Wiesenburg: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

Field notes from Brandenburg:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Berlin: A spring diary

By Paul Scraton:

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

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

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

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

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

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

We walk the city to remember. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Dortmund: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

In the bowels of Dortmund station I look at a map of the city and try to get a sense of this place I’ve arrived in for the first time. The orientation points are limited by a lack of natural landmarks, like a river or a coastline, and my own ignorance. There’s a harbour, a river port through which much of the coal and steel that made this city once moved. There’s a ring road where the city walls once stood, surrounding what the historic old town that was very much destroyed by the bombing raids of the Second World War. And there is the Westfalenstadion, now named for a financial services company, home to a football club who have taken the name of Dortmund around the world and whose stickers in distinctive black and yellow occupy every lamppost, bus shelter and abandoned shop front in the city.

Our hotel is in the Nordstadt, divided from the city centre by the railway lines that function in the way that rivers do in other cities. Instead of bridges, there are long and dark tunnels underneath the tracks, giving each side a distinct feeling of being over here compared to over there. I am in the city for a panel discussion on the subject of borders at the Dortmunder U, an impressive arts space that occupies the giant brick building that was once a brewery. It is on the other side of the tracks from the hotel, and it feels fitting somehow that we have to cross beneath the tunnel to reach it, the lonely walk beneath the tracks as a reminder that borders and boundaries can take different forms in different places.

But we have some time before we need to make that journey, and so we walk out from the hotel in search of the harbour. From the docks at Dortmund it is a 269-kilometre journey along the Dortmund-Ems Canal to reach the North Sea. Unlike many canals, obsolete soon after they were built thanks to the coming of the railway, the Dortmund-Ems waterway was dug out of the western German soil in the 1890s precisely to alleviate the demand on the railway network, such was the freight transportation needs of the industrial city and the surrounding area. It helped turn the Port of Dortmund into one of the largest inland ports in Europe, with eleven kilometres of piers and one which, despite a decline since a peak in the 1970s, continues to move some three million tonnes of goods a year.

As we follow streets between the docks, past abandoned warehouses and coach parks for vehicles with number plates from Serbia, Croatia and Kosovo, it reminds me of Liverpool and Rostock, of Gdansk and Belfast, with that similar feel of port areas that still have enough cranes and shipping containers to suggest that work is being done but a distinct lack of people. And in the spaces where once they might have worked, other businesses have moved in. A bicycle parts wholesalers. A club venue with a view over the water and no neighbours to disturb. A portacabin and patch of wasteland behind a high fence, a place to park your caravan or camper van over the winter. Cranes move, high above on the other side of the street at the Container Terminal. The port functions. 

From beside the Container Terminal the road rises up, past the ornate old harbour administration building, to lead us back towards the Nordstadt and our hotel. From the bridge we can see across the port and over towards the city centre, the huge U atop the former brewery clearly visible. We have started to find our orientation points. 

The next morning, we move once more beneath the railway tracks to walk through the pedestrian area of the city centre, almost entirely rebuilt during the West German economic miracle to replace the medieval core that had been blown to pieces during the bombing raids. With its mix of mid- to late-twentieth century shop fronts it reminds me not only of other city centres I’ve passed through in this part of the world, but also those of my childhood, of parts of Manchester or Liverpool visited on Saturday afternoon shopping trips. Can you choose twin cities based on a feeling? Despite a light drizzle, the streets are busy, with shoppers and those who, judging by their hats, scarves and shirts that peak out from beneath heavy winter jackets, are getting ready for tonight’s game. I can’t help but feel that the fans of Liverpool FC and the two Manchester clubs who, in recent years, have come to Dortmund to support their team, would also have also found much to remind them of home. 

Back at the Dortmunder U we take an elevator to the very top floor and step out onto a roof terrace beneath the giant letter that is visible from across the city and look down on the ring road and the city centre and its collection of glass and steel office blocks that speak to the new industries that have replaced the old. There’s no interest here in managed decline. I can see the television tower and the railway tracks, and the cranes of the harbour. Over there, in the gloom, the groundskeeper will be putting the final touches to his Champions League stage set. I have been in the city for less than twenty-four hours, and I’m still ignorant of Dortmund, of what the city is and what it means to the people that live here. But I also know that when I return to the station and look at the map, I’ll already have a better sense of what I’m looking at than I did yesterday.

It’s a start. 

***

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

Usedom: A winter diary

By Paul Scraton:

We have travelled north to the Baltic in the lowest of low seasons, to reflect on the passing of another year and another decade at a place that has meant so much to us over the recent and not-so-recent past. It feels like we are the only ones here, in our thatched house divided into apartments, and we move quietly up the stairs despite knowing there is no-one around to disturb. We arrive after dark, so we know our location only from the little blue spot on the map, but the morning will come and we will step out onto the village’s quiet streets, to walk from one side of the island to the other.

The next morning, when we reach the harbour the view across the inland sea is obscured by the mist that has rolled in off the Baltic and covered the island. Is there any point to this? We ask ourselves the question, but still we press on, following a farmer’s track across the field to the lookout point. It is a gesture more of hope than expectation, for visibility is down to less than fifty metres, but we are rewarded. First we hear the call, loud and distinctive, sounding through the mist. And then we spot it, standing tall in the misty field. A white-tailed eagle, its distinctive beak visible even in this strange half-light. After a moment it takes flight, and we catch a momentary glimpse of its impressive silhouette, before it disappears into the mist and the clouds, soaring high and out of sight. Perhaps it manages to get high enough for a glimpse of the sun. We can only imagine. 

It will be a day of shadowy apparitions, of figures emerging and retreating as we make the short walk that will lead us across the island from the lagoon to the sea. We leave the last of the village houses and enter a low landscape of fields, drained by ditches and surrounded by dykes, home to bulls, sheep and horses. In the distance, we spy a couple striding along a dyke-top path that my map tells me is a dead end. In the other direction, two cars meet at the end of a bumpy track beside a collection of tumbledown wooden buildings. I imagine a conversation through open windows and something in the boot, to be transferred from one car to the other.

You cannot help but summon scenes and images when the mist obscures almost everything that would normally be in sight. The footpath enters a forest, rising and falling between dense evergreen trees before we come across a brick house behind a high wall and metal gates. There are empty flagpoles in the garden, three of them, and they suggest a story, a history, that is unavailable to us in the mist. Unhappy is the land in need of heroes, and insecure is the land with too many flagpoles. But those poles were erected in a country that no longer exists, and however insecure we might be, not all of us are waving flags.  

Across the main road and the railway tracks, we enter the resort, where the houses sit on low cliffs above the beach and dunes, with a view across the stilled waters of the Baltic Sea. The kiosks and beer gardens are shuttered and closed, but smoke rises from the chimneys of holiday homes and light shines behind net curtains in some of the windows. In the distance the mist curls around the white towers of a grand hotel, that seems less grand the closer we get. The walls are water-stained and the terrace canopies tattered, with grass poking through cracks in the paving stones and a handwritten note posted in a smudged window to tell us the bar is closed for the season. 

In the 1920s this was the preserve of silent film stars, who travelled north from the studios of Berlin to take the water and the sea air. Now, at the start of the 2020s, the town was quiet, the posters outside the hotel advertising karaoke nights and tribute acts, and evenings with members of GDR-rock bands, the skeleton staff stalking the echoing halls in service of the handful of guests. 

We walk through the dunes, past an old fishing boat long out of service, and for the first time we see the waters of the Baltic. At the beach, the sand, sea and sky blend almost into one as ghostly figures walk the sands. In the mist it has been a kind of half-light all day, and now even that is fading. It is as if the town, the hotels, and the island itself is just waiting. The new year has begun. A new decade. But not here. Not yet. Only when the mist lifts, and the sun starts to shine once more.

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