When the goal goes in it feels like our neighbourhood is going to explode. Even more so at the final whistle. Throughout the day I’ve seen flags everywhere. Outside the cafes and hanging out of car windows. Three young women on their way home from school or college all have their team kits on, hours before kick-off. When Germany plays, we can hear the goals go in by the delayed cheers of neighbours, the speed to which they see the ball hit the net depending on their cable or internet connection. But when it is Turkey, the noise is something else. 

If Gesundbrunnen is celebrating, it has to be said that it took some time. Maybe no-one expected them to get this far, but most of the flags and the knock-off merchandise for sale on Badstraße came after the first couple of good results. 

*

Another day. Another sport. Mark Cavendish rolls back the years to win his record-breaking 35th stage on the Tour de France. A few years ago he thought he would have to retire because he couldn’t find a team willing to give him a contract. What happened next is now cycling history.

Ten years ago we were on the side of the road in Otley and then up on the moors for the stages of the Tour de France in Yorkshire. The pubs in town changed their names. People dug out their old bicycles from the shed to spray-paint them yellow or white with red polka dots. One of the greatest things about what might be the greatest of all sporting events is its accessibility. You just have to look at a map of the stage and find your spot by the side of the road, and you can be a part of it. 

Hopefully one day I’ll get to see it in France. Despite everything, it is perhaps my favourite sporting event. Or maybe not even because of the bad parts of the race’s history. Maybe that is all just a part of it. The triumphs and the disasters. The incredible performances and the all-too-flawed heroes. It’s all about the stories. 

*

The third Salon Weißensee at Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, this time with Marcel Krueger, Jessica J Lee and Dasom Yang. I read a work-in-progress, something that is part of the preparation for my residency in Wrocław later in the month. It is about the Karow Ponds.

These are all the stories of the edgelands. The gravel pits and drainage channels, places that once filtered the waste of four million souls that became an unplanned gift from the past to the present. Neither urban or rural, the ponds and their footpaths offer respite from a city they are part of and owe their existence to, and yet somehow feels so very far away when surrounded by the thick, heavy air of summer and the persistent buzz of insects.

If you follow the path beyond the last of the ponds, along the edge of the fields, you reach a small stream. You can follow that through a tunnel under the road and then another beneath the Autobahn. Now the old sewage fields stretch out towards the horizon. The last notes are scrawled at the top of an otherwise blank page.

Clusters of trees and huge electricity pylons. Gravel tracks and worn down desire paths. A red kite against a bleached blue sky.

This is Berlin.

I wrote.

But not quite.

In the hotel in Dömitz, overlooking the Elbe, the German team line up on the television screen ahead of their match with Spain. The first bars of the national anthem sound and the room falls quiet. It is a little awkward. One man stands up. He is about sixty, with white hair tied back into a tight ponytail. He wears a Germany shirt, but not one produced by Adidas or any kit supplier. His wife stays sitting next to him. He puts his hand on his chest and sings gently. His voice is soft, almost tender. The rest of the room watches the screen while listening to him. 

Beyond the television, through the window, we can see the Elbe. This stretch of the river was once the inner-German border, our hotel a grain-storage silo in a restricted zone, West Germany on the opposite bank. Across the harbour is a watchtower. It is the only real remnant of the border in sight. Later, I will meet a woman who lived in the town when it was hard against the border.

‘You didn’t really think about it,’ she said, about the fence at the bottom of her garden. ‘I felt sorry for the guard’s dogs. But otherwise it was just normal. We didn’t know any different.’

Back then, if she wanted to see the river she would have had to travel south, into Brandenburg and on towards Magdeburg, where the GDR controlled both banks and access to the dykes and paths no longer reserved to the men in the watchtowers and their dogs.

The anthem finishes. The man sits down. Conversation starts again. Germany give a good account of themselves, but in the end Spain are too strong. And so, despite their early performances, it looks like hope now rests with England.

*

Reading Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck. In it, two characters in East Berlin discuss the national anthems of the two Germanys.

– Odd, really, the anthem of a socialist country starting with the most Christian word there is: Resurrected.

– I don’t think it’s odd. It’s just the way it is. You can only make something new after some thoroughgoing destruction.

*

We take a boat trip along the river. The guy sitting next to us has just come from the hospital. He had come here with his elderly father, taking the place of his mother who died a few months ago. His father fell sick and is now on a ward, although the man is hopeful that he will get better.

‘I didn’t know what else to do?’ he says, as if trying to justify his presence on the boat. ‘I visited this morning, but otherwise I just have to wait. And I always wanted to take a boat trip on the Elbe.’

He will get no judgement from me. We move out from the harbour and onto the river, the captain giving us snippets from time to time as most of his passengers try to decide what cake to have with their coffee. Overhead a white-tailed eagle soars. It is an incredible sight. We share the binoculars. Our waitress, delivering the cake, looks up and smiles, as if recognising an old friend.

*

What can you see in the shallows? An oystercatcher on the sandbank. An abandoned bucket from a long-ago fishing trip. Cattle at rest in the shade of a silver willow.

On the wall of Goethestraße 25 is a plaque dedicated to Anna Wolffenstein. She was the last Jewish resident of the town, before she was deported to the camps. I try to work out what her journey would have been. Most likely she would have been taken first to Schwerin and then to Berlin. From there it would have been a cattle truck from Anhalter Bahnhof to Theresienstadt, the fortress concentration camp on the Elbe. The same river that used to flow a hundred metres or so from Anna’s house.

The Jewish population of the town had been decreasing long before the Holocaust, but it was under the Nazis that the Jewish cemetery was finally cleared. I wander around for a while, trying to find it. A few steps lead up to an overgrown path between two fences, and then a green gate with a Star of David. A cluster of trees and a single memorial at the centre. All the remains.

One of the Jewish families of the town left for the United Kingdom. The father would return after the war, to East Germany and the restricted zone, to periodically tend to the grave sites of the family who had remained in the earth long after their descendants had fled or been murdered.

*

I already know that this month I will only spend seven nights in Berlin. From Dömitz, on the Elbe, we have a pit stop in the city before heading out to Wiesenburg. We walk through the dry valleys of the High Fläming Heath, known as Rummel, where legends linger in a place where folklore seems mostly to have been lost in the shifting of the sandy soil and the movements of people caused by war, disease, regime change and the shifting of borders.

*

Back to the Elbe and the modern engineering wonder of the ship canal bridge, crossing the river and transporting boats, barges and ships high above the river. In our corner of Germany it is rare to have a view, but climbing up the embankment to the level of the bridge seems to open up the sky. It reminds me of something Dorthe Nors writes in A Line In The World about her yearning for the west coast during her time in Copenhagen:

I want to wake beneath a sky that is grey and miserable, but which creates a space of colossal dimensions in a second, when the light comes ashore. A horizon is what I want, and I want solitude.

The sky is anything but grey and miserable today, but as we stand on the bridge, the swallows ducking and diving beneath us, we have a horizon and we have the place pretty much to ourselves.

I take the train to Wrocław for my residency, funded by Culture Moves Europe and supported by the BWA Galleries of Contemporary Art. I am there to make connections and start work on a project titled The Fields, all about the former sewage irrigation fields of the city, that share a history with similar spaces in the edgelands of Berlin. But I am also travelling to learn more about Wrocław itself, the culture and the history of a city that has had many names over the years.

As with most Central European cities, Norman Davies writes in his book about Wrocław, the problem of nomenclature is a thorny one. When a city has a different name for every nationality that lays claim to it, to prefer one version over another is to make a political statement and to risk causing offence. Nonetheless, a ready solution comes to hand when one realises the choice does not lie between two stark alternatives – Breslau or Wrocław – but rather between the scores of variants which the historical sources contain.

Davies decided to title each period of the city’s history with the name most appropriate for that era, based on the historical sources. It is something I have wrestled with before, especially in relation to Germany and Poland. My solution was always similar: to name the place based on the period I am writing about. And so, in 1945, the Allied bombs fell on Swinemünde. In 2015, I visited Świnoujście to tell that story among many others about the Baltic shore.

*

Going backwards in time:

Wrocław 

Breslau

Bresslau

Presslaw

Vretslav

Wrotizla

But what do you call the place when no-one knows that the city’s name actually was? Davies goes for ‘Island City’.

And when he is not sure?

Whenever we are in a quandary we use the name that was first introduced by literate Latin-speaking clergy more than a thousand years ago and which is still with us: VRATISLAVIA.

*

I explore the fields with Katarzyna from the BWA and Piotr, a musician and sound artist from Gdańsk. We discover traces of the infrastructure among the reeds and long grass, pick our way through the riparian forest that stands between the old sewage treatment fields and the Odra river, and peer through the fence at the pump house. 

Piotr collects the sounds of the fields, from the calls of the finches and the yellowhammers, our footsteps on the path and distant sounds of the trains heading out from Wrocław. The pulpits are empty of their hunters and the sky is quiet, except for the beating wings of a marsh harrier and the occasional buzz of the light aircrafts that have quite possibly the best view of all.

*

How do you experience the stories of a city? In Wrocław I walk from where I am staying in the southern suburbs and into the city centre, getting a feel for the neighbourhoods I would otherwise only pass through by choosing to move on foot. I read books about the city and novels by Polish writers. I meet artists and curators and people working for literary and cultural foundations, and I have conversations with my new friends and all manner of Vratislavians. And as the days pass by, I make some stories of my own. I find my corners, my places. Ones that I will return to and look for when I come back to this city in the months and years to come. 

The reedbeds and desire paths along the Ślęża river. The shaded trails of what was once a cemetery and is now the Grabiszyński park. The shelves and cosy corners of the Tajne Komplety bookstore. The alleyway outside, and the tables of the Proza bar. The preposterous train station. The galleries of the BWA. The cafes, bars and restaurants under the railway tracks, where I sit and chat and share ideas with Katrin, with Kasia and Aleksandra, and with Berenika. 

And of course: the fields.

We travel to the fields at first light, Kasia collecting me from outside the house at 4.30am. We arrive as the sun is just pushing up above the trees of the forest in the distance. Mist hangs above the fields as we follow old cobblestone roads and make our own paths through the long grass to find a place to simply sit and be for a while. We see deer grazing in the distance. We hear moorhens, goldfinches, golden orioles and the sound of the train to Poznań. I am about to write that we have the place to ourselves but of course we don’t. We might be the only humans though.

*

In Grabiszyński park you’ll find the Monument to Common Memory, a recognition – created in 2008 – of the more than forty cemeteries that were destroyed in the transition from German Breslau to Polish Wrocław after the redrawing of Europe’s borders at the end of the Second World War. It is, I think, an important recognition of the history of the place. We can only find belonging if we build relationships, and we can only build the relationships through recognition of what has gone before.

The memorial has been created using surviving headstones of graves from the old cemeteries, including inscriptions in both German and Hebrew. The dedication is in both Polish and German and is to the memory of the former residents of our city buried in cemeteries that no longer exist.

It reminds me of the Cemetery of Lost Cemeteries in Gdańsk, a place I wrote about in the novel BUILT ON SAND and which has a similar function in that city. There, the fragments of shattered headstones, with inscriptions in German, Polish and Hebrew and which represent the city’s former residents of all faiths, whose resting places were destroyed during the Second World War or in the years after.

How do we remember, when memory is painful? How do we remember, when memory is contested? How do we remember, when there is no longer anyone around who can recall the times before?

We built relationships to places by writing our own stories too. Katrin arrives for the weekend and we spend the day walking the city. The Island City still has islands, even if the Cathedral Island is no longer an island (and Museum Square doesn’t have a museum in it). The exhibition at BWA Studio is called KROKI or STEPS is all about walking:

When we walk, the horizon of our experience is defined by the distance we are able to cover on our own feet. The collective exhibition KROKI / STEPS refers to the conceptual and performative foundations of the contemporary reflection on walking in art – from the motif of pilgrimage, through political steps, to walking in the aspect of the migration crisis.

*

The month ends but my time in Wrocław is not over yet. Still, I am asked to give a presentation about my residency for the team at the BWA. I make it about memory and the importance of stories, two things that speak as strongly in this city.

In thinking about how we create, how we write, and how we tell stories, it is in the power of those who have gone before that I take solace. In the words of Sebald or Drndić. In the journalism of Joseph Roth or the drawings, sculptures and woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz. The British poet Ruth Padel once wrote that ‘No poem ever stopped a tank. But,’ she added, ‘by putting vivid words, memorably together, in ways that resonate more loudly the deeper you go, poetry can address huge issues very powerfully.

I finish with some words I had already written, a few years ago for an essay for a Norwegian journal. It was titled Against Forgetting. In this city, where the population almost completely changed in a matter of years, it felt right:

The stories we choose to tell will help us shape what comes next. There is a famous line from Hegel that tells us we learn from history that we do not learn from history. It need not be the case. Yet we need to keep telling the right stories, the truthful stories. Even when there is no-one left to remember it is within our power, those who remain, not to forget.

*

I meet Kuba from the Wrocław Culture Institute. We talk about many things; about stories and memory, the history of this city, what is remembered and what is forgotten. And we talk about belonging and how we built a relationship with a place. He tells me about the flood of 1997, when much of the city was underwater. Of course, as there hadn’t been a major flood since Breslau had become Wrocław, there was a certain missing collective or folk memory, which perhaps made the situation worse than it might otherwise been. But something else happened too.

It was, Kuba says, that people had to really fight for the city for the first time. It was a turning point. People had to fight for the city, they had to work for the relationship they had for the city, and they started to feel belonging. And something else too. When the high water mark was added to buildings, to show future generations what they had to fight against, it was alongside the high water marks of previous disastrous floods. The details of 1997, recorded by Polish hands, would go alongside those recorded by Germans. 

The history of the city is shared.

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton

Hundreds of young people – mostly young women – queue patiently on the square between the arena and the Spree, the river glistening like the glitter on the faces around me and that clings to the homemade merchandise lovingly created for this moment. There is a kind of uniform, based around white tank-tops scrawled with song lyrics, fishnet tights and big don’t-mess-with-me boots. Tinny versions of bad idea right? sound across the square as last minute tik tok videos are filmed to mark the occasion.

‘Don’t push!,’ the security guard shouts as he moves the crowd closer to the doors. ‘Walk! Move slowly!’

Despite the excitement for the concert, for that moment when Olivia Rodrigo will bound onto the stage full of enthusiasm for life, no-longer-teenage angst and sarcastic lyrics about idiot ex boyfriends, everyone does what the security guard says. No one wants to miss the show.

The atmosphere is wholly positive. I exchange knowing looks with other dads, but we are all seemingly pleased to be here. The show crashes into action at 8pm and for the next two hours the vast majority of the crowd sing and feel every word. Caught in the middle of it all, I cannot help but smile. 

I am a long way away from the time of life Olivia Rodrigo is exploring, explaining and sharing with her fans, but there is something about it all that takes me back. The hopes and fears. The anticipation. The dread. There is not a single part of me that would go back, but I am happy for the young people all around me that this woman on stage is one of their guides.

‘If you are here with your best friend, give them a hug.’

‘If you are here with your mom or your dad… give them a hug.’

Lotte and I are still hugging when the next song starts. The girls behind us, a chaotic mix of Disney Club and Riot Grrrl, belt out every word. Their voices are going but they do not care. Soon enough it is all over, but the songs carry on, down the street and blasted from car stereos, shouted at the tops of their voices. Ten thousand young women spread out into the night, walking taller on their heavy black boots. There’s fun to be had. Love to be won and lost. Mistakes to be made.

Fuck it, it’s fine. 

*

Two weeks out from the European Football Championships the state broadcaster ARD publishes the results of a survey that shows 21% of people in Germany would like to see more white players in the national team. It is part of a documentary that explores issues of racism in Germany, but as a headline the intentions of why the questions were asked are lost amid the hand-wringing of the press and the understandable annoyance and anger of the German team’s manager and players. It is a statistic that begs so many questions. Not least: if you asked the same in England, France or Italy, what would the answer be?

On Franz Kafka’s birthday, reading his diaries that have been published in English in a new translation.

In periods of transition, as the past week has been for me and at least this moment still is, I’m often seized by a sad but calm astonishment at my emotionlessness. I am separated from all things by a hollow space, to the boundary of which I don’t even push myself.

This speaks to how I sometimes feel both in the UK and in Germany, as if I started a period of transition more than twenty years ago and never came out the other side. 

*

Our house in Wiesenburg is at the top of a small rise – ‘on the mountain’, one of our neighbours once said – and the only running water nearby are a couple of streams that spend most of the year as dry ditches. But our conversation over the back fence is of the floods in southern Germany; horror stories from family members close to Lake Constance that give more detail to the images flashing up on the evening news.

Whole streets are turned to rivers. Houses have chunks taken out of them by the power of the water. Cars are lifted from their parking spaces and carried away.

Jahrhunderthochwasser.

Flood of the century. And yet, they are happening with an ever increasing frequency.

Meanwhile, the polls suggest the biggest losers of the upcoming elections will be Europe’s green parties, and the most gains for those who insist the world is not burning, the flood waters are not rising, and that the climate crisis is the invention of shadowy, global elites.

‘People will only take it seriously when it impacts them directly,’ we used to say. Now I am not even sure about that. We can see and feel it all around us. Melted glaciers. Ravaged forests. Jahrhunderthochwasser that comes every couple of years. And still we don’t learn.

*

Lotte is eighteen. It seems improbable, impossible even. A midnight taxi ride through empty Berlin streets to a Pankow hospital. Katrin admitted but I was sent home. Nothing will happen until the morning, they said. So I stayed up all night and watched episodes of Teachers and listened to Pulp and waited for the sun to rise and the new adventure to begin.

Now it feels like we are at the starting line again. Only, Katrin and I are increasingly going to be onlookers rather than active participants. It’s exciting and scary and a bit discombobulating. Lotte seems to be taking it in her stride. I think we did alright. 

Election day. We vote in the function room of the Luisenbad library, once the entrance hall of a grand dancehall almost completely lost to the bombs of the Second World War. Back in 2016, not long after the Brexit referendum in the UK and just ahead of Trump’s election to American President, Marcel Krueger and I read from Joseph Roth’s The Man in the Barbershop in the library courtyard as part of an event on the subject of ‘Democracy without Populism’.

Marcel read the original German and I read the English translation of an essay Roth wrote in 1921 about a boorish man who enters a barbershop in Berlin and starts to fill the room with his thoughts and ideas. More than that, he wants agreement on where his thoughts take him.

“The farther north you go,” he says, early on in his monologue, “the more nationalist people are. In Hamburg they’re really excited about Flag Day. Well, you’ll see. It’s on its way. Can’t be stopped. On, on!”

Roth’s essay was a warning about the rising tide of nationalism in Germany. Twelve years later, he would leave Berlin with Hitler’s appointment to Chancellor, having long understood where the times were heading.

You will have realized by now that we are drifting towards great catastrophes, he wrote in a letter to his friend Stefan Zweig on his departure. Apart from the private — our literary and financial existence is destroyed — it all leads to a new war. I won’t bet a penny on our lives. They have succeeded in establishing a reign of barbarity. Do not fool yourself. Hell reigns.

From the barbershop to the Chancellory to bombs on the ballroom and the gas chambers of the east. As we leave the polling station the sun is shining.

*

We head south, to Köpenick and the stadium on the edge of the forest. 1.FC Union Berlin’s women’s team are playing their promotion play-off and 18,000 fans have filled the stadium on all sides. The team do their bit, winning comfortably to all-but ensure their status in the Bundesliga 2 next season. We leave the stadium in high spirits, and cannot bring ourselves to check the exit polls just yet. Let the good mood linger a while longer.

*

The AfD polls strongly across the country and especially in the eastern states. The far-right makes gains across the continent. In Germany at least, this is a vote from the young as well the old, with 16% of under-25s voting AfD, an 11% gain on the election five years ago. A sense of insecurity, economic worries and lack of hope for the future, are some of the factors given for the vote that appears to be mirrored in other countries across the continent. 

In Sylt, a group of young party goers film themselves singing ‘Foreigners Out!’ while one of them gives a Hitler salute in the background. In Politico Nicholas Vinocur and Victor Goury-Laffont use the election results and the media furore about Sylt as a starting point to explore why some of Europe’s young people (the majority still vote for left-leaning parties) are turning towards the far right.

The answer is a hodgepodge of factors ranging from Europe’s cost-of-living crisis to the isolation many youths suffered during the COVID lockdown years to a delayed backlash following the bloc’s 2015 migration crisis when nearly two million migrants flowed into the bloc. But there are also more intangible factors, linked to the fact that many young people experience politics solely via social media platforms like X and TikTok where far-right content glorifying the “Great Replacement” theory and linking immigration to violence runs unchecked.

In France, a snap election is called. In Germany, the coalition stumbles on. In the UK, no longer taking part in the European elections, Reform polls in the high teens ahead of the general election next month. 

Is the man in the barbershop confident once again?

*

At the Topography of Terror in the centre of Berlin, the exhibition is filled with tourists as well as groups of young people from Germany and beyond, brought to this site of memory as part of school trips to Berlin, to hear the story of how the Nazis used violence and terror to take and maintain power, and what the consequences were.

Inside, a temporary exhibition titled ‘Weimar under Attack’ explores the violent beginnings of the Republic, around about the same time Roth was listening in to the conversations of the city for his essays and newspaper articles..

Violence, the exhibition states, is commonly accompanied by unrestrained language. From the beginning of the Weimar Republic, the political rhetoric is frequently abusive, defamatory, vitriolic (…) Political opponents are declared “traitors”, “criminals” and “enemies” – exclusionary terms that suggest they must be combated with all means available, ultimately also physical violence.

It is of course too simple to draw parallels between then and now. History never repeats itself in exactly the same way. But it is worth listening for the echoes. 

A walk through the city with a friend. Last night, Nadine played at the Privatclub. Today we wander through sunny streets and try to make sense of how the world has changed since we last saw each other, before the pandemic. Before the explosion in Beirut. Before Ukraine. Before Gaza. It is hard to find the words. 

*

A fleeting visit to Belfast once more. We look at the weather radar to try and find a gap between the showers. Our walk takes us along the river and then up to the Giants Ring. There are subtle changes in the month or so since we were last up here. Everything is a little greener. More flowers are in bloom. The city is still hidden in the hollow between where we stand and the Belfast hills beyond. 

Back at the house, having got back before the rain came, I flick through Heinrich Böll’s Irish Journal in the kitchen.

The rain here is absolute, magnificent, and frightening. To call this rain bad weather is as inappropriate as to call scorching sunshine fine weather. You can call this rain bad weather, but it is now. It is simply weather, and weather means rough weather.

*

On a Friday evening in Guiseley, on the other side of the Irish Sea, we sit on picnic benches beside the cricket pitch and watch the kids play as the European Championships are shown on the big screen in the bar behind. We watch sport to escape. To entertain and distract. To think about something else, for ninety minutes or the period of an innings. 

Back home in Germany there are hundreds of thousands of fans drinking and dancing, mixing on the streets, in the squares and in the stadiums, and for the vast majority of the time it is peaceful, joyful and a lot of fun. The Scottish team are woeful but the fans are honoured and welcomed guests. The Dutch team are not much better but their supporters paint the town orange. The German fans revel in a team that has not (yet) let them down.

Is it just bread and circuses? Or can it bring us something else, something positive in a time when everything seems hopeless and lost?

Rules in the fan parks and public viewing zones banning any flags (read Palestinian or Israeli) that don’t belong to a participating nation remind us that the wider world can never be ignored for long. And it leads to the question of how we can possibly celebrate the skill of Musiala or a goal by Georgia, the talents of a sixteen year-old Spanish kid or the drama of a last-minute equaliser, when so much of the world is burning.

*

Reading Ivan Klima, Czech novelist and survivor of Theresienstadt. His novel Love and Garbage was banned under communism in Czechoslovakia in 1986, but became a bestseller once the ban was lifted after the collapse of the regime and the coming of democracy.

The amount of freedom is not increasing in our age, even though it may sometimes seem to be. All that increases is the needless movement of things, words, garbage and violence. And because nothing can vanish from the face of our planet, the fruits of our activity do not liberate us but bury us. 

*

We walk out from Menston and up onto the hills and to the moor. These are places filled with memories. Ten years ago we walked here on the day before the Tour de France started in Yorkshire, and we saw Team Sky roll their way along the narrow lanes on a final warm-up before the Grand Depart. Today, the group of cyclists we meet at the cafe where we stop for tea and bacon sandwiches are riding battery-powered gravel bikes. As we walk on, we spot curlews and lapwings, red kites above the reservoir and hear the sound of oystercatchers a long way from the seashore. The path back down into the village takes in an old shooting range, a millpond hidden by a patch of woodland and the clash of architectural styles that tells the story of a place over time, the needs and priorities of any given age, and the things that change and the things that stay the same.

*

Lotte’s school career is over. She gets her Abitur diploma at a ceremony by the lake. For seventeen years she has been going to the same street in the centre of Berlin, first for her childminders, then for nursery, then primary school and then secondary school. Her Grade 1 primary school teacher is here to see her pick up her diploma, as is her form teacher from secondary school and so many others who helped her along the way. 

We see our fellow parents, some of whom we met while sitting on tiny kindergarten chairs at a first parents’ evening back in 2009. We remember those who were there then and who are no longer with us. And we marvel at the young people that sit in front of us in their gowns, even though it only feels like yesterday that we were having to make sure they had enough nappies and wet-weather clothes in their little cubby holes outside the playroom.  

In many cases, we have not seen each other for a couple of years, as a global pandemic and our children’s increasing independence means no meet-ups at the school gates or for an end-of-year picnic. I’m not sure how we parents are all handling it, but the young people seem ready for the next steps and the adventures to come. It is going to be a change for all of us.

*

The morning after the party. We stayed in the hotel by the lake, and so I run / hike up the trails from the lakeside and into the Müggelberge – Berlin’s mini mountain range. This is the city’s highest natural point, and the sign points to Berlin’s highest mountain. But history in this place will always have its say, and there are “mountains” made of the rubble of war and the refuse of a city that reached out to where I am standing now that are now higher than the Großer Müggelberg and its fleeting views of the lake and the city beyond. 

At the top a cyclist takes a selfie with the summit cross while a woodpecker hammers at one of the trees that surround us. And then I follow the trail down, a steep winding path that takes me back to the lakeshore to hear those stories of the night before, after the parents exited stage left, heads full of memories, and let the kids get on with the first dance of the rest of their lives. 

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton

Waiting for an early May Day train back into the city, there is time to explore the old railway sidings and overgrown tracks beside Wiesenburg station. They once led to an industrial complex beside the station, where only a couple of buildings and the old gate remain. Part of the property is now a nature- and disc-golf course. The rest is being prepared for a new ‘co-living village’, the future set out in a weather-faded sign hanging from the outer fence. Progress, it seems, is slow. Another springtime brings new plants to grow up through the cracks. The only movement behind the fence comes from some heavy bees moving between the flowers. But it is May Day after all.

*

In the newly renamed English-language magazine The Berliner, the history of May Day in the city is told, from the first rally held at the Neue Welt in Hasenheide in 1890 to the present day. The piece quotes Rosa Luxemburg, writing 130 years ago:

As long as the struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie and the ruling class continues, as long as all demands are not met, May Day will be the yearly expression of these demands. And, when better days dawn, when the working class of the world has won its deliverance then too humanity will probably celebrate May Day in honour of the bitter struggles and the many sufferings of the past.

*

The garden grows. There are birds everywhere. Wagtails and black redstarts. Blackbirds and housemartins. As dusk arrives, so do the bats. The first barbecue of the year turns into a campfire. We spend time together talking, while staring into the flames as they flicker in the half-light. Down by the town hall, someone has chopped the May Tree down. Pranksterism, it seems, is a tradition. But not one appreciated by all. 

*

Down at Wannsee bathing beach, in the 1920s and early 1930s, bathers would stake out their territory according to political allegiance. Flags in the sand would declare this stretch for the Communist, another for the Social Democrats, and another for the National Socialists. Symbols sewn into the swimming trunks allowed everyone to know where you stood, even when in line for a portion of fries. Sunshine and beer would lead to territorial encroachment. Fights in the late afternoon. The police would come in along the alley through the woods. Berlin street violence transplanted via the S-Bahn lines to the lakeshore.

*

Today, the flags in the sands advertise outdoor brands. There are campervans and a climbing wall. Spin the wheel to win a rucksack or a sleeping bag. Try out a new kayak or a stand-up paddleboard. In the May sunshine we stand by the water’s edge and dream of the mountains and the coast.

The wonderful things in life are the things you do, not the things you have.

*

At BER airport, approaching midnight, things are settling down. The last of the flights have departed. The bakeries and cafes are closing. Security guards and police stroll the halls while those waiting for the very early morning flights are trying to make themselves comfortable on hard benches. In the corner, next to the lift for the railway platforms, there is a collection of sleeping compartments. They come with a bed, a dusk, air conditioning and a variety of lighting options.

Inside, the sounds of the airport are masked by the low hum of white noise. It feels somehow both futuristic and retro at the same time. Japan in the 1990s? To emerge from this cocoon at 4am, into an airport well on its way to waking up, is a strange and discombobulating experience.

The sun falls beyond the Belfast hills. All day the city has been alive to what is about to happen. The further we walked down the Lisburn Road, the percentage of people wearing fan shirts increased until, outside the Bowery pub, it seemed like everyone had bought into the day’s unofficial uniform. Every tour since Springsteen first crossed the Atlantic appears in the in evidence, the backs of all those shirts a collection of many thousands of hours on stage and many thousands of memories.

We all share something, on this playing field sandwiched between the motorway and the railway lines, and conversation comes easy.

‘I saw him in Cardiff. Brilliant…’

‘I’ve tickets for Wembley too…’

‘Did you go last year? I didn’t make it… My mum was having an operation and…’

There is relief and excitement. When your heroes are in their mid-70s, you wonder if this is the last time the E Street Band will come to town. Make it a night to remember, then. It surely is. From No Surrender to See You In My Dreams. The band play. Oh, can they play. Bruce apologises for his voice. No one cares. The sun sets beyond the hills. Tramps like us…

Darkness, but no one is ready to go home. Not yet. And so the band plays on…

*

We walk by the Lagan. Belfast’s river. Like all rivers, it has stories to tell. It links the countryside to the city. One community to another. Amy-Jane Beer, in a book picked up from the wonderful No Alibis bookshop in town:

Rivers are life, health, history, story, reflection, transmission, awe. They can be barriers and obstacles and boundaries, but more often they are corridors, portals, thin places or confluences. Like water itself, a river can be giver and taker of life…

From the river bank we climb up to the Giants Ring. What’s the story here? Nobody knows for sure. Lost to time. In the distance we can see those hills again. The outline of a face that inspired another story. Between us and there lies the city, but we cannot see it. It is hidden by the trees, by the grassy hillocks and thick bushes coming into bloom.

*

Cross the Irish Sea. In Manchester, between the showers, we walk through the city to the Castlefield Viaduct, part of a network of bridges that criss-cross the canals close to the oldest passenger railway station in the world. Liverpool Road station wasn’t used for long, and hasn’t even seen a goods train for about sixty years, but there are still plenty of trains passing this way and that, as we inspect the barges moored in the shadows beneath.

But not on the Castlefield Viaduct. This no longer carries trains. For years it was left to the elements and the seeds carried in on the Lancashire winds. Not so much rewilded as wilded-in-the-first-place, there grew a soft green carpet where the tracks once ran. One section is now managed by the National Trust, a Mancunian High Line with raised beds and space for classes and workshops, and other spots to simply take a break. On the day we visit they are making birdhouses as the tram rubbles by across the bridge next door.

Quotes from Octavia Hill, co-founder of the National Trust, remind us of the need for air and the sight of sky, while an artwork cast in iron speaks to the history of a place that was at the very epicentre of the Industrial Revolution.

Once a place of noise, industry and commerce, Castlefield is now a place of community, culture and recreation. Castlefield is authentic and it doesn’t stand still. It showcases what has gone before whilst opening its arms to the future.

Elbow in the new arena. A place of noise and community and culture. A night of joy. A perfect waste of time.

*

The People’s History Museum, right on the river, tells the story of the struggle for democracy and representation, from the Tin Plate Workers Oath and the Peterloo Massacre, to the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, the Clarion cyclists and fight for the women’s right to vote.

There is a small exhibit next to the story of the Co-operative movement that explores how music has played a role in many democratic struggles over the years. There is a poster for Nelson Mandela’s 70th Birthday Party at Wembley Stadium, when he was still locked in a South African prison cell. It was the first concert I can remember attending. But on this day, and in this place, the song that most quickly comes to mind is not from Dire Straits or Little Steven, but from Ewan MacColl:

I’m a rambler, I’m a rambler from Manchester way
I get all my pleasure the hard moorland way
I may be a wage slave on Monday
But I am a free man on Sunday

*

‘Welcome to the Manchester of Poland,’ Maciej says as we drive along the wide streets of Łódź, passing new office buildings, shopping centres and the crumbling remnants of the textile industry that built this city. Like Castlefield, plants have found their way into cracks in the brickwork, rooted in the legacies of the Industrial Revolution.

At midnight we walk through a crowded city centre to the old power station, now re-imagined as a film museum. Since the film school opened in Łódź in 1948, it is cinema as well as textiles that have put the city on the map. The two strands of history come together in The Promised Land, a film by Andrzej Wajda based on the novel by Władysław Reymont, set in the world of 19th-century Łódź. The past and the present came together during filming in the 1970s:

When Wajda began filming The Promised Land (1974), Łódź was still teeming with textile life, and some of the factories used equipment dating back to the 19th century. Today there is not much left of this Łódź…  

Still, a wander through the north of the city centre between thunderstorm showers offers traces and reminders. Łódź feels like a city that once knew exactly what it was for and is not trying to find itself again, now that the mills and factories and power stations have fallen silent. 

At the Łódź Literary House I talk with Maciej in front of a friendly festival crowd about Ghosts on the Shore. It was my first full-length book, written between 2015 and 2016, and published in English seven years ago this June. It has just been published in Polish translation. As I speak with Maciej, I try to remember the context in which I took those journeys to the Baltic coast and wrote the book. What has changed and what stayed the same. It was the time of a million refugees from Syria. There were anti-immigrant marches while a third of the population volunteered to help. I finished the book a few weeks before the Brexit vote in the UK. A Donald Trump Presidency seemed unimaginable.

A lot has changed. Some things have stayed the same.

After the reading we make a late night pilgrimage to the Hotel Savoy. It closed during the pandemic and is yet to re-open, but we were there to look at the plaque on the wall. It tells us, in Polish and in German, that Joseph Roth once stayed here in 1924. A hundred years after his visit – during which he was working on the novel titled Hotel Savoy – someone has stolen the sculpture of his face. So we are left with an incomplete memorial fixed to the wall of a shuttered hotel.

What next for the Hotel Savoy? What next for Łódź?

*

The joyful anticipation before a journey is always outweighed by the irritation of actually going… – Joseph Roth, writing for the Frankfurter Zeitung, June 1926.

*

In Warsaw… but not really. Not yet. From arriving on the train from Łódź, I travel with Kasia from the publishing house to their bookshop/office not far from the Jewish museum in what was once part of the Warsaw Ghetto. I spend the day between the books and on the Baltic shore, talking to journalists and readers about my memories of those coastline explorations. It is interesting what different readers focus on: the family stories or the parallels to Poland. The notion of borders, both political and geographic. What the sea holds and what the sea hides. The books written and the songs sung. Caspar David Friedrich’s Monk on a clifftop and how two people sharing a low stage in a Warsaw basement can have had such differing experiences of Greifswald.

The Old Town is thronged with people, most of whom seem to be a member of some kind of group. Adults with lanyards. School children with matching caps. Like much of Warsaw’s city centre, the Old Town was almost completely destroyed during the Second World War, and its reconstruction was one of the first ever attempts to resurrect a historic city core.

Elsewhere in the city, Warsaw seems to reach for the sky in a way that no other European capital, except maybe London, has gone in for. Huge steel and glass towers rise up as if trying to block the view of the Palace of Culture, itself a monumental wedding-cake of a building that refuses to be overshadowed. Indeed, it somehow seems to be all the more striking now surrounded by these taller neighbours.

At street level there are still gaps. I meet Ewa in a small bar tucked into the corner of the Palace of Culture, next to the theatre. It is the eclectic nature of Warsaw that makes it so special, she says. To get to her, I walked beside empty plots covered in gravel and what some people might call weeds, used as car parks for shiny Audis and BMWs. There were communist-era apartment blocks and 21st-century condos. The odd pre-war building that somehow survived the devastation comes as a shock, held together with green netting and wooden supports; the last standing clues as to what once stood on this particular street corner.

*

What was lost. At POLIN, the museum of Jewish life in Poland, history is told in an almost overwhelming exhibition. It starts in the dark forest that covered much of the Polish lands more than a thousand years ago. The museum’s name comes from the legend of the Jewish arrival in this forest; in these lands. Po-lin. Rest here. But the museum’s ceiling, fragmented and fractured, speaks to the rupture of what was to come. The rupture of the Holocaust.

From the moment I got off the tram from the station with Kasia, I have spent almost my entire time in the city within the boundaries of the Warsaw Ghetto. Almost half a million Jewish people were held within its walls until they were taken to the trains and the extermination camps. The central deportation point was called Umschlagplatz, and a memorial marks the spot.

Along this path of suffering and death over 300,000 Jews were driven in 1942-43 from the Warsaw Ghetto to the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps.

From the memorial I follow the road around to the Jewish cemetery, one of the largest in Europe. The dates on the headstones speak aloud the long story of Jewish life in the city. But the deepest wounds are reflected in the memorials. The mass grave of those who died in the Warsaw Ghetto. The orphans led hand-in-hand to the cattle trucks that would deliver them to Treblinka. To Jack Eisner, who survived, and to all those that didn’t.

*

Grandma Masha
had twenty
grandchildren.
Grandma Hana
had eleven
only I survived.
– Jack Eisner

*

On the Berlin-Warsaw Express, I eat schnitzel in the dining car as Poland passes by the window outside. I am reading Wojciech Nowicki:

“Rebuilding” is a key word in my part of the world, similar to other words like “war”, “besieged”, “murder”, like “liberation”, “exile”, “escape”, like “cemetery” and “displacement”, like “Regained Territories” and “post-German houses”. Here, if you dig a little deeper, it turns out to be fake, not original, a couple dozen years old at most.

On the train I sip my beer, the book face down now on the table as I watch the fields and forests, villages and towns, and I think of Gdańsk and Wrocław. Of Berlin and Dresden. Of Warsaw.

Home again. 

‘What does home mean to you?’ they asked me in Poland.

Not Germany. Not England. Both Germany and England. Maybe: the North. Whatever that means. Most probably: Berlin.

Wherever Katrin is.

*

At the Lobe House, a short walk from our apartment in Berlin-Gesundbrunnen, I watch a friend launch her book while the S-Bahn rubbles past, chickens peck at the soil and a fat rat makes an appearance through the open doors behind the stage. Jessica J. Lee writes about place and nature, borders and belonging, better than anyone I know. I treasure the chance to listen to her talk and carry her new book Dispersals home with me like precious cargo. 

These are essays, she writes in a note to the reader, written for a world in motion. Plants that, in dispersal, might teach us what it means to live in the wake of change.

*

We sit on the central reservation of Unter den Linden and drink a beer, across the street from the Aeroflot building and a few steps away from the memorial outside the Russian Embassy to all those killed following the invasion of Ukraine. Each time we come this way, more photographs have been added. More stories of those who have been lost to Russian aggression.

There are stories from Ukraine told too in the foyer of the Instytut Pileckiego on Pariser Platz.

The Pilecki Institute is simultaneously a research institute, a digital archive, a historical museum and an educational institution. Our work seeks to help defend the values of democracy and freedom from historical oblivion, as well as unveil a new perspective on the history of Europe by including the Polish experience of the 20th century in international discourse.  

We are there to listen to Marcel Krueger talk about his Great Uncle, about how he was a soldier in the German Army and a spy for Poland. How the story of a family from Olsztyn/Allenstein can show us how complex notions of nation, identity and home have always been, and why the world is rarely easily explained. 

At the end of Marcel’s talk he is asked about his Great Uncle and what he might say to us today, if he could.

‘Somehow,’ Marcel replies, ‘“never again” has become “no war” for many in Germany and I find it difficult to understand why. It seems the historical experience of a necessary military struggle for a just cause, the experience that violent resistance against a criminal opponent is not only morally imperative but can also be successful – a thing my Great Uncle Franz understood early on – is missing from the current debate. The legacy of the resistance fighters and partisans who defeated National Socialism after a long and difficult struggle is regularly commemorated in Poland, Ukraine and many other countries in central and eastern Europe, but not in Germany.’

*

Caspar David Friedrich turns 250 years old this year. A collection of his works are being shown in Dresden, Hamburg and Berlin to mark the anniversary of his birth. Right now it is Berlin’s turn, with Unendliche Landschaften or Infinite Landscapes at the Old National Gallery on the Museum Island.

Together with what feels like half of Berlin we walk through the halls and try to catch a glimpse of these landscapes; the coastlines and mountain ranges, the scenes lit by moonlight or at dawn and dusk. The small figures almost swallowed by the world around them. The contours of a country covered in mist and fog.

Friedrich, the exhibition tells us, saw the forest as a symbol of belonging, its evergreen trees expressing hope and consolation.

Today, the evergreen trees of the Harz Mountains, and the ranges along the German, Czech and Polish borders that were the main places of the artist’s wanderings and his inspiration, are ravaged by bark beetles and threatened by forest fires. The forest of Caspar David Friedrich’s imagination tells us a story not so much of hope and consolation but of the climate crisis.

*

The exhibition leaves me with more questions than answers, one of which is posed at the very start:

Where does the human being stand in relation to the world?

And if we cannot find the answer in these infinite landscapes, where might we find it?

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton   

Easter Monday and the Berlin streets are quiet as we move around the back of the university from Friedrichstraße station to the Gorki Theater for Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan. The English-language translation of the novel was called Man of Straw; the tale of Diederich Hessling, whose snivelling and unswerving loyalty to authority, when combined with his hypocrisy and general unpleasantness, stands as a satire of Wilhelmine Germany and the type of patriotism that led the country to the ruinous battlefields of World War I. Mann completed the novel in 1914, on the eve of a war that he would become a vocal critic of, but it would only be published four years later as a very different Germany emerged from the trenches. 

In the decades that followed publication, Der Untertan would be seen as almost a premonition. The attitudes embodied in the character of Hessling were those that enabled the rise of the National Socialists. And today, it feels like those behind the production at the Gorki Theater have something to say about the current situation. Hessling’s story is told through twelve morality tales. There is humour and a bit of slapstick. Breaking of the fourth wall. It is funny and clever, but throughout you are forced to ask the question: just because the protagonist is laughable, doesn’t mean the place we get to is necessarily amusing. 

The play has English sur-titles and at least a couple of the translations – “drain the swamp” being the most on the nose – seem to be offering up a vision of Donald Trump as a 21st-century Hessling character. It seemed clear, even in 1918, that what Mann was offering was not just a portrait of the recent past but a warning for the future. In Berlin in 2024, there remain lessons worth heeding. 

*

The Trans-Pennine Express. Never has there been such a gap between the evocativeness of a train service’s name and the reality of the passenger experience. But today everything seems to be going smoothly between Manchester and Liverpool.

As we move through the suburbs we can look down on the gardens of semi-detached houses. There is a view through a window to a kitchen sink or a wooden table. Blinds pulled down in the middle of the day. A man smoking a cigarette out of an upstairs window. The gardens offer clues as to the personalities of those who maintain them. Neat lawns and tended flowerbeds. Is the overgrown tangle next door the result of laziness or an attempt at creating an insect-friendly garden? All are better than the plastic grass surrounded by white pebbles a few doors down. A single pot of basil outside the back door is the only growing thing between the tall wooden fences.

It is this vision of suburbia that I think of when I imagine myself on a train in the north of England. If I imagine a similar scene on a German train, I am looking down on the allotment gardens on the edges of Berlin. The divided plots with their sheds, lawns and beds for growing vegetables or flowers. Depending on the authority of each colony, some are almost regimented in their neatness. 

Here the gardens speak less of the personality of those who maintain them, and more of the people with the clipboards who move along the neat paths to judge them. Are you keeping up to standards? Has the hedge been trimmed? Is the compost pile out of control? It is a job for Diederich Hessling, for even in the Kleingartenkolonie there needs to be order and respect for the authority of those wielding the clipboards.

In Germany, I am still sometimes relieved to be able to use English, especially in doctor’s surgeries or in any dealing with officialdom. When in the UK, I enjoy the opportunity to use German on those who are not expecting it. Across the aisle at Anfield, a couple of men are enjoying the build-up to the Sheffield United match. When I offer to take their picture for them, I see the moment of brief worry cross their faces. Have they said something they shouldn’t, in this place where they thought no-one understands them? But they haven’t. They are just excited, like we are, to watch our beloved red men in these last matches of the Jürgen Klopp era.

I have been to Anfield in recent years – to visit the museum and to be part of the Hillsborough Memorial – but it has been a long time since I was in the ground for a match. That was 2007, and the stadium is almost 50% larger now and, of course, no players from back then remain. But the magic of catching a glimpse of the green of the pitch at the end of the concourse tunnel remains as electrifying as it was as a kid, as is the chance to join in with You’ll Never Walk Alone as kick-off approaches. 

It would be nice to say that it is enough to just be here. To soak up the atmosphere, regardless of what transpires on the pitch. But at this moment in time, there is still a chance of a title, so there are a lot of nerves in the ground and a real feeling of relief as Liverpool win 3-1. We don’t know what will happen next but we walk out into the dark and stormy night with hope in our hearts, if only for the time being. 

*

I have written about Rhoscolyn many times before, and of all the things I have committed to paper about places that mean something to me, it is those that I am the least happy with. It feels like I cannot do justice to the place and what it means to me. A gentle failure, then, of trying to write about the most important place in the world.

I have never lived here. Never called it home. If you add up all the time I have spent at Cerrig-yr-Adar since I was born it would come, at most, to about 40-50 weeks of my 45 years. Not nothing, but nothing compared to my Uncle and Aunty, and my cousins and their children, who have lived and worked here. And yet, it is the only place I have constantly returned to in my life. The only place that has a presence in all the different chapters I have lived so far.

Perhaps that is enough. The one place I hope I shall always be able to return to. And to try, and try again, to find the right words.

On Unter den Linden the half marathon runners turn the corner by the Aeroflot building and catch a glimpse of the Brandenburg Gate. Their race is nearly run, and for most it gives them the boost they need to run the last of the 21.1 kilometres. I have run this race a number of times and I know how they are feeling. Those who are finding it easy. Those who are suffering. Those who are elated, and those who want nothing in life at this moment in time than the possibility to stop. We clap and cheer and shout our encouragement in the springtime sunshine, and try to resist the temptation to think that maybe next year would be a good time to do it again.

*

In Wiesenburg our local red kite – who we have named Charlie – hovers over the gardens in the early morning. I am reading Kathleen Jamie’s Findings:

If you’ve seen the hawk, be sure, the hawk has seen you.

*

There is blossom on the cherry tree at the heart of our garden. The grass is getting long. The bats are dancing at dusk and the bees soundtrack the morning. Spring.

*

It is the anniversary of the death, in April 1945, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He was hanged by the Nazis in the dying days of their ‘Thousand Year Reich’, which would last a little more than twelve. At the Zionskirche in Berlin, where we walk numerous times in a week, there is a sculpture in his memory. Bonhoeffer was active at the church on Zionskirchplatz from 1931 until 1933, when Hitler was appointed Chancellor. There was already a schism in the protestant church over National Socialism, but Bonhoeffer was clear where he stood.

The church, he wrote, has an unconditional obligation to the victims of every social order, even if they do not belong to the Christian community. 

This was April 1933, only a few months after the Nazis came to power. The church has a responsibility to resist, Bonhoeffer argued, to not simply bandage the victims under the wheel, but jam a spoke in the wheel itself.

*

Wiesenburg is alive to the sound of birds. In the garden, we hear the bicycle-pump call of the great tit. Blackbirds. Sparrows. Wood pigeons. There are wagtails on the wood pile next door and a black redstart on the compost heap. Walking out across the fields we spy a kestrel, a buzzard and crows pacing between the ploughed furrows. There are less birds outside of the village than in. Horatio Clare called the crows, on his own walk across Germany, the Emperors of Emptiness, their domain the monoculture of the countryside.

On Saturday morning the village wakes slowly, a tale told through a series of sounds. The birds with the coming of first light. A cockrell. People with early shifts back their cars out of the driveway. One dog a few doors down catches a glimpse of an early morning jogger and his barks wake up all the rest. The first of the motorbikes from the city change down the gears as they enter the 50 zone. The click-whir of a lycra-clad peloton riding three abreast. Lawnmowers and wood saws. Tractors pulling loads. Saturday shoppers from outlying hamlets. The sound of the Bundesliga Konferenz, drifting out of an open window.

We walk out from the village to the low hills – little more than lumps in the landscape – that separate it from its neighbour to the north. The paths follow the “rummels”, dry valleys created at the end of the last Ice Age that are not dissimilar to holloways, especially as they became paths from the moment humans began to move through this space. One is named for the pastor. Another for the brewer. Now they belong to the hikers, following the symbols painted neatly on the trees, the hiking maps available for free at each train station with routes to suit every level of fitness and time schedule.

*

Another day, another walk. This one leads us out of our end of Wiesenburg and across the fields on a path that takes us to the historic heart of the village, a cluster of low-slung houses around a church built from the stones that were cleared from the fields (and are still being disturbed by the plough to this day).

On the corner, where the path dog-legs to follow a ditch that has become a running stream this year, there is an old oak tree with a bench beneath it. The tree has been pollarded numerous times, and it has a strange, almost uneasy shape. Which is not to say that it is not beautiful, and more than anything it is a reminder that even the most familiar walks can offer up something new. We have encountered the old oak tree in all seasons of the year, at all times of the day and in all types of weather. Each time, it seems to offer up something different.

The early morning bus links the villages with the town, with the high school and the train to the city. Frost returned last night and there are patches of white in the shade, even as the rapeseed flowers shine a bright yellow against the blue sky. A low mist hangs over some of the fields, a reminder of being on night trains approaching Berlin as the long journey through the darkness approaches its end with the first light of morning. 

Today, the commuter ticks off the stations like a mantra. She dozes at one end of the carriage, in what she likes to think of as her regular seat, and although her eyes are closed and she travels in that place between sleeping and waking, she always knows where she is. As we approach Charlottenburg she gathers her things, ready for her stop even before the announcement comes.

*

In Weißensee we read pieces inspired by the White Lake City. It is the second salon at Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, almost a year to the day after the first. Last year we spoke about rivers, today it is Weißensee itself, from the lake to the old racetrack, the memories of film studios and the Jewish cemetery.

In another country the baseball season is in its infancy. On the Rennbahnstraße, the schedule has yet to be fixed. All that lingers are the triumphs and tragedies of summers past.

A swing. A metallic thunk. The white ball against a blue sky. Her teammates cheer as she touches them all. Glory Days. 

*

In Grunewald we walk from the station of the same name, where Jews were loaded onto trains at Platform 17 and taken to the camps. Grunewald is a neighbourhood of big houses erected beneath what Isherwood called the gloomy pines, but our path takes us away from the villas and the memorial to those taken and never to return, into the forest.

We pass by the sand dunes and the Devil’s Lake. The old listening station stands on a rubble mountain, no longer spying but still observing the scene. We reach the Havel at Schildhord, named for a Slavic Prince and a death-defying escape across the choppy waters. We can see the villa where the British Commander lived during the Cold War. From Slavic Princes to British Commanders, via Hessling’s beloved Kaiser, the list of those who have called the shots in Berlin is long and varied.

Our journey takes us through the suburb where British officers once lived to Le Courbusier’s massive apartment block, just across the railway tracks from another monumental architectural statement: the Olympic Stadium. This is an ambivalent place, depending on what you choose to remember. Hitler or Jesse Owens? I’ve played football on its pitch and run around its track. I’ve watched Liverpool play a friendly and Usain Bolt break a world record. I’ve heard Bruce Springsteen sing about summer in New Jersey and sheltered from a Berlin summer thunderstorm.

It feels like this is a place that has spent its existence trying to erase the stain of its earliest years. The World Cup in 2006 was probably its most successful moment. This summer, we’re trying to do it all again. 

In Deutsche Welle, a report that pessimistic young Germans are turning to the far right. That 22% of those aged 14-29 would vote for the AfD if there was an election tomorrow, a number that has doubled in two years. Their main concerns are inflation, expensive housing, poverty in old age, the division of society and migration.

*

Posters for the European elections have begun to appear. A parade of placards along the central reservation of Osloer Straße.

We must vote for those who think justly, not dictatorially, Heinrich Mann wrote in 1930. We must work, be patient and show ourselves far too proud to allow ourselves or our state to be “saved” by anyone. That is something only we ourselves can do.

*

In Köpenick we join the crowds, mostly in red and white (but with patches of blue and white here and there) as we walk along the path through the trees to the Alte Försterei. Anyone who has been to a home match of 1.FC Union Berlin will know this walk, along the railway to the Plattenbau clubhouse bar and then through the trees to the ground. But this day is different. Today it is the women’s team who are playing in the forest stadium, in a local derby against Hertha BSC. They may only play in the third tier of women’s football, but more than 12,500 turn out to cheer them on.

From both sides. Indeed, the Hertha fans are arguably making the larger racket during much of the match, but they have little going for them on the pitch. Union take a 5-0 lead into half-time and then seem to decide the job is done. The game finishes with the same score as both sets of fans trade their favourite songs, and insults, throughout the second half. The Hertha fans’ loyalty is almost rewarded when they hit the post, but it is not to be. Despite the one-sided scoreline, it is a hopeful and joyful lunchtime kick-off. 

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton

In Wiesenburg, in the driest corner of Brandenburg, where the sandy soil absorbs water as quickly as it can fall from the sky, the fields and meadows are flooded. Ditches that have been dry for years flow as streams. Standing water creates a reflective pool next to the footpath through the Schlosspark. On the radio, the announcer tells us this has been the wettest winter since records began.

*

What is litost? Litost is a state of torment created by the sudden sight of one’s own misery.

Is it possible for a country to suffer from litost? Milan Kundera describes the meaning of the Czech word in the pages of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Kundera’s character argues that it is predominantly an affliction of the young. On our kitchen wall there is a map from the early 19th century. At that moment, Germany existed only as a concept or a dream. An imaginary nation like any other. This is a young country.

Newspaper articles speak to a pervading feeling of angst and anxiety ahead of the European Championships this summer. The atmosphere of the country as a whole is compared to 2006 and the last time Germany hosted a major football championship. The World Cup was a Sommermärchen – a summertime fairy tale. 

The world came to Germany and liked what they found. Klinsmann’s young team reached the semi finals, narrowly losing to the eventual winners in dramatic extra-time scenes. The Black-Red-Gold flew from balconies and the backs of taxis; a sea of patriotic pride in the stands.

A year later I met the husband of a friend in Lower Saxony. We were on a road trip and had stopped for the night.

‘It was the best summer of my life,’ he said. 

*

Is Germany so radically different today than eighteen years ago? It certainly feels that way. And yet: Our daughter was born three days before the opening match of the World Cup, and spent the first week of her life in the hospital in Pankow. A day or so after she was born there was a demonstration outside the S-Bahn station and up to the town hall. A mosque was to be built at the top end of the Prenzlauer Promenade, where the street lifts up over the railway tracks and becomes a motorway.

The demonstration was against the establishment of the mosque. The police presence was large but although a handful of counter-demonstrators made their feelings known, there seemed little possibility of trouble beyond a bit of traffic disruption. Outside the station, extra police officers loitered in the sunshine and practised their English from crib-sheets that were clearly part of their World Cup preparations. Newspaper articles abroad warned of certain no-go areas for fans, particularly in the old East.

*

The hospital in Pankow is on Breite Straße. Before Pankow was absorbed by Berlin it was called Dorfstraße. From 1971 until 1991 it was named for the poet and communist Johannes R. Becher, who was Minister for Culture in the German Democratic Republic and lived for a while around the corner on the banks of the Panke, along with other head-honchos of the SED before they fled in the face of public dissatisfaction to their forest compound outside Wandlitz.

After reunification, Breite Straße – “the boulevard of the North” – became Breite Straße once more.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera describes a character who wanders a street that has changed names five times in 70 years. 

Wandering the streets that do not know their names are the ghosts of monuments torn down.

What ghosts are stalking the New/Old Royal Palace on Unter den Linden, as uncanny a place as Berlin has to offer? On the roof, in the shadow of the palace dome with its golden cross and an inscription calling on all peoples to submit to Christianity, is a sound installation by the artist Emeka Ogboh, titled ‘Cosmos – Things Fall Apart’

On the strike of every hour, it is possible to hear the choral singing of the Igbo folk song Nne, Nne, Vdu from Nigeria, accompanied by chants inspired by a line from Chinua Achebe’s novel that – in turn – inspired the name of the installation.

The folk song and the chat originate from a rich Igbo tradition of oral storytelling, and are a critique of Christianity’s influence and disruption on the Igbo culture.

We stand and listen in the late winter sunshine as the cross on the palace dome glows like the cross that forms on the ball of the TV Tower, just a few hundred metres away.

*

To explore our home city with friends who are experiencing it for the first time is to reflect once again on how a place tells the stories of its past, of which stories it chooses to tell and which it chooses to forget, and of which monuments it erects or reconstructs, and which it chooses to tear down. 

We leave the New/Old Royal Palace to pause at the Neue Wache and its oversized casting of Käthe Kollwitz’s beautiful sculpture Mother with her dead son – the guardhouse now a memorial to the victims of war and tyranny. We cross the street to look down between the cobblestones to the sunken memorial of Bebelplatz that marks the spot where Nazi students burned books on 10 May 1933. We take in an ad hoc and continually updated memorial that has been created outside the Russian Embassy to remind all that pass by of the crimes being committed in Ukraine. We walk between the slabs that make up the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe and peer into the single slab across the street that is the Memorial to the Persecuted Homosexuals Under National Socialism.

From here it is a short walk to Wilhelmstraße 92. There you find a small information board with a map of Africa and a text in three languages. This is the site of the Berlin Conference in 1884, which formalised the so-called “Scramble for Africa” as almost the entire continent was divided between European colonial powers. 

The Nigerian historian Olyaemi Ainwumi writes: The foundation for present day crises in Africa was actually laid by the 1884/85 Berlin Conference (…) the Conference did irreparable damage to the continent. Some countries are still suffering from it to this day.

In our short walk along Unter den Linden and through the Brandenburg Gate, it would be easy for our friends to think that Germany is a country that takes its historical reckoning extremely seriously indeed. And sometimes it does. But on Wilhelmstraße, a modest and easy-to-ignore memorial to an event so central to the history of both Africa and Europe reflects the priorities and choices we make; of what we remember, and how we choose to remember it. 

By the Spree, next to the German History Museum, an art market attracts a crowd. It is International Women’s Day – a public holiday in Berlin. On the opposite embankment, a small group hold a vigil for the women of Iran, some of the many victims of the regime, whose photographs look at us across the water in the sunshine. 

*

The Guardian reports that a print of Gerhard Richter’s Birkenau cycle has “returned” to Auschwitz with a new exhibition in the city of Oświęcim. The cycle is a powerful work of art, with Richter’s paintings made over the top of prints of photographs smuggled out of Auschwitz-Birkenau. 

Richter discovered them in the 1960s and was struck by how some could be perceived at first as benign photos of the forest…

To understand them, you need to understand where they are from. Richter’s idea was to blur them with thick layers of paint, squeezed and smudged and scraped; that it was only by ‘obscuring the unthinkable’ was it possible to make the true, horrific story behind the photographs clear.

*

In ACUD there is a night of discussion and poetry inspired by the work of Friedericke Mayröcker. In a neat coincidence, two of the translated poems read out by two different translators mention Heinrich Heine. A statue of Heine stands across the street from ACUD, guarding the entrance to Weinbergspark. It is also a quote from a Heine play, written more than a hundred years before, that marks the spot on Bebelplatz where the books were burned. Tonight he is keeping his fellow writers company as they nervously smoke the edge off before crossing the street to climb the stairs and give their readings.

All of a sudden it appears. On Swinemünder Straße the colours are striking against the gloom of a grey sky and the block of flats beneath. The blossom is emerging. Springtime is coming.

*

Pankaj Mishra publishes a fine essay for the London Review of Books. The front page of the new edition is simply a quote from ‘The Shoah after Gaza’:

Memories of Jewish suffering at the hands of Nazis are the foundation on which most descriptions of extreme ideology and atrocity have been built. But these universalist reference points are in danger of disappearing as the Israeli military massacres and starves Palestinians, while denouncing as antisemitic or champions of Hamas all those who plead with it to desist. 

*

The blossom comes to the Berlin Wall Trail early this year. Underneath the railway tunnel that links the Soldiner Kiez of Wedding/Gesundbrunnen with Pankow, there is a rewilded stretch of the Panke river, a collection of beehives among the long grass of the old security strip, and a neat line up of cherry blossom trees that provide a burst of colour each spring along different stretches of the old border.

In the park we toast Katrin’s birthday in the same beer garden where we drank mulled wine on New Year’s Day. We have more company today, as the arrival of good weather pulls Berliners from their apartments. It is the one weekend of the year when our fellow cityfolk forget themselves. The first fine weekend is a time to forgo the default grumpiness of the average Berliner, and the path along the riverbank is filled with the sound of cheerful greetings and the cling-a-ling of bicycle bells. 

At the Komische Oper, currently housed in the Schillertheater, The Magic Flute is a visual mix of Czech fairy tale and 1920s silent movie.

If we could lock the mouths of all the liars, instead of hatred, slander and cruelty we would have love and brotherhood.

*

A memory walk with some young people from the sixth grade of our daughter’s school, taking in the stories of Mitte. Koppenplaz and its memorial of an upturned chair. Große Hamburger Straße and the place where the Jewish Berliners of the neighbourhood were brought before being transported east to the camps. On the pavements, the shining cobblestones that remember those who never returned.

It also happens to be ‘Motto Week’ for the 12 Graders of Berlin’s high schools, a week of costumes and pranks, and after-school beers in the weak, springtime sunshine. Do you remember that feeling? The rush towards adulthood? The anticipation of the next stage of life? As the kids fool around near Oranienburger Straße, it is possible to feel their impatience to get to what’s next. I want to stop them all – the skeleton, the nurse and the young man in a bathrobe smoking a fag – and tell them to take it easy. That there’s no rush. But what do I know?

On the street we experience this mix of stories from the past and a carnival atmosphere of the present. It isn’t jarring. It is both laughter and a refusal to forget. One need not cancel the other out. 

*

Statues are raised into position on the New/Old Royal Palace, close to where the Igbo folk songs sound on the hour. Some of the new arrivals have been funded by dubious characters.

It appears, says Jürgen Zimmerer of the University of Hamburg and quoted in the media, that we are dealing with a targeted infiltration of the Berlin palace by fundamentalist rightwingers who want to turn it into a symbol of a Christian and thereby ‘white’ ethnic Germany. 

Since a peak of around 22% in January’s opinion polls, the AfD have dropped around 4-5 points following the revelations of meetings to discuss ‘remigration’ in Potsdam and the huge demonstrations that followed.

We walk along the Panke, following the river on part of a route the Prussian King used to travel between his palace in Charlottenburg and his wife’s summer residence in Niederschönhausen. The royal barge was pulled by animals along the towpath where we now walk, and the story goes that extra ditches had to be dug to make the river somewhat navigable.

It seems unlikely. But then the growth of industrial Wedding and northern Berlin in the decades that followed the King’s journeys altered the water levels of the city beyond recognition. Before the factories came, the biggest danger to the quality of the river water was people.

‘Don’t piss in the Panke,’ they would say, up in Bernau close to the river’s source. ‘Tomorrow we’re brewing.’

*

The wind has lost its chill but the evening still smells of woodsmoke in Wiesenburg. It is Easter weekend and the motorbike riders of Berlin and Brandenburg have uncovered their machines and pulled them out of winter hibernation. Geese gather by the banks of the village pond and overhead the storks circle the village having made their return.

Blossom and buds. Daffodils in bloom. Can we say goodbye to winter? The weather forecast is for 23 degrees and in Wannsee the first swimmers of the season have taken to the water.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only for an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost knew that the golden moments cannot last. I think of the young man in his bathrobe and sunglasses, cigarette in hand, school almost behind him. A golden moment indeed.

*

Beside the fire engine we discuss the origins of the Easter Fire. It is a mix of pre-Christian and more recent religious traditions. The undimmed light of Christ or the victory of Spring over Winter? Take your pick. In any case, in Brandenburg only 18% of people are members of a church. A greater percentage than that from the village have wandered out from their homes to enjoy the spectacle. Now it is a simple statement of community. Of coming together. Beer and schnapps. Sausages on the grill. Bats dancing the gloaming as the fire is lit, and when darkness comes, it illuminates the sky. 

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton

Early morning on the Ku’damm, walking in the dark as the drizzle is illuminated by car headlights and the window displays of luxury stores. Tom from Succession and Roger Federer sell expensive German cars as people huddle under the shelter of the bus stop on their way to work. Across the street, a new building is finding its shape against the dark sky, the workmen already up on the scaffolding. What was here before? Was there always a gap in the buildings? It’s hard to remember.

The drizzle turns rain as the sky lightens above the construction site.

*

And so the Kurfürstendamm stretches out endlessly day and night. Also, it’s being renovated. These two facts need to be emphasised, because of the way it’s continually ceding patches of its true self to its designated cultural-historical role (…) it still feels as though it weren’t a means to an end but, in all its length, an end in itself.

Joseph Roth wrote those words 95 years ago, some four years before he left Berlin for the final time on the appointment of Hitler as Chancellor. It will become clear to you now that we are heading for a great catastrophe, he wrote to his good friend Stefan Zweig as he went. The barbarians have taken over. Do not deceive yourself. Hell reigns.

*

The demonstrations against the AfD continue to gather pace as their poll numbers drop slowly and ever-so-slightly. There are 150,000 souls gathered in the rain in front of the Reichstag. In the twenty-two years since I first arrived in Berlin it has never felt like a more dangerous time, and the tensions are apparent in the crowd that has been drawn to the Tiergarten.

‘Ceasefire now!’ is the call from one corner of the demonstration, against the bloody attack on Gaza by Israeli forces. Others in the crowd don’t think this is the time or the place. But when is? And which wars, crimes, displacements and threats do we give our attention to? Later, it is reported that national flags of all types – Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, Germany – were confiscated by stewards and police at the demonstration. 

Meanwhile, the Schwarz-Rot-Gold flies in front of the Reichstag building, home of the Bundestag and the very democracy we have all gathered in the rain to defend.

The Federal Ministry for Food and Agriculture releases new monitoring figures about the return of wolves to the German landscape. There are now 184 packs, 42 pairs and 22 lone wolves in the forests and woodlands of the country. 

In Wiesenburg, on the footpath that follows the Kunstwanderweg or Art Trail to Borne and on to Bad Belzig, there is a sculpture that stands just off the path. It is a small pack of wolves, always lingering among the fallen leaves of countless autumns. It was created by the Belgian artist Marion Burghouwt at a time when wolves had yet to return to Brandenburg. The last wolf was shot around 1850. Since this stationary pack took up residence in High Fläming, they have been joined by others.

A brief artist’s statement is included beside the sculpture:

The wolves represent the ghosts of the past, the search for new living space.

In the United Kingdom, the last wolf was killed in 1680. From the moment they become scarce or extinct in a particular place, they become the stuff of folklore and legend, mythical creatures like dragons and unicorns. They are the danger lurking in the forest, long after they are no more. Their return is not unanimously popular, despite those of us that find the return of any creatures to what was once their habitat a tiny glimmer of hope in these dark times. 

*

Reading From the Berlin Journal by Max Frisch. The Swiss writer began documenting his life in West Berlin (and his frequent visits to the East) when he moved into Sarrazinstraße in 1973; an apartment he would pass on to the Austrian poet Friedericke Mayröcker. In Frisch’s diaries he alternates between the details of everyday life and portraits of his fellow writers in the city, including Uwe Johnson (who later died on a flat, windswept English island), as well as Günter Grass, Christa Wolf and Wolf Biermann. Those wolves again. 

Summer is coming, Friedenau is green, making it even more petty bourgeois. Berlin without its Nordic sky and its lively cold, (is) a mild and leafy Berlin – which to me isn’t Berlin at all.

I met Berlin in wintertime. Today, I walk along the Holzmarktstraße, the Spree on the other side of the buildings and – eventually – the longest surviving stretch of the Berlin Wall. The sky is suitably Nordic for Frisch, above a collection of GDR Plattenbau and the architecturally incoherent collection of new builds that have been thrown up between Alexanderplatz and Warschauer Straße in the decades since the Wall came down. And still they are being built, with their pink pipes to pump out the groundwater of the Berlin swamp.

There are many who – if they can – try to escape the Berlin winter. Freelancers and hybrid office workers; those who shifted to remote contracts during the pandemic. Anecdotally, it seems like Portugal is the preferred destination, where Berliners are increasingly viewed like the New Yorkers of yesterday when they first landed in Berlin. By definition, Global Nomads have no home, and yet they still manage to raise the rent.

I wonder what his neighbours in Friedenau made of Max Frisch’s arrival. Or Günter Grass and Hertha Müller. Do Nobel Prize winners have an effect on house prices?

In Leipzig, the old factory is hosting an art market. Signs at the door list the clothing brands that are banned for their far right connotations. On the streets around, the graffiti is all in support of Regional League football team BSG Chemie Leipzig. There is not a Red Bull in sight. Welcome to Connewitz. 

It is grey and drizzling. Again. This is the third warmest winter since records began at the end of the 19th century, and one of the wettest. After the market, we walk through a soaked woodland on raised pathways that eventually lead to the river where the water is threatening to breach the banks. On the journey home through Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Brandenburg we catch glimpses of flooded fields and overflowing streams. There is water everywhere, and all at once.

*

A morning walk through Wedding, passing by the old factories and warehouses by the Panke river, where 1950s housing blocks fill the gaps created by the British and American bombing raids. Ghost signs advertise the things that were once made and fixed and distributed from here. A crematorium is hosting concerts and films. A physiotherapy practice is named for the swimming pool that has long since been replaced by a block of fancy flats. 

In the Humboldthain, crocuses are pushing up through the soil on the meadow in front of the open air swimming pool. 

On Nettelbeckplatz, a Hertha BSC flag is held aloft by a dancer that is part of a sculpture that adorns the fountain at the centre of the square. The fountain is shut off for the winter. On the low wall in front, someone is recording the deaths of women at the hands of their partners or other men in their lives by pasting a piece of orange paper with the details of each of the lives lost. It is part of a campaign to bring attention to the horrific number of women killed in Germany each year – currently one every three days – but also to rename the square itself.

Nettelbeck was a seafarer with ties to the slave trade. Good enough reason to find a new name. The Netzwerk Gegen Feminizide has identified the square as a place of resistance and the focal point for their campaign. 

In 2023, 114 women were killed by men in Germany. 

*

Rhiannon Giddens at Lido: ‘I’m a mixed baby. My children are mixed babies…’

With her band, she takes us on a journey through musical and cultural heritage; her own and those of the members of her band. It is a celebration and a dialogue and a reminder of what music can mean and what people from different spaces and places can create when they collaborate.

*

Magdeburg is a city I have only really encountered at a distance. From a train window. From the Autobahn. I visited once, as a new and sleep-deprived parent, and have memories of only a street scene that could easily have been Berlin and a schnitzel restaurant that could well have been in Schwerin. 

Today I walk through the Altstadt from the station to the banks of the Elbe. These first impressions are of a city that has had to be rebuilt. Aside from the churches and a couple of municipal buildings, there is nothing on this initial walk that is older than the 16th January 1945, when British and American bombs laid waste to much of the city centre. As a proportion of the city before the war, only Hamburg and Dresden suffered a greater level of destruction. 

It is a level of destruction that has been experienced in many places around the world, and can be seen on our nightly news – from Gaza especially – today. In Magdeburg, I walk through the specific architectural mix that speaks to the city’s geographic location and thus its social, political and economic history. Grandiose buildings of the 1950s and the brave new Stalinist world of the German Democratic Republic rising from the rubble. The more prosaic (and cheaper) Plattenbau of the 1970s and 1980s. The glass and steel structures that have filled in those gaps that remain. 

All of it, from whichever period, only makes me feel small and the space depopulated. I feel a bit lost, despite knowing exactly where I am.

*

At a few minutes to twelve, the bells of the Cathedral of Saints Maurice and Catherine – otherwise known as the Magdeburg Cathedral – sound out a call to fifteen minutes of peace and prayer that takes place each weekday at noon. Visitors are asked not to walk about during this time, and instead take a seat far beneath the impressive ceiling of the cathedral.

It is led by a layperson from the support foundation of the cathedral, and about fifteen of us are sitting before him as he begins by playing a piece by J.S. Bach over the loudspeakers. We then hear his reflections on peace, on the dangers of hate, with mentions of Ukraine and the Middle East. There is a reading from Psalms 19 and then the Lord’s Prayer. I find that seven years at Burscough Country Primary School have equipped me to mouth along the words, albeit in English and most probably an outdated version.

We are invited to sit again and listen to some more Bach. Suite No.1 in G major. It is a truly wonderful piece of music, and even played via CD or Spotify it gives a feel for how incredible the acoustics of this space truly are.

In the corner of the cathedral is a wooden sculpture by Ernst Barlach, a memorial to those who died in World War I, with an eternal flame for peace flickering in front of it. Eight thousand soldiers from Magdeburg perished in the trenches and no-man’s lands of what was then called the Great War.

As Bach plays, we can all see our breath mingling with the music in the cold air of the cathedral. In 1631, four thousand citizens sought sanctuary here as Catholic forces attacked and ransacked the city. As with the bombing raids at the end of WWII, almost the entire city was destroyed. The people in the cathedral were the only survivors of what became known as the Sack of Magdeburg in which 20,000 were killed in one of the worst massacres of the Thirty Years War – a conflict that claimed the lives of half the population of present-day Germany and the trauma of which still lingers almost four hundred years later.

It is a lot to think about, in this place, during fifteen minutes of peace on a weekday in February. Even for an atheist, in its understated and modest way, it is all very affecting. 

‘I love your country,’ the man who had been speaking says to me after I introduce myself. ‘I have been there so many times.’

I thank him for his words to all of us a few moments earlier and he thanks me for coming, before pulling on his bicycle helmet to continue on with the rest of his day.

*

In Wolfenbüttel, a half-timbered town famous for the Herzog August Library and being the global headquarters of Jägermeister, I give a reading in the former residence of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who was librarian from 1770 until his death, eleven years later, on a visit to his wine dealer at the age of 52.

I am reading from my book about the Harz mountains to an audience of people who have as much experience of those forested hills as I probably do, and the conversation which begins in the woods with the stories of Heine, Goethe, Anselm Kiefer and the impact of climate change and bark beetles, soon wanders off along diversions to the streets of Berlin and Magdeburg, the coastline of Wales, the moorlands of Scotland, a boat on the Rhine and the cliffs of Rügen, and explorations of Wolfenbüttel in the gloaming.

Can we separate the art from the artist (hello Wagner)? What about the artist celebrated by the worst of us (Casper David Friedrich)? How is the art of a place tied to its history, if not directly in the works or even the intentions of the artists themselves, but in how we as individuals respond to them due to the context in which they were created? These are all good questions, and I am sure I am not fully equipped to answer them, but it is the conversation that is important and I walk home through the deserted streets of the town inspired by the few hours we all spent in each other’s company. 

*

At the Delphi Filmpalast, Yoake No Subete – All the Long Nights, a film by Sho Miyake and part of the Berlinale film festival. No spoilers, but this is a beautiful film about disorder, trauma and grief, and how friendship among colleagues, respect and the act of caring, can create safe spaces where all are valued and the goal of the enterprise is not measured in how much money is made but how we all get through the day.

‘Perhaps it is not so normal in Japan,’ the filmmaker says on stage afterwards, ‘but in the end, it is also how I try to run my own projects.’

A film that, in its making, its story and its execution, is full of joy and hope.

In Yorkshire there are daffodils on the verges and the footpaths are muddy. We walk the canal into Leeds and along the river in Otley. We drink beers in a pub where the soundtrack is from our university days in Headingley before Berlin. Twenty three years ago we celebrated a birthday and then watched Liverpool win a cup in the living room of our student house on Raven Road. This weekend, we get to do it again. Geographically, it’s not that far. But we’ve come a long way baby. 

*

Two years since the Russian Army extended their war in Ukraine beyond the territories occupied in 2014. A year ago, there seemed some hope of a Ukraine counter-offensive. Now positions are entrenched and exhaustion in all its forms is taking its toll.  

Acknowledging this collective exhaustion may seem like admitting weakness, Nataliya Gumenyuk writes in The Guardian – as if our international audience expects Ukrainians to demonstrate their successes in their flawless fight against Goliath. Our country finds itself in an impossible position, where we are expected to show that we’re in control, while simultaneously making it clear how critical the situation is. Delays with weapons deliveries mean our armed forces are lacking ammunition. Foreign aid – financial, humanitarian, military – is essential right now.

*

In Berlin, freezing temperatures return, if only for a couple of nights. The rooftops are white with frost in the morning sunshine. On Nettelbeckplatz, where those pieces of paper had been added to the wall of the sculpture in memory of each of the women killed by men in 2024, someone has torn them all down. 

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton

The S-Bahn is empty mid-morning. The streets are piled high with the debris of an explosive night before. It’s a day where even the weather seems to be having a lie-in. It is not yet time, it seems, for the new year to begin.

Perhaps the city is waiting for the countdown. At the Brandenburg Gate we pin the year to our chests and line up behind “pacers” whose job it is to slow us down and who have – we are told through a crackly speaker system – have an average age of 81. The countdown commences and then we run; down Unter den Linden, past the Russian Embassy and the vigil outside for those killed in Ukraine. At Bebelplatz they are dismantling the Christmas Market but ahead of us, in front of the City Hall, the big wheel turns still. 

‘Wir schaffen das!’

The mum encourages her daughter at the halfway point. Dad echoes the sentiment, but it is easy for him to say as he tolls along on a bicycle. The runners are stretched out now, from the Museum Island to the Brandenburg Gate and the finish line. As we arrive the weather finally wakes up. It begins to rain. The new year can finally begin.

*

In Pankow the drizzle has set in. Only dog walkers and joggers are braving the early year conditions, but the lights are on at the beer garden in the park so we walk over more in hope than expectation.

‘I had some things to do so I thought I’d open the hatch and see who turned up…’

The man is cheerful as he warms our apple punch and Glühwein. It seems likely that we might be his only business of the day. But then again – with his strung-out lights shing against the dull, deadened colours of a Berlin winter’s day – you never know.

*

The first election posters for the rerun vote are spotted. Free Palestine is scrawled on a wall. A Ukraine flag hangs limply from a balcony. Its colours are faded by the sunshine of two summers. We are approaching the second anniversary of the Russian invasion. 

*

Reading Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. A “whole life” story of changing times in the American West and a short novel that manages to tell a story of epic scale in its 116 pages. It would make a good companion to A Whole Life by Robert Seethaler in its depiction of an individual experiencing the world shifting during a self-contained lifetime, even if the books themselves are as different as an American railyard is to an Alpine valley. 

God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?

They are books about lives on the borderland. That ragged space where nature meets what we call civilisation, and the recognition that here there is no line at all; that one is part of the other, and the idea that we can hold nature at arms length – from the safety of our “civilisation” – is as illusory as the dreams that haunt us like memories in the night. 

*

Behind the Soviet War Memorial in Tiergarten, sleet falls between the photos that show Berlin in 1945. The brick skeletons of the buildings. Tiny figures picking their way through the rubble. The Tiergarten completely devoid of trees.

We walk on through the park, where every tree and bush is younger than those photographs, with the knowledge that if they can be stripped away once, they can be stripped away again. 

Outside Wittenberge in Brandenburg, the Elbe has broken its banks and flooded fields on either side of the motorway. South of Berlin, wind turbines stand in a foot of water. The mildness of the past few weeks is about to give way to a freeze, and the waters will not recede in time. The frost won’t be able to break up the soil, and the fields will not be able to absorb as much water in springtime. This will be bad for the crops.

Meanwhile the farmers are blocking the roads and making their feelings known, taking headlines from Sahra Wagenknecht, who launches a party named after herself. Ukraine. Gaza. The climate crisis. Recession. A Deutsche Welle survey finds that only half of respondents in Germany are confident that 2024 will be a good year. Meanwhile, the AfD are polling at 22%

I cannot avoid the impression, Vaclav Havel wrote in 1984, that many people in the West still understand little about what is actually at stake in our time. 

Overnight, the temperature drops. We walk along frozen tracks between waterlogged fields in the mist, before it is time to make our way back to the city.

*

The closest thing we have to a daily walk takes us along Bellermannstraße to the Millionenbrücke, crossing the tracks to Swinemünder Straße and on to where Gesundbrunnen gives way to Mitte by crossing the little line of cobblestones that mark the route of the Berlin Wall. For seven years we lived at one end of Swinemünder Straße, close to Arkonaplatz. For the last thirteen we have lived at the other. 

Many of the stories of this walk are personal. A first kiss. A first bike ride. Helping a friend move apartments. A marathon viewing of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and summer beers by the riverbank. Sunday runs and walks to work. Flea markets and meeting friends at the playground, some of whom have left Berlin, others who have passed away. 

Later I am with a group of people as we cross Swinemünder Straße. We are following the route of the Berlin Wall now, and our group contains people from Australia, Romania, Japan, Cameroon, the Netherlands and Germany. None of them were even born when the Wall was standing, and they have come to hear stories from the divided city and beyond. On Bernauer Straße, some of the gaps created by the fortifications have yet to be filled in, even though this has been a memorial site longer than it was a no-man’s land.

The group are interested in the stories of the Wall and the city at a time that is increasingly hard to imagine. But they are also interested in the personal stories of a place. Of those first kisses and a child learning to ride their bike. Stay long enough in a place and your own memories become stories of the city, to be taken away by those who visit, shaping their own ideas of what Berlin is and how it once was, at a time when they were children in places far away. 

Secret meetings in a villa outside Potsdam. The discussion is about “Remigration” – meaning: mass deportations.

With under two years till the general elections, Musa Okwonga writes, it’s time that a lot more people started paying attention.

*

A run along the river crosses the old border into Pankow. The lights are shining once more at the beer garden, but it is not the time to stop. On the edge of the park, close to where the trams rubble by, the memorial to the Czechoslovak journalist, communist and member of the anti-Nazi resistance Julius Fučík stands solid beside the footpath.

MENSCHEN, ICH HATTE EUCH LIEB. SEID WACHSAM!

Be vigilant. Fučík worked for the underground Communist Party after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, moving between his parents’ house and other locations in the countryside before finally being captured by the Gestapo in 1942. In 1943 he was brought to Berlin, charged with high treason, and executed at Plötzensee prison, not far from our apartment and close to the lake where we sometimes go swimming in the summer. 

*

A friend travels in from Brandenburg and we walk together to Pariser Platz.

NIE WIEDER IST JETZT!

The demo was called in a hurry. Many of the placards are homemade. The crowd is mixed in age. There are 25,000 here in Berlin and another 10,000 in Potsdam. Is it enough?

In an interview for NDR, the writer Florian Schroeder talks about the role of the Identitarian Movement – whose ideologue Martin Sellner was present at a meeting in Potsdam with members of the AfD – within the populist right as a whole. They operate, Schroeder argues, in a “pre-political space”, changing the terms of reference. From deportation, for example, to remigration…

This is a classic populist tactic. Someone from the fringe says the “unsayable”. Everything shifts in response, including the discussion of the so-called “middle”.

It’s wrong to say that history repeats itself. Each time and era has its own unique set of circumstances and challenges. But even if the context shifts, as in the quote so often attributed to Mark Twain, history may not repeat itself – but it does rhyme.

The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, wrote Hegel, but we know that this is also not true. People learn from history all the time. But those doing the learning might not always be on our side… 

As the tractor horns sound outside, four thousand Faroese fans (approximately 8% of the entire population) belt out the national anthem before a European Championship handball match against Poland. The game is played in a cacophony of boos and whistles, shouts and cheers, mostly on the side of the tiny island nation from the North Atlantic. The game is cagey and tense, with no side getting more than two goals ahead at any time.

While the athletes and the fans give their all, an announcer called Kevin does his best to get the rest of us going. In between plays and bursts of Europop, John Denver and Neil Diamond, Kevin tells us what is going on in a beautiful Euro-English accent that has its origin somewhere near a service station close to the French-German-Luxembourg border. Naturally, whether the players are Faroese or Polish – or later Norwegian or Slovenian – he pronounces each and every one of their names with precision, from Elias Ellefsen á Skipagøtu to Przemysław Urbaniak.

Poland wins but both teams go out. The Faroe Island fans retire to the bar to drown their sorrows, but most return to their seats to watch Norway and Slovenia battle it out for the group win. The latter win the tightest of victories, before we all head out into a dark, cold night, that echoes with the sound of the Faroese songs and those tractor horns, all soon to be muffled by the thinnest of blankets of overnight snow.

*

In the city, snow and ice brings chaos wherever it meets stone or concrete. A walk to the shops becomes a dangerous undertaking with the threat of injury. Bridges become ice rinks, with nothing solid beneath them, only freezing air. The snow piles up by the kerb, dirty orange and speckled with grit.

In Brandenburg and Sachsen-Anhalt, the effect is no doubt the same in the towns and cities, but moving between them and something about the snow creates a shift of perspective. Here, it serves to muffle and disguise, hide and cover. A village, viewed across a white blanketed field beside a fairytale forest, is a collection of neat white triangles around a church tower, the snow resting on slates, plastic tiles or solar panels, covering plastic toy and garden furniture, water butts and gas tanks.

Under a grey sky, with everything else seemingly black and white, the scene becomes impossible to date. Viewed through a car window it is as if we are taken out of the here and now, if only for a moment. 

It’s a little uncanny. Or perhaps, as an old Aimee Mann song gives way to the hourly news bulletin, it is just a short moment of wishful thinking.

*

A short walk to the Elbe in Wittenberg, with snow on the cobblestones of the old river harbour, where some brick factories are still operating, others have been turned into gyms and training colleges, furniture showrooms and DIY stores and others still have been left to collapse into snow-dusted ruins.

Scrawled slogans insult others for slights the casual reader can never possibly know. A swastika against the red brick triggers an almost physical reaction. You try to imagine the person as they spray it. What are they thinking? What are they trying to say?

At the river, the sounds and the symbols of the city, its past and its present, recede. Geese fly in formation overhead. Deer stand in the field on the opposite bank, dark against the snow. Dogs bark in a distant village. Church bells sing. And the river rushes on by, no time to pause in its long journey from the Bohemian hills to the North Sea. 

The numbers offer a glimmer of hope. Organisers say 350,000. The police say 100,000. No matter the demo, no matter the country, it’s always the same. But if the truth lies somewhere in the middle, it remains – as do all the demos across the country – a powerful symbol. As does the vote on dual citizenship laws in the Bundestag.

Ignoring the protests against them, the AfD put “Dexit” on the table. Meanwhile, train drivers announce a six-day strike. Recession grows ever more likely. And the temperature rises by ten degrees and the snow melts.

*

News from Liverpool reaches the Berlin U-Bahn. Football is unimportant, especially when compared to what is happening in the world, and yet it is the sense of escape that it gives that keeps us following and tuning in, despite the money, the corruption and the sportswashing that are an inescapable part of the sport. As for Jürgen Klopp: for anyone who fell in love with footy as a kid, you’ll understand how Liverpool fans are feeling. He made us feel like it was then… again. 

* 

Escape on a Friday night is to be found at the Velodrom, just off Landsberger Allee. Groups of young people gather inside the track, clutching their plastic glasses of beer. Lights flash and music blares. The two commentators do their best to explain what is going on to those of us for whom the Berlin Six-Day races are the only indoor cycling event they ever go to watch. Older men, slim in their jeans with a cycling cap perched on their heads follow the events on the track. They don’t need any explanations.

The Six-Day Races have been going for more than a hundred years, although the pandemic shut the Berlin edition down for a while and now the racing only takes place over two days.

“We’re working on it…’ one of the commentators says, about the possibility of returning the event to its former glory. Those who have come to the Velodrom on this cold, January Friday evening seem to be having a lot of fun. The racing will continue to midnight, in a dizzying array of disciplines. Not everyone – audience or competitor – will make it to the end.

A slow morning stroll through streets I have known for more than two decades. A cafe where we drank 2.50 DM beers while the proprietor told inappropriate jokes about 9/11. A square where we met friends in the playground when our children were still small enough to go on the swings and climbing frames. The house where an old, mostly lost friend lived, surrounded by walls that we helped to paint. Her name is still on the doorbell.

More squares, more playgrounds. Which shops are the same? Which cafes have changed their name? By the Gethsemanekirche – where the Peaceful Revolution first arrived in Berlin – notices on the railings bring to the attention of the neighbourhood human rights abuses at different places around the world. Another message kindly asks the person who keeps tearing the notices down to come and talk instead. A time and a place is offered.

Let us talk! But this is a time for slogans. Shouted by a multitude. Affixed to the front of a tractor. Delivered while glued to the floor or aiming foodstuff at a piece of artwork.

*

A sign above a kindergarten exclaims:

NEVER AGAIN WAR

A painted piece of cardboard leaning against a balcony balustrade insists:

NEVER AGAIN IS NOW

The sun shines. The air is chill. In the centre of the square, an old artist contemplates an empty playground in the place where she used to live and which now carries her name.

NIE WIEDER KRIEG

Käthe Kollwitz’s placard is a hundred years old this summer, created to mark the tenth anniversary of a war that was supposed to end all wars and took with it 40 million souls, including Kollwitz’s son Peter, who died on the battlefield in October 1914.

A hundred years. Never again… No more wars. But you count them off, and there are so many in the century that has passed. Even then, you realise, do not know of them all.

Don’t forget Sudan.

The sticker on the lamppost is small. For “Never again” to mean anything, it requires the memory of what went before. But instead we do our best to forget what is happening, even as it happens. 

Words & Pictures: Paul Scraton