Postcard from... Waterford

By Paul Scraton:

In Waterford, the shops were doing a busy trade in the run-up to Easter. Dunnes Stores was heaving with people, their trolleys piled high ahead of the holiday weekend. Chocolate eggs and multipack bags of crisps. Beer and wine. Meat for the barbecue, for the weather forecast said there was a chance it might be fine.

A few steps away, there was one shopfront that had nothing to offer the people of the city. P. Larkin was closed, and looked to have been for a long time. The door was locked. The display shelves in the window were empty. Looking inside, it was possible to see an old cash register and a jacket hanging behind a door. A calendar turned to a month that was long gone. Meat hooks and refrigeration units told us that this had once been a butcher’s shop. But there was nothing for the barbecue here.

Someone had pinned photographs to the inside of the window. Pictures of a different time, in a different era. A man in a white jacket, standing in the doorway, meat hanging in the windows. So time had passed. The man was gone. The shop had closed. This is not an unusual story. In towns and cities across Ireland and beyond, local independent shops struggle in the face of supermarkets. But there was another story here, something altogether more intriguing.

A newspaper article, itself a decade old, weather-faded but legible, filled in the details. The last piece of meat that had been sold from behind the counter left the premises in 1983. Michael Griffin, who had lived at this location on Blackfrairs since he was born, had decided to stop trading as a butcher with Ireland’s accession to the European Union as he felt it was no longer possible to get the same quality of meat.

“I couldn’t get the quality cattle that I wanted so I stopped selling,” Griffin explained to the reporter from the Waterford News. And yet, despite having effectively shut down his business, he continued to open the shop each day, sitting just inside the door and welcoming those who still popped by to say hello or have a chat. By the time the reporter came to visit, it had been around thirty years since he’d hung up his white butcher’s jacket. 

“The good old days are gone and there’s no going back now” Griffin said. “People wonder why they have to put an Oxo and Bisto in their meat to make it taste of something… People will look back and see how right I am.”

We stood outside and read the article, looking once more beyond the dusty window to see what clues there might be to what happened next. There was no further information to the story, nothing to fill in the gaps of the last ten years. One day, Number 2 Blackfriars will be renovated. When the shop re-opens there will be something to sell. But hopefully there’s still someone around who remembers the quirky story of the butcher’s shop without any meat, and the thirty-odd years when all that was on offer was a bit of conversation. 

***
Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place.

What We See: Joseph Roth and Our Berlin – A call for submissions

On the 11 March 2023 at Lettretage in Berlin, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is co-hosting an evening of discussion about the writer Joseph Roth and a series of readings inspired by his writing. We are looking for writers in Berlin to join us at the event…

"What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs; a small boy playing with marbles on the sidewalk. He watches the purposeful bustle of the grownups all around him, and, himself full of the delights of idleness, has no idea that he represents the acme of creation, but instead yearns to be grown up; a policeman who fancies himself as the still point at the center of a whirlpool of activity, and the pillar of authority—enemy to the street, and placed there to supervise it and accepts its tribute in the form of good order."
—"What I See," Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth keenly observed the Berlin of the 1920s in his now-classic feuilletons, short reports on the city scene. How might he have seen Berlin today? We're looking for work that – like Roth – explores life in Berlin today, from the playful to the political. So whether you have read Roth’s pieces on Berlin or not, we are looking for contemporary short nonfiction pieces, scenes and sketches, mini-reportages and place-based essays about Berlin.

Together we will create a portrait of a city.

Need some inspiration? How about writing about one of Berlin’s underexplored curiosities, or unusual approaches to familiar places? Eavesdropping in one of the city’s many watering holes, at the barbershop or in a hotel lobby? A late-night visit to the train station or moving through the city by public transport? A profile of Berlin’s outsiders or newcomers? An early beer as the corner pub opens its doors to the morning sun?

All of these are the starting point for one of Roth’s Berlin stories, and he would certainly find plenty to write about if he were to use them again today.

Your submissions can be previously published or unpublished, but we would need you to be able to read at our event on the 11 March. We would also love to showcase the selected unpublished pieces here on Elsewhere as part of a Joseph Roth / Berlin series.

The details:

Language – English
Word Length – 500-1000 words
Send to – JosephRothToday@gmail.com 
Deadline – 24 February 2023
Eligibility – Must be available to read at Lettretage in Berlin at 7 PM on 11 March 2023

Who are we:

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, born in London, grew up in New Jersey (USA). His writing has appeared, among other places, in newyorker.com, Hypocrite Reader, and The Bad Version, which he founded and edited from 2011-2014. He has written on Joseph Roth for both Majuscule and Slow Travel Berlin. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California.   

Julia Bosson is a writer originally from Ojai, California. Her work has appeared in publications such as BOMB, VICE, Guernica, and the Believer, among others. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Program, DAAD, and the MFJC, she has been awarded fellowships and residencies from LABA Berlin, the Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Catwalk Institute. She currently teaches writing at the Cooper Union and resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is at work on a novel about the life and journalism of Joseph Roth.

Paul Scraton was born in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books for Influx Press including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany's Baltic coast (2017) and the novella of the forest In the Pines (2021). He has written for New Statesman on the life and work of Joseph Roth and his next book explores the place of the forest in German cultural identity via a long walk in the Harz mountains, following in the footsteps of Heinrich Heine.

Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and critic from Australia. His reviews and essays—including one on Joseph Roth's urban miniatures—have been published by The Guardian, The Baffler and the European Review of Books among others. He is currently Books Editor for the print monthly Exberliner.

Between the Years

Photo: Katrin Schönig

By Paul Scraton:

We were supposed to leave on Boxing Day, but the waves raced in off the North Atlantic, crashing against the harbour walls and rolling over the loading bay where the fishing boats had been pulled on wheels out of the ocean’s reach. There was no ferry that day, as there hadn’t been since the 17th December, and the forecast was not good.

For two further days the wind and the waves hammered at the island. São Jorge is a thin sliver, a line of volcanic peaks falling away towards the ocean. If there is flat land to be found it is often on lava debris fields at the foot of cliffs, where villages were built that, for centuries – and in some cases still – are only accessible by foot. Across the channel it is possible to spy the neighbouring islands of Pico and, from the right vantage point, Faial. But if the winds and the waves are high, it does not matter how close they might be. No boats will leave the harbour, and no planes will rise from the airstrip.

We hunkered down, waiting for the break. At a local surf shop, the owner looked at the same website as the owner of our guesthouse had shown us on his phone. A line of coloured boxes, filled with numbers. The website is hosted in the Czech Republic but is apparently bookmarked on every browser in São Jorge. The surf shop owner translated what it meant. High winds. Big waves. We weren’t going anywhere.

Each evening came and with it the message that the ferry was cancelled for the following morning, until one evening when it didn’t. Our guesthouse owner was hopeful. Tomorrow, you can sail. But he promised to leave our beds made just in case. We were to message him only once we left harbour. Only then, would he know we had finally checked out.

At the port in the morning a trickle of passengers became a tide. It was more than ten days by now since the ferry to Pico and Faial had run. In that time, Christmas had come and gone, although the decorations were still up in town and festive songs were still playing through the loudspeakers that had been erected some time in December. Passengers checked in their bags and waited in the terminal buildings. 

Others lined up their cars, waiting to board. At the check in counter, a woman delivered a parcel that would travel on the ferry without her. A man did the same. A taxi driver delivered three boxes and then queued to pay for the transportation, before driving off to work the next fare. The weather forecast for the next day was bad, and for the day after too. This might be the only chance.

Photo: Katrin Schönig

We sat on deck and watched Velas and São Jorge slowly retreat. It would take two and a half hours to reach Faial via Pico, and the island remained in view throughout. It was a long farewell. The first crossing was rocky, the second was rough. Perhaps they wouldn’t have made the crossing if it hadn’t been more than a week since the last one. We stayed on deck and watched the horizon. Some passengers slept, laid out across the plastic chairs. Others headed inside and tried to ignore the motion, watching films on their phones or tablets. 

In the channel between São Jorge and Pico, in the central islands of the Azores in the middle of the Atlantic, the internet connection was better than Berlin. We weren’t surprised.

We were between the years and between the islands. In the channel between Pico and Faial a windsurfer raised alongside the ferry, flying above the waves that we were crashing through. The waves seemed to grow bigger the closer we got to Horta and our destination. The spray reached the top deck. Gulls hovered above. At least one passenger was sick. The time between the years is usually when nothing much happens. As we approached land and the rise and fall of the ferry seemed to intensify, we wondered if there were any more surprises left. 

At Horta harbour, where sailors from around the world have left their mark in colourful murals on the harbour wall, and where the first transatlantic seaplanes used to land between the boats, we felt solid land beneath our feet. That evening in Faial, we would still be able to hear the ocean breaking against the rocks below where we were to sleep. We could still feel the motion where we lay. And we could see the dance of the white horses as they broke between the islands behind our closed eyes.

Outside it was calm. The sky had cleared and the stars shone down on the islands and the ocean. Tomorrow, the sun would shine. But the waves had been growing, and the colours and the numbers on the Czech website were not good. The messages had been received. The ferry for the next morning had already been cancelled. 

Photo: Katrin Schönig

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. His latest book is In the Pines, a novella of the forest with photography by Eymelt Sehmer, and published by Influx Press.

Capturing the forest – the photography of Eymelt Sehmer

By Paul Scraton:

It was a cold winter day when Eymelt invited us to her studio in Berlin-Weißensee. She had been looking for models, people she could photograph using a technique that dates back to the earliest days of photography. It would take a while, she said, to capture each image. We would – in this era of mobile phones and Instagram, when more photographs are taken in a single year than in the previous century – have to be patient.

The collodion wet plate process requires that a black tin plate be coated, sensitized, exposed and developed in the space of about fifteen minutes. We spent a few happy hours in her studio room, laughing and joking and mainly talking to Eymelt’s legs, because she was usually under a thick blanket of some short, either behind the camera or in her self-made dark room where she prepared the collodion emulsion, coating the plates and then developing them by hand.

‘Did you ever try this outside?’ someone asked, and in those six words, an idea was born.

In early 2017, Eymelt had made a short film based on my book Ghosts on Shore about the Baltic coast, and we had been keen to work together on a project again. The idea of finding a way to take the collodion wet plate technique out of the studio and into the landscape was the starting point for what would become our new book. 

In the Pines is a combination of words and images. It is my novella, a whole-life story told through fragments about a narrator’s relationship to the forest, sharing the pages with Eymelt’s photographs from between the trees. Some of the stories contained within the book gave Eymelt inspiration when she took her mobile darkroom into the forest. Some of the images she returned to inspired new stories in turn. Eymelt’s art both illustrates the text and inspires it, and I know I would have created something different, something lesser, without our collaboration.

To celebrate the launch of the book this autumn I wanted to celebrate Eymelt’s talent and her art. What follows is my short interview with Eymelt, about the photography in our book and what she’s planning next. 

What is it about this technique that is so appealing to you as a photographer?

First, I love analogue photography in general. And then, what I find most intriguing about the collodion wet plate process, are the imperfections of the images. The photos are blurred; the images look liquid, creating blind spots. These are voids to be filled by the viewer’s imagination. And each photograph is truly unique.

When you first showed me the technique in the studio, it seemed almost impossible you could take it outside. What specific challenges did you face when taking your camera out into the forest?

The most challenging thing involves the developing, in that I have to do it immediately. The coated photoplate needs to still be wet for the developing process, which means I have about ten to fifteen minutes from coating the plate until developing it. I have to therefore coat each plate by hand before each photograph. I cannot prepare a batch in advance.

Once the photograph is taken, the plates can only be handled in darkness. So I need a mobile darkroom, and I built one out of a former steamer trunk. Transporting this monster out into the woods, to basically build a lab out there among the trees, was quite a challenge and was time-consuming as well. 

Added to all this, and related to how much time everything takes, is that I am somewhat exposed. To the weather, and especially the temperature, which can have a major impact. During the winter, for example, the chemicals on the plates froze, creating some beautiful crystalline structures on the photographs. It was as if the environment had engrained itself on the image. But that is also what I love about the technique – you have to embrace the uncontrollable and see what happens.

In my introduction, I’ve written about how the photographs both related to the text and sometimes also inspired it. How was it for you, working on a collaborative project like this?

Generally, the inspiration for my works comes from fairy tales and myths, so the starting point is almost always a story. In the Pines was my first ever collaboration of words and photography, and as your language is very evocative, I could picture some of the images in my head right away. What also helped were the walks and talks we had, especially through the landscape. It helped me get a feeling for it.

Text is interesting because it can go into detail, and you take the reader with you. With an image it is slightly different. I am choosing the frame of course, the perspective and the light situation. But there is more there for the viewer to decide for themselves. Not least when it comes to how close or carefully they decide to look.

My favourite aspect of the collaboration was that it basically forced me to take the technique outside and into the woods. Without this project, I’m not sure I would have given it a try. And spending all that time out there with my camera and my mobile darkroom meant I had lots of beautiful encounters with mushroom foragers, kindergarten kids, horses and hikers.

So will you be taking more landscape or outside photographs using this technique in the future?

I’m certainly going to take some more. I would also like to experiment more, try some things with filters etc. 

In the Pines is all about the narrator’s lifelong connection to the forest. What does the forest mean to you?
For me the forest has always been, since early childhood, a kind of retreat – a place of sanctuary. I could lose myself in fairy tales, and in difficult emotional times it was a place where I took refuge. To this day, the forest is still a place of solace for me.

It was also an adventurous playground for myself and my brothers. A place where you could pick berries and hunt mushrooms, where you could climb trees and build secret hiding places far from the parents’ eyes. It was our own microcosmic realm and it captivated our imagination.

Finally, what’s next for Eymelt Sehmer? You have a gallery in Berlin – are there any projects or news from the gallery you’d like to share with us?

Oh, I have lots of ideas! In early 2020 I took the Trans-Siberian Express through Russia to Mongolia where, thanks to the pandemic, I got stuck. Initially I’d intended travelling there to take photographs of the Dukha people, a nomadic reindeer tribe, and then, having got stuck in Ulaanbaatar with my guide and his family, I met his wife Mugi’s motorcycle club – the first and only female motorcycle club in the country: the Mongolian Lady Riders. Modern nomads.

I made a short film about the motorcyclists and have photographs from the entire trip, but it takes thought and care as to how they might be used. My experience with the Dukha, for example. It was a nice experience, but parts still felt awkward, and we as artists or tourists always need to be careful as to how we present, and indeed to an extent, ‘exploit’ such encounters and topics for our own artistic ends. 

I’m also working on a portfolio of analogue photographs of female characters in mythology, and in the gallery we are slowly getting back to exhibitions, readings and film screenings. Thanks to the pandemic, and the ever-changing situation, it is hard to plan things in advance. But in 2022 we hope to host some photography workshops and collaborations with different people from our neighbourhood in Berlin.

Galerie Arnarson & Sehmer, Berlin
In the Pines by Paul Scraton and Eymelt Sehmer, published by Influx Press

Bearing Witness

Barney Sidler and Zeev Borger

By Paul Scraton:

On a soft summer evening in Weimar we walk through the traffic-free streets of the historic city centre, this monument to German culture with its theatres and museums, palaces and music schools, town of humanism and the Enlightenment. In the square where Goethe and Schiller stand in front of the theatre they look down upon a typical summer scene, as young people gather at their feet to drink beer while football matches are screened to the terraces of cafes and restaurants as, in the beer garden over in the corner, a live concert is about to start.

Throughout the city there are signs that it is awakening from the pandemic. There are posters for concerts and plays, puppet shows and readings, exhibitions and fairs. Bach and Liszt. Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm. Gropius and Kandinsky. Outside Goethe’s old illustration studio, paintings hang beneath the windows of an art school while across the way music drifts out from the rehearsal rooms of the university.

This is Weimar? What does the name Weimar mean to you? A small town in Germany made great through art and words and music. A place that gave us the Bauhaus and named the democratic republic that would emerge from the devastation of the First World War battlefields. And yet, north of the centre, as we walk up towards the railway station from the New Museum, a collection of faces remind us of the other side of Weimar’s story. That this is a town that played host to some of the heights of German culture and also, up there on the hillside, some of its deepest depths. 

Because Weimar is also Buchenwald, the concentration camp on the Ettersberg that was opened in 1937 by the Nazis and would claim the lives of more than 56,000 who were held there. The bus that takes you from the town to the camp follows what became known as the ‘Blood Road’ even while the camp was in existence. If you want to walk, there is another route, a ten-kilometre trail that starts at the railway station and follows the route of the Buchenwald Railway, along which many of the inmates were taken to the camp.

Petro Mischtschuk

The stories of Buchenwald are part of the story of Weimar, and are tied to the city via the Blood Road and the old railway tracks. Within the city itself we discover stories of Goethe and Schiller, of Bach and Liszt and Strauss and Wieland and Hummel and all the other greats who lived and worked here. They have their museums and their exhibits, and they give their names to streets, schools and squares. And since 2019 they have had some company, joined along Weimar’s streets by the faces of some other, less well-known names.

Pavel Tichomirow
Andrej Moisejenko
Chaim Bukszpan
Vasile Nußbaum
Heinrich Rotmensch
Naftali Fürst
Alina Dabrowska
Petro Mischtschuk
Ottomar Rothmann
Gilberto Salmoni
Barney Sidler
Boris Romantschenko
Zeev Borger
Alojzy Maciak
Aleksandr Bytschok
Magda Brown
Eva Fahidi-Pusztai
Günter Pappenheim
Josef Falkash
Raymond Renaud
Tadeusz Kowalski
Zbigniew Pec

These men and women are just some of the more than a quarter of a million people who passed through Buchenwald or its subcamps. They were photographed by the Weimar artist Thomas Müller for Die Zeugen (The Witnesses), an exhibition that can be found in the north of Weimar between the New Museum and the station. The aim of this exhibition is relatively clear to all who emerge from the station on their walk down into town. It is to make this part of history visible and, in the words of the exhibition organisers, to ‘invite the people of Weimar and their guests to consciously pause for a minute.’

The twenty-two faces that make up the exhibition are of twenty-two survivors of the camps. They were brought to Buchenwald from Poland, Hungary, France, Ukraine, Italy, Czechoslovakia, Belarus and elsewhere in Germany. They were held for being Jewish or as political prisoners or for forced labour. By the time Müller took their pictures, they were old. In the meantime, since the exhibition was opened in April 2019, at least one of their number has passed away.

Alojzy Maciak

These are people who have been to Weimar. They were taken to the hillside where Goethe once walked, held in a camp that had been cleared from the forest. They are the witnesses to what was done in the name of Germany within sight of this symbol of German culture. And with these photographs, the town recognises them as it does its other sons and daughters. In Weimar, there are many different stories to be told and all shall have their say. All need to be heard.

On a soft summer evening we walk through Weimar. Twenty-two faces. Most are still with us to bear witness, to tell us what happened behind those gates and the barbed wire fences. Looking at them now, it is sad to think that we do not have much time left. All too soon there will be no one left to remember, at the very time nationalism is on the rise across the continent and the history of what happened in places like Buchenwald is beginning to be rewritten. In this atmosphere, as we slowly lose those who can tell us what happened in the camps, it is up to the rest of us to continue the work of remembering. Of how we got from Weimar to Buchenwald, from one end of the Blood Road to the other. The names of the victims and what was done to them, and those who survived to give us their testimony. We need to keep listening and we need to keep speaking their truth.  

***

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place

Podcast: The Adventure Podcast

By Paul Scraton:

There are many ways to have an adventure. For some of us, it means climbing to the top of a mountain or exploring a remote island. For others it means pushing ourselves to our physical and mental limits. For yet others, it means challenging our perspectives or our beliefs through learning and discovery, by searching out the stories of people and places, and sharing them with others. All of these forms of adventure are the subject of The Adventure Podcast, a series of conversations hosted by the filmmaker Matt Pycroft.

Many of the interviews are with people who might fit your preconception of what an “adventurer” is. These are men and women who have done things that are barely imaginable to most of us, people who have travelled to extreme places. They are mountaineers who have summited K2 or crossed Antarctica, people who have climbed trees in the Amazon or trekked the desert. I discovered The Adventure Podcast through the edition featuring Chris Bonington, one of the world’s greatest mountaineers. The next I listened to featured Dee Caffari, the first woman to sail solo, non-stop around the world in both directions. These are the type of people whose stories have long fascinated me, precisely because they set out do those very things I would never be able to do myself.

As I listened on, getting deeper into the archive – 62 editions at the time of writing – I saw that Pycroft’s understanding of adventure was as broad as the range of guests he invited to speak to him. In a two-part interview, Sophy Roberts spoke eloquently about how, over the course of six trips and many thousands of miles, she gathered the material to write her book The Lost Pianos of Siberia. I listened to the absolutely fascinating tale of Emma Crone as she tracked down the father and son who were known as the ‘last poachers’ in England – and a reminder that distance, when it comes to adventure and discovery, can be as much a matter of time, place, culture and class as it is miles or kilometres. And I found myself stopping on a walk to scribble down some notes as Michael Turek reflected on how a deep personal connection to place informed his photography, and why photographs are perhaps the closest thing we have to time travel. 

Recent editions of the podcast have included Ed Caesar, a writer of long-form essays that has taken him to the DR Congo, a Russian prison camp and on frequent deep explorations of libraries and archives in search of stories, and Cal Flyn, whose book Islands of the Abandonment led her to all manner of abandoned places around the world and discussion that included the appeal of ruins and the dangers of Ruinenlust, the many conceptions of re-wilding, and why places and their stories speak to us and can really matter. 

What all these editions and conversations have in common is that Matt Pycroft has found conversation partners who have not only done extraordinary things, but people who have thought long and hard about the places they inhabit, whether for a short period or a long while, and who have something truly interesting and thought-provoking to say. And they have found, in Pycroft, an interviewer who is skilled in asking the right questions, who knows when to challenge or discuss, but who also knows – crucially – when to stay quiet and let his guest tell the story at their own pace and the way that works most naturally for them. The result is a podcast that is a form of exploration and discovery in its own right, especially for us – the listeners. Highly recommended. 

The Adventure Podcast website
Instagram
Links to podcast feeds

Watch: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

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

The essays:

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

Online Event: Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere

Join Elsewhere editors and contributors on 14 December for an online reading and discussion on wanderlust and memories of elsewhere, the places we’re longing for and those we are separated from, whether by time or distance. 

The starting point for the discussion are a series of essays published on Elsewhere: A Journal of Place earlier this year (see links below) and we are really looking forward to bringing together Sara Bellini, Anna Evans, Marcel Krueger and Paul Scraton to talk about wanderlust and belonging, what it means to be home and what it means to be away, at the end of this strange and anxious year.

To register: For Zoom login details, please send an email to paul@elsewhere-journal.com and he’ll send you the info you need to join the event.

Wanderlust and Memories of Elsewhere
14 December 2020
6pm in Dublin & Cambridge / 7pm in Berlin 

For updates, please also follow the Facebook event page if you are on the platform, or follow us on Twitter. 

Read the essays by our panel from the Memories of Elsewhere series....

Plateau of the Sun, by Sara Bellini

The Road to Skyllberg, by Anna Evans

La Fleur en Papier doré, by Marcel Kruger

The White Arch, by Paul Scraton

About the Panel...

Anna Evans is a writer from West Yorkshire, currently based in Cambridge. She writes about place and memory, travel and migration, and is working on a non-fiction project on the author Jean Rhys and the spaces in her fiction. You can follow her progress through her blog The Street Walks In. 

Sara Bellini is an editor of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. She lives in Berlin, the place she calls home at the moment.

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

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books, including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) and the forthcoming novella In the Pines (Influx Press, 2021).

9 November, Berlin-Pankow

By Paul Scraton:

On this 9 November in Berlin the city is shrouded in fog as we leave our apartment on Osloer Straße. The last few days have been glorious, days made for walking, lingering in the autumn sunshine, but today the weather has closed in as we set off along the leaf-clogged pavement. But despite the change in the weather, I’m starting my week with a walk, a stroll from where I live in Gesundbrunnen across the old Berlin Wall border to Pankow, a deliberate choice for this particular morning, on this particular date.

The 9 November is Germany’s Schicksaltag, its day of fate. As I cross the bridge by the S-Bahn station at Bornholmer Straße I pass by a series of photographs from this day 31 years ago when the border was opened and thousands of people flooded across from the East to the West on the night the Berlin Wall came down. On this date in 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm was forced to abdicate in the November Revolution that ended the monarchy in Germany. On this date in 1923, Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch failed in a volley of police bullets in Munich. And on this date in 1938, the November pogrom against the Jews was unleashed, an attack on their synagogues, their property and their lives, during which 400 were killed. In the days that followed, a further 30,000 Jews would be arrested, taken to the camps where many would later perish. 

There is much to remember on this date in this city, and it has brought me to Westerlandstraße. I walk slowly along the pavement, counting down the houses until I reach number sixteen. I could have picked any number of addresses in my home city to walk to this morning, but this is the one I have chosen. In front of the house the leaves have piled up by the entranceway, covering up much of the pavement. I need to brush them aside in order to find what I am looking for, the three bronze cobblestones laid in the ground just in front of the door. Three cobblestones, one for each person: Conrad Danziger. Frieda Danziger. Emil Elie Leyser.

All three called Westerlandstraße 16 home. Conrad was an architect, who lived here with his wife Frieda from 1935. At some point after 1939, in the words of their neighbours who witnessed the event, the couple were “collected” by the authorities and taken to what was called a “Jewish Apartment” on Köpenicker Straße. On 2 March 1943, Conrad was deported to Auschwitz. On 16 June 1943, Frieda was also taken from the city, first to Theresienstadt and then later to Auschwitz. Emil, known as Elie, was their neighbour. He had lived on Westerlandstraße since 1931 with his wife Margarete, his son Leopold, Leopold’s wife Grete and their daughter Karin. Emil was arrested in 1939 and was also deported to Auschwitz on the 2 March 1943, where he was almost immediately murdered. Leopold and his family were deported to Chelmno/Kulmhof, where all three were killed. What happened to Margarete is as yet unknown. 

In front of the house on Westerlandstraße, everything is quiet. I look down at these three stones that represent three lives, all lived here in Berlin-Pankow, all extinguished in Auschwitz. Even the main road at the end of the street seems to be less busy than one would expect on a Monday morning. Perhaps it is the impact of the latest lockdown, perhaps it has something to do with the weather. Kneeling on the pavement, I try to polish the Stolpersteine, these stumbling stones that have been laid for Conrad, Frieda and Elie, the best I can. Across Germany and in other places in Europe where these stones have been laid, others will be doing the same. Polishing and placing a candle or a flower on these tiny memorials laid in the ground. Memorials that put names to the millions of lives lost in the Holocaust. Memorials that help us to tell their stories. 

I make my way back slowly through the back streets of Pankow to Bornholmer Straße, past the last of surviving embassies that were built here in GDR times, crossing the bridge once more above the railway tracks that once served as a border between two worlds. The history of Berlin can sometimes weigh heavy on this city of ours, where every street seems to contain a memorial and every date in the calendar marks some kind of anniversary. So much so that it is often very easy to miss them, to pass by without a second glance or let the dates slip by unremarked. But it remains important to remember, and perhaps today more than ever. 

Although the biographical information on the Stolpersteine is, by design, starkly limited, the Stolpersteine Berlin website has done a fantastic job of creating an online archive of life stories for many of those remembered through these tiny memorials, including the lives of Conrad Danziger, Frieda Danziger and Emil Elie Leyser, who lived at Westerlandstraße 16.

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Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place. He lives in Berlin, Germany.

Jenny Sturgeon, Nan Shepherd and The Living Mountain

By Paul Scraton:

Sometime around 2011 or 2012 I was in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, browsing the shelves of the Grove Bookshop. There, in a section devoted to nature writing and the outdoors, I found a slender volume called The Living Mountain by Nan Shepherd. This book, written around the end of the Second World War and first published in 1977, has become a touchstone of landscape and place writing in the decade or so since Canongate published it in a new edition with an introduction from Robert Macfarlane. It has been translated into a number of different languages and its author, who died in 1981, now graces the Scottish five-pound note. Quite the result for a book that had sat, quietly in a drawer, for more than three decades after Shepherd wrote it.

In the Canongate edition, The Living Mountain is only just over a hundred pages long, and yet within that short space Shepherd creates a richly detailed portrait of a place that was so important to her throughout her life – the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. If I remember correctly, I read it in one evening at my mum’s house in Menston, and as so often happens with a book like this, it became connected in my imagination not only to the place it is actually about, but also the place where I read it.

I don’t know the Cairngorms very well. I have only been to that corner of Scotland a couple of times, both in childhood, and so I cannot be sure if my memories of the landscape are real, or based on other sources, not least Shepherd’s wonderfully descriptive prose. But picking up the book again this week, I found myself reminded not only of the Scottish landscapes I have known, but also the moors above my mum’s house and the walks we took during that visit nearly ten years ago, with Shepherd’s words still echoing around my head.

Indeed, it is perhaps the greatest compliment I can give to The Living Mountain is that a piece of writing so deeply connected to and rooted in a specific place, can have such resonance with someone who has nearly no personal experience of it. Perhaps it is because all of us who love the outdoors have our own version of what Shepherd felt when she walked out once more into the Cairngorms. For us it might be the Welsh hills or the Baltic coast, a Yorkshire moor or a Brandenburg forest, but we understand Shepherd’s depth of feeling because we feel it too. 

The cover artwork of ‘The Living Mountain’, the new album by Jenny Sturgeon, photo by Hannah Bailey

What is true of books is even more true of music. There are so many songs and albums that are connected in my brain to a certain moment, a time of my life and a particular place. A youth hostel room in Slovenia, the snow falling at the window. A border-crossing in Switzerland, in the middle of the night. A road trip through Spain and the volcanic landscapes of Cabo de Gata. Of course, these songs are not about those places, but they became forever linked with them in my imagination. So I was intrigued to see what happened when I listened to a new album by the singer-songwriter Jenny Sturgeon, who has written and recorded her own The Living Mountain, a collection of songs inspired by Nan Shepherd’s book.

As well as the album, released earlier this month, there will also be accompanying films by Shona Thomson which will be hopefully toured next year, and Sturgeon has also found time to record The Living Mountain Podcast, a series of conversations with artists, writers and ecologists about their own connections with the mountains, outdoor places and how they inspire and influence their work.

It often feels, with projects like this, that the great test of the work of art inspired by another is whether it can stand up on its own right. And while it is certainly true that, listening to Jenny Sturgeon’s songs with Nan Shepherd’s book at your elbow, it is easy to hear the conversation between them, the strength of The Living Mountain (the album) is that the songs work in and of themselves. It was a long time since I’d read the book when I first listened to Sturgeon’s album, and what I heard was something poetic, beautiful and haunting, and I think this would have been the case even if I had never read Shepherd’s work at all. 

At the end of Sturgeon’s podcast episodes she asks her guests if they have a piece of music that connects them to the landscapes and places they have been talking about in their conversation. The greatest compliment I can give The Living Mountain as an album is that I have continued to hear it, echoing in my head as Nan Shepherd’s prose did before, long after the album has finished and I’ve left the house to go for a walk by the river or in the woods. Something tells me that Sturgeon’s voice and songs will be with me for a long time, and will take me back to these autumn days in Berlin and Brandenburg, forever linked to this particular time and these particular places. It’s quite a way from the high plateau of the Cairngorms to the flatlands of northeastern Germany, but for this listener at least, they are now connected through the words and music of Jenny Sturgeon. 

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You can find out more about Jenny Sturgeon and the Living Mountain project, including the podcast, on her website. The album was released in October 2020 by Hudson Records. Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain is published by Canongate. Order it through your local independent bookshop.

Paul Scraton is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany’s Baltic coast (Influx Press, 2017) as well as the Berlin novel Built on Sand (Influx Press, 2019). His next book, In the Pines, is a novella about a lifelong connection to the forest and will be published by Influx Press in 2021.