow – January in Bochum

By Marcel Krueger:

There are many bridges in Bochum. Sadly they never cross any water, but only ever rails, concrete and motorways. 

I've been in the urban sprawl of the Ruhr area since early December. My wife has started a new job here and we've rented a small apartment in the center of the city, planning to divide our time between Ireland and Germany in the coming year. I came here when the last lockdown in Ireland ended, with plans to go back to Ireland in January. But now the renewed lockdowns in both Germany and Ireland have prevented me from returning and spending January in my crooked house from 1875 by the harbour in Dundalk. So for the last weeks I've been strolling around Bochum, which is a completely new place for me. 

As I always do to get a feeling for a place, I sought out destinations that would link me to the past of the city in the 20th century: honorary graves of people who died during the upheavals of the Kapp Putsch and in the Red Army of the Ruhr in 1920, disused railway lines, former coal mines all over town. It is almost impossible to walk around Bochum and not encounter leftovers of this former main industry of the city: overgrown slag heaps, ventilation shafts, metal towers and red-brick buildings of former collieries are everywhere, and even if they  have been dismantled the former pits are still indicated by street names, subway stations and memorial plaques.  

But mainly I tried to revisit tragedies of the past. I really couldn't say why I always tend to do this. There is a certain level of escapism and horror, learning more about the terrifying things that humans had inflicted upon them by other humans as a privileged white European with a certain conviction that I'm safe from these horrors. Yet there is also an aspect of comparison to today, always: of how easy it is for totalitarian and populist regimes to lure people in and make them willing collaborators, a thing that is worth constantly reiterating. And it is also always revealing to see what a city choses to remember and honour officially, and what it chooses to forget; like the swastika on the helmet of a statue on a war memorial that had been erected in the central city park in 1935, only toppled by activists in 1983.

Some of these locations and sites I chose deliberately, upon others I just stumbled by coincidence, like the memorial dedicated to the men from the Hamme suburb who went and died in the wars of 1866 and 1870/71 in side street: Carl Hake from Hamme joined the 2nd company of the 53 infantry regiment, marched off towards the south and died fighting the Austrians in the Battle of Königgrätz on the 3rd of July 1866, far from home.    

On another walk I came upon a small park, one that seemed deserted. Paved trails and gravel paths sneaked around small hills on which thorn bushes and small trees grew, under the arms of massive electricity pylons looming overhead and a forlorn, low-hanging grey sky. I came across what looked like a piece of concrete wall topped with a rusted metal bar, and only as I stood close did I realise that there were words embossed in the metal bar. In German, it read: "A strict regime prevailed in the camp. At night people died in their bunks, then in the morning the living got up and went to work." 

During World War II the Saure Wiese, the Bitter Meadow, was one of 15 forced labour camps of the Bochumer Verein, one of the main steel and arms producers of Bochum and the Ruhr area and one of over 100 labour camps for forced labourers in Bochum and neighbouring Wattenscheid, a suburb today but a town in its own right back then. The people incarcerated here were mostly so-called Ostarbeiter, Eastern Workers, deported from the Ukraine and Russia, who had to work in the ironworks across nearby Essener Strasse, still in existence today as the Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe Bochum plant. In 1943, the camp had 765 Ostarbeiter and 290 "various foreigners" according to the records, who had to live here in subhuman conditions: they worked in 12-hours shifts seven days a week, and daily rations mostly consisted of watery turnip soup and 150 grams of bread. Viktor Schmitko was deported as a 16-year-old and brought to Bochum, where he worked from 1942 to 1945 and talked about his experiences 50 years later:

"We went to sleep and woke up only thinking of food. We went to sleep hungry and got up hungry again. That was hard to bear. I worked in the forge at the hot press with hot metal, that was hard work, on Sundays we also had to work, doing repairs, unloading wagons, that was hard too."

When Allied troops approached Bochum in spring 1945, the camps were dissolved and the surviving workers taken away in death marches and rail transports. The Gestapo shot 20 forced labourers in their headquarters, a confiscated villa at Bergstraße 76, just a few hours before US troops marched in, and buried their bodies in bomb craters in the city park.

Reconciliation with the fate of the Ostarbeiter and the camp at Saure Wiese did not happen immediately. First the remaining barracks were used for people whose houses had been destroyed in bombing raids, or German refugees from the eastern provinces. And then the area was buried under poison. The site had been used as landfill already before the war, but with the increased reconstruction and industrial output of Bochum after 1945 it was again used as a dumping ground for industrial waste. This continued until 1973, when it became clear that heavy metals and cyanides had reached the groundwater and almost completely polluted and killed nearby Ahbach creek.

The site remained a wasteland for the next decades, and only in 2007 was remediation work carried out. 45,000 cubic metres of contaminated soil were replaced, and at the same time the Association of Persecutees of the Nazi Regime approached the city of Bochum and informed them of the history of the site. It was then decided to turn it into a memorial park that commemorates the camp and the fate of the forced labourers, but also invites visitors to actively engage with the fascist history of the area.

In 2012 the park I first discovered was opened: 10,000 plants and trees had been planted and a park of 65,000 square metres created. The ground plan of a barrack is reconstructed by stone blocks and several information boards document the history of the site; dotted around the park are parts of the artwork entitled "Laute Stille", Loud Silence, created by Bochum artist Marcus Kiel: the pieces of concrete and metal I encountered. Quotes from former forced labourers are cut into rusty steel strips, the harsh quotes intentionally contrasting with the quiet landscape.

When I visited it, the site of the former camp seemed eerily misplaced. Even though I found myself in one of the most densely populated areas of Europe, surrounded by millions of people and with one of the largest steel plants of the state just across the road, under the grey winter sky filled with sleet that crackled on the lines between the electricity pylons it felt like a much more remote site, like a former camp of the Moorsoldaten on the heath in Lower Saxony or place of long-lost tragedy somewhere in rural Brandenburg.  

I came to be immediately fascinated by the site, and have returned there a few times now, always discovering new paths, new leftovers of history: half-buried tracks leading nowhere, blackened and cracked concrete foundations in the undergrowth.  Maybe I return here because the setting and the emotions I project the former inmates to have left here correspond to my mood these days, constantly slightly on edge, constantly mistrusting my fellow man. But then I also discovered that the park is never really deserted, and encountered dog walkers, joggers and mothers pushing buggies through the gloom, all keeping their social distance while doing the same thing as I do, exercising outdoors. I wonder what the park looks like in summer: it is surely not shunned by the people from the nearby estates, and even if they bring blankets and beer and sandwiches, and play frisbee on the largest of the hills on a summer weekend it would not be disrespectful but appropriate.    

***

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.

Watch: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

In a discussion based a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year, Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year. Thanks so much to everyone who attended and took time out to spend a Monday evening with us. This was the first ever Elsewhere online event, and hopefully it won’t be the last… but equally, we hope to see some of you in person in 2021 too!

The essays:

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton