The Rats of Rush Common

By Michael Eades:

7.30am in the drizzle, waiting for a bus by the side of Rush Common in Brixton. I am watching two large rats as they bound across the wet grass and forage in the litter. It is broad daylight but they are not afraid. Their nut-brown bodies and long tails and darting movements are there for all to see as they zigzag around, bouncing from place to place, occasionally scuttling back to shelter in the hollow of an ivy-covered tree stump. 

In the haze and blur of the early morning, I see people walking across the common. Trudging along, hurrying to work, they see the rats and stop briefly. The look on their faces as they react is the same every time (the same as must surely be on mine). Shock, then disgust, then resignation. 

In folklore, rats are bad news. The Oxford Dictionary of Superstitions tells us that, ‘rats gnawing the hangings of a room is reckoned the forerunner of death in a family’. It tells us too that there are people in East Anglia ‘who will not say the word “rat” but will call it some other name, like Joseph. They say it is unlucky’.

When a brown rat crosses your path in the morning, in other words, it is bad luck. Little feet, sharp heads, long writhing tails slipping through the dew… It is a hex on your day to see this. Walking across a patch of municipal grass, lost in your own thoughts, it is unsettling to see that grass twitch and scurry beneath your feet. It is a sort of curse for this to happen: a bad omen, a glimpse into a dark and different world.

You never used to see rats in London. They were always there, I suppose, doing their own thing. But they stayed mostly out of sight. Over the past few years though they have become more and more visible. Ten years of austerity and council cuts, along with the litter-generating bonanza of lockdown, has brought them to the surface. They are there in the parks, rustling in the bushes. They are there on patches of wasteland at dawn and they are in the gutters and alleyways at dusk, spilling out of municipal bins. They dig underneath garden decking and tunnel beneath patches of fake plastic grass. They come up through the drains and gnaw through the floorboards of our flats, apartment blocks, housing estates. 

A century ago, in The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot used the figure of the rat to conjure a sense of the slinking dread running beneath the surface of his ‘unreal’ London. ‘A rat crept softly through the vegetation’, he writes. ‘Dragging its slimy belly on the bank / While I was fishing in the dull canal / On a winter evening round behind the gashouse’. 

White bodies naked on the low damp ground
And bones cast in a little low dry garret,
Rattled by the rat’s foot only, year to year.

Year after year, rattled by the claws of a rat’s foot and the swish of a tail through the undergrowth, we go about our business. In a city where you always have to tread carefully, avoiding pavement cracks and patches of spilt grease and litter disturbed by the foxes, the scurry of rats is becoming a common sight caught in the corner of your eye. A sudden movement twitches your head around with an alertness that you would rather not have, to catch a glimpse of something you would rather not see.

In a brief and fleeting moment, you stop and twitch and grimace. Your face says it all. ‘I do not want this’, says your face.  ‘I didn’t think that my life would be like this. When I was young, I hoped for better things than to be walking to work on Monday morning in the rain in South London and seeing rats foraging in my local park’. 

Eliot, again, whispering over your shoulder. ‘I think we are in rats’ alley / Where the dead men lost their bones.’

Back on Rush Common, you put your head down and walk on. In the rain, you keep walking, past the bins and the picnic tables and the playground and empty swings and the litter. The rats are here and so are you, and you have a bus to catch, and what can you do? The rats of Rush Common crawl and swarm towards you across the grass, invincible. 

 In the end, I suppose, you will stop noticing them. Or, rather, you will learn to ignore them. You will learn not to flinch, or twitch, or curse superstitiously. You will learn not to notice the tails and the darting movements and the rustling of the litter and dead leaves. You will learn to live with them. 

That’s all that we have left. That’s all that there is to do. Walk on, in the sad morning, and ignore them. You just have to get used to the rats. 

***

Michael Eades is a writer and researcher based in London.  His work has appeared in places like Confluence, The Mechanics’ Institute Review, Londonist, The i, and Reflex Press. His writing is rooted in an interest in ritual, folklore and (urban) nature. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram at @DrMichaelEades and www.michaeleades.net.

Leaving Epping

By Michael Shann:

Entering the forest with your back 
to Bell Common, skip out of your other self.
You are not who you were on the High Road.
In two hundred yards, ignore the waymarker.
Despite what they say, you can take this path, 
that path, it doesn’t really matter. 
The forest is a slender creature - 
you’ve stepped onto its tail and will follow 
the supple curve of its spine till you find 
its head fourteen miles away in Wanstead. 
You’ll cross fifteen roads and one meridian.

You might get lost. Enjoy getting lost.
It isn’t easy to get lost these days.
Keep the map in your bag and just keep going,
heading south with half an eye on the sun. 
If you see houses beyond the trees,
turn back and keep the trees about you.

When no one is looking, put your ear
to the rippled bark of a hornbeam.
This is what the past sounds like. And when
you can, dip your fingers in a stream.
Any stream. This is what the future feels like.
And listen: the green factories are working 
overtime. The pulse of the forest rhymes 
with your own pulse. The forest contains you.
You enter it as you enter a poem or prayer.
Read it like a poem, walk it like a prayer.

***

Michael Shann is a poet and printmaker based in Walthamstow, East London, and is a member of the Forest Poets stanza. He has had three poetry pamphlets published by the Paekakariki Press (Euphrasy, Walthamstow and To London) and has recently completed a collection of poems about Epping Forest. Michael works for the charity Carers UK.

They're not volcanoes

By Fiona M Jones:

These hills don’t quite make sense. Three of them together, standing up from the lower land of the Scottish Borders, miles away from anything else on the landscape that might explain their origin. Other ranges of hills demonstrate the ancient folding of Earth’s crust or the gouging of high land in glacial ages past. These just stand there as though lost. 

The Eildons, or Trimontium as the Romans called them. North of the small villages of Bowden and Eildon, south of Melrose. St Cuthbert’s Way threads between the three of them: a mediaeval pilgrimage route towards the Holy Island of Lindisfarne three days to the east from here. Any one of the Eildons makes a pleasant afternoon’s walk in good weather: shortish but steep, just high enough to look down from the top and view the land like a Google map below you. 

Up out of the trees and bracken, it’s mostly heather and trodden footpaths of gullying mud or rocky scree. Bilberries in summer, wind-chill in winter, thick fog whenever the clouds hand low enough. England somewhere off to the south of you. The River Tweed, flowing north of here, used to be the national border—but centuries and battles have redrawn the map until from away up her you’re merely guessing where Scotland ends and England begins. 

The Eildons are VOLCANOES, the local children say, evoking colourful pictures of lava and ash-cloud. They are not volcanoes, or at all events, they have not erupted. Guess again. 

These hills are laccoliths: volcanic blisters pushed up by pressure from beneath Earth’s crust, then left there abandoned as rising magma receded and the softening under-crust hardened once more. Would-be volcanoes that ran out of steam. Would-be tectonic invaders that changed their minds and went away again without conquering this place. 

Far back in history, early in the morning of the third long day of Earth’s genesis, that’s when it happened. The ground here creaked, cracked and crunched. It slowly rose to change the landscape and the destiny of its inhabitants. Streams altered course and the waves of the clouds broke against new summits. Plant cover adapted and the insects of the day found new niches. Swamplife would gather in the hesitations of a river unsure of its course. Aeons later, footpaths and roads and the boundary of nations would obey the lines they inherited from geology. 

Even after all the millennia of erosion by ice and water, these three peaks are still sharp in outline. One or more of them must have come close to erupting, close to yet another version of history… but they never did. Convection currents in Earth’s mantle veered away. The magma stopped rising inside its sedimentary domes. The brittler sedimentary rocks eroded away, leaving a hard, fine-grained igneous surface: the lava that couldn’t quite break through on its first attempt, but wrote its place in history all the same. 

***

Fiona M Jones writes short fiction, poetry and nature-themed CNF. Her published work is linked through @FiiJ20 on Facebook and Twitter.

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

People in the hotel

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

by Marcel Krueger:

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

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

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

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

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

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 04: Sonnenallee Onwards

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Tom Rollins:

“It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it”––only it’s winter now, late cretaceous tail-end of it at least, never ends until it does, sudden and too late. 

And anyway, here and now, the contradictions are grotesque but related to different things, different people. 

*

Passing the old petrol station and the Damaskus Konditorei, a newspaperman trying to interview someone on the street about the ethno-political significance of fireworks and who exactly is it that actually runs these shawarma restaurants, I am distracted momentarily by a man in a tarboush, red-velvet and tassel-topped, who is pushing a trolley full of cardboard boxes along the pavement. It is distracting—an orientalist cartoon for the feuilleton emplotted onto a street named after the sun that somehow always feels cold as concrete. 

But despite others’ best attempts, nothing here takes precedence. This is a mid-morning corso of faces, snatches of conversation, wholesale delivery men forever moving boxes into shopfronts. 

As I keep walking, someone is shouting the prices of vegetables, first in Arabic and then in German. Two young lads, arms interlinked, greet an older man, surprised, with a familiarity that is years old, from another place. “Peace be upon you, uncle, how are your things? When did you arrive?” Theirs are warm, knowing smiles that acknowledge the distances required for this conversation to be happening here. 

*

A Syrian storyteller said recently that, here, “even a plate of hummus isn’t like the plate of hummus [one] knows from back home…a bag of za’atar isn’t either.” 

It is, at the same time that it isn’t. Community that is not quite community, common access. Tied together by a loose thread, a street. 

*

Oh by the way, the other day I was reading my copy of Roth while waiting for the M41 opposite Pannierstr. Roth was either in the middle of describing the city as framed by an apartment window-frame or the other way round. I forget. 

I was holding the book in my left hand, my peripheral vision looking down framed by dragon-skin cobblestones and a smashed bottle of Pilsner Urquell. I couldn’t concentrate. 

And then I heard an Irish guy on a date, waiting at the bus stop, saying, “Well yeah…so the reason it’s called Kreuzkölln is because it’s more like Kreuzberg than Neukölln, the restaurants are nicer, even though it’s still in Neukölln.” 

*

Off the bus, further south, the city’s dinosaur bones start to bear themselves, vertebrae-bumps of cast-iron and brickwork still traceable by hand and foot. 

Two bricks thick, the cobbled trace of the Berlin Wall darts off, crosses a road past a Lidl then takes in a really big breath. Shape-shifting through a 19th-century railway arch, it reappears on the other side, and casually walks off down the pavement. 

The Ringbahn passes overhead, and a new addition to the dual carriageway ringroad is being built underneath it. Somehow in between, an A-road leads south toward forgetful commuter towns. The canal is never far away.

Dumper trucks are shipping the sandy, loamy earth away from a construction site for the new road—how many more of them would it take to uncover all that has happened here?—digging beyond the wasteground shrubs, plastic bottles and crisp packets, past the concrete foundations of the Wall and through the underlying strata of abandoned wire-frame spectacles, rotting leather boots and saxophones, Prussian moustaches, novels about aristocratic romances frustrated in corsets and drawing-rooms.

This is what the graves of dinosaurs look like, the evidence of mass dying, bones on bones. 

***

Tom Rollins is a researcher and writer from the north of England, based in Berlin after several years in the Middle East. He's interested in place and displacement, political geography, walking, and Syria. 

What We See 03: Three Journeys

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Kate McNaughton:

They are at once the arteries, the nerves, the bowels of a city: rumbling intestinally under streets and buildings, singing with electricity from their overhead lines, ferrying weary commuters and be-suitcased tourists, like so many nutrients, from one organ to another. Métro, tube, U-Bahn, subway, RER, underground, overground, S-Bahn: they have different names, different characters layered over their commonalities of wheels, tracks, sliding doors and beeps announcing departure. The hypertension of the Metropolitan and City line at rush hour, suits crushing in at Waterloo from their leafy suburbs, politely ignoring their unnatural proximity on their long one-stop journey to Bank; a more variegated crowding on the ligne quatre as it rattles through Barbès, the wretched of the Earth from the northern banlieue joining up with clean-cut cross-Channel commuters at Gare du Nord on their way to the centre of Paris.

And Berlin? Berlin is a city with low blood pressure, carriages half-empty most of the time, except on the U8 at 2 am, when its pulse is raised by the party moving between Wedding and Neukölln. Berlin is, perhaps, this:

Senefelder Platz to Leinestraße

I walk down the steps to the U2 at Senefelder Platz; just descended from the train that is now pulling out, a man is walking towards me. He is in his 60s, longish grey hair, sports a maroon velvet suit – and on his shoulder sits a magnificent parrot, its feathers an almost fluorescent pink. They are both proud, flamboyant – Prenzlauerberg is theirs, however many Bioläden and Montessori Kitas may have sprouted here over the past twenty years. I imagine them in the 1990s, the dash of their colour against crumbling grey walls, breaking open doors to empty flats, living free and extravagant in the newly-reunified city, as my train trundles off towards Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz – the U2 being a slow, digestive sort of a line.

Then the finicky change at Alexanderplatz, leaving the wine-red shades of the U2 platform for the pale turquoise of the rest of the station, up and down countless short flights of stairs, along endless corridors cloyed with the scent of industrially-produced sandwiches – until I am on the grubby, nervy U8.

By the time I get off at Leinstraße, I am almost alone on the train, alone on the platform. There is one other person here, though, I realise as I walk towards the Okerstraße exit: a young man is defecating between two of the pillars that line the centre of the platform. I only catch a glimpse: an image in perfect profile of him crouching, his heroin thinness, the paleness of his exposed thighs and buttocks, the dark shape of the turd coming out of him at that very moment, silhouetted against the white tiles of the station. Then my eyes, having registered what they are seeing, avert.

Ringbahn

The Ringbahn, somewhere near Ostkreuz. It is over two years into the pandemic, and we are all well-versed in the requisite measures: FFP2 masks, ventilate wherever possible. Late August, and the weather is deranged: a fat-dropped rainstorm that belongs in the tropics, not here on the continental plain. A young man sits, unmasked, at the end of a long line of seats; the narrow window above him is tilted open, letting in a heavy spray of water which arcs above his head leaving him mostly untouched, but drenching the man – equally maskless – standing in front of him. The standing man reaches over the sitting one’s head, closes the window; the sitting man stands up, opens it again with aggressive finality. The standing man, who is dark-skinned – perhaps Indian, perhaps Pakistani – complains in English about how wet he is getting, closes the window again.

‘I don’t want your fucking Corona breath on me, man.’ The young man, who is white, reopens the window.

But the young man isn’t even wearing a mask?

‘I don’t want to wear a fucking mask. I don’t want your Covid.’

A handful of other passengers get involved: quite a few of them are also getting soaked. ‘Better to get wet than to get Covid,’ points out a woman in a perfectly-fitted FFP2 mask. The young man glowers. The air is sticky, quite possibly with Covid, also with humidity and resentment – it has been a difficult couple of years.

S75

How wonderfully it slices through the heart of the city: Ostbahnhof, Alex, Museumsinsel, over there, the Reichstag, down there, the Spree, and now the glass cathedral of Hauptbahnhof. It is Christmas Eve, and my travelling companions and I are off to have lunch in the Tiergarten, full of cheer and goodwill on this crisp, sunny day.

A trio of young men bursts into our carriage, one carrying a speaker, another a trumpet, all three wearing Father Christmas hats. They greet us all heartily, and launch into an upbeat jazz piece; the trumpetist is amazing, his body twisting, fingers flying over a perfect solo. We are charmed, filled with joy that this pleasant day has been given appropriate musical accompaniment; we donate generously.

When we get off at Tiergarten, the musician lads do too, emerging from further up the train. As we walk along the platform, towards them, one of my group says to me: ‘I’m pretty sure that was just playback.’ No longer performing, the young men’s bodies have slumped, lost their wiry exuberance; they slink past us like foxes. I think of the improbable perfection of the trumpet solo. ‘Yeah, it was definitely playback,’ my companion decides.

I notice, now, how waxy their skin is, how sunken their eyes – how grim and devoid of Yuletide spirit their expressions. I am dismayed not so much by our gullibility and the cheapness of their trick as by our naive assumption that they were sharing in our festive joy. I consider whether to let the moment be ruined, but decide, somewhat guiltily, not to.

The young men, a handful of our coins still jangling in their pockets, get onto another train, as we continue our journey on foot.

***

Kate McNaughton was born and raised in Paris by British parents, which left her culturally confused but usefully multilingual. She now lives in Berlin. Her debut novel HOW I LOSE YOU was published by Doubleday (UK) and Les Escales (France) in 2018. Her next novel will be coming out with Doubleday next year if she manages to get the manuscript to her editor on time.

What We See 02: A Meadow, A Park

Photo Vincent Mosch © ZLB

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Daniel Perlman:

The Amerika-Gedenkbibliothek is open on Sundays. SoAGB the program is officially called. There are no librarians, they are forbidden to work on the sabbath, but as long as the library hosts events and activities the doors may remain open to the public.

—

The meadow in front of the library is a pleasant place to sit on Sundays and weekdays alike. Staff set up lawn chairs when the weather is fine, hauling them out of a blue storage container. The Frischluftbibliothek it is officially called. In the late afternoon, if you look up from your book, you might see a gray heron flying past Halleches Tor, over the Landwehrkanal.

—

There is a feather-filled stairwell in Hallesches Tor that leads to the U1/U3. The windows confuse the pigeons and they get trapped and some of them die.

—

A lanky, long-faced fellow in stiff dungarees visits the AGB nearly every summer’s day. He sits on the low stone wall that rings the meadow and releases his pets on the grass, two box turtles, then turns his back and smokes cigarettes. The turtles take off as soon as they touch ground, making a beeline for the east. Most are delighted by the reptiles, but some simply snort and get back to work, as if to reassure themselves that they have better things to do than look at turtles. By dint of some internal turtle timer the man always knows when they’ve strayed too far. He strides forth, snatches them up, and rubs their wagging heads on the way back to his seat. Then he puts them down again; the scene repeats. 

—

Sometimes the man trades out his turtles for a remote controlled car which he crashes at top speed into Doc Martens on the sidewalk. 

—

One Sunday at the Frischluftbibliothek a man with a ponytail and cut off sleeves crawls on the ground beside me. He wears a plastic bag over his hand and scours the earth with a diligence I find disquieting. For over thirty minutes he’s at it, picking up debris. At last he rises. He ties a belt around his waist, a red band around his head. Kung-fu masters are permitted to work on the sabbath, apparently. Two children appear, pushed forward by their parents. Punch! Kick! Roll!  One of the pupils promptly quits. The remaining child wavers. Now, kung-fu master, bring your training to bear! Your dignity hangs in the balance! He adjusts his headband, draws a deep breath. . .but his little apprentice defects. Berlin Berlin/Du heiße Braut, how can you be so cruel?

—

When the wind is right, as are the time and the day of the week, smoke wafts over the meadow. Its source is the park next door. Hundreds of people, friends and family, claim their spots and set up their grill kits. Chairs and fold-out tables, footballs and paddles, charcoal semaver, fleisch and sides. Not a kartoffel in sight. An unkempt man ambles from camp to camp, piling his plate high with kebabs and cutlets, gladly given. He is not partial to vegetables or rice and accepts them, if he must, with a look of undisguised disgust. 

—

I sit in this park on a bench and inch from one end to the other to keep in the oak tree’s shade. A panorama of joy around me. I fill up on it greedily.

—

One evening at Grillfläche Blücherplatz (for so it is officially called, after the Prussian General who sent Napoleon back to Paris from Waterloo) I see a woman walk down the path that bisects the park. Sinewy, tanned, wearing faded Camp David, she pauses to admire a plastic pink scooter and even takes a picture of it. I return to my book. Entschuldigung! Entschuldigung! A girl, no older than nine, runs down the woman who is absconding with scooter in hand. I settle in for a session of that favorite local pastime. Bystanding, it is officially called. 

The girl is slight, patient and polite, but it soon dawns on her that this is no innocent encounter. She puffs out her chest, pluck undaunted, and holds her ground against the stranger until, baby on hip, her mother arrives. Surely, now, the woman will relinquish her ill-gotten prize. But no. She takes out her phone. She displays the picture as evidence that the scooter is her’s by right. So brazen is the claim that mother and daughter are rendered momentarily speechless. But only momentarily. Two aunties arrive, crowding the would-be thief. Her plan was to sell the scooter, I think, but who’s to say there’s not a little one in her life in dire need of a gift? She releases the toy and flees.

—

The aggrieved return to their grillplatz, I to my reading. Not really of course. I continue to spy. I hear them tell their comrades what happened. The little girl chimes in from time to time, emphasizing certain details with wild gesticulations. But an even grander gesture is in order. The entire clan rises as one. Young and old, men and women, they take off marching through the smoke, hot on the trail of their antagonist. Somewhere, the ghost of General Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher tips them an approving nod.

—

Will they call the police if they catch her? Demand an apology? Cuss her out? It is a moot point of course, she is long gone. Sure enough, a minute later the group returns, foiled, triumphant. 

***

Daniel was born and raised in the USA. He earned his MFA in Fiction from New York University. Currently he lives in Reinickendorf where you'll find him shopping at Penny.

What We See 01: Tentstation

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Jen Metcalf:

Berlin was once a city of empty spaces. Many were voids created by bombed-out buildings from the war, and a wide scar left by the death strip that sliced the city in half for 28 cruel years. I didn’t move to Berlin, didn’t start “building my Berlin” like a Colson-Whitehead New Yorker, until 2006. But even then – decades after the bombs had stopped falling, the Wall had been chipped away, and the city had stitched itself back together – even then, Berlin was a city of vacancies.

The year I arrived, one of them, a former lido, had become a campsite. Tentstation. It occupied a leafy, paused space smack-bang in the centre of Berlin, right by the shiny new main station. Prime real estate given over to four young Germans on a temporary contract that should have ended after one year, but went on for six. 

The lido’s 50-metre pool remained, drained of water, but still blue-painted and with graffiti splashed over the walls. A basketball net had been fixed up in the deep end. The diving blocks and diving boards stood motionless at the edge, waiting for the swimmers to return. Instead, they got young backpackers, local clubbers, and fashion shows. Then the dancers came.

That was us. A patchwork community of lindy hoppers. We were scientists, teachers, office workers, freelancers. We were in our 20s and still new to the city, or in our 70s and part of the fabric since the days of the Wall. Most evenings we could find each other in spaces all over the city and dance the day out of ourselves to Count Basie, Cab Calloway, and all that jazz. A world away from the techno thudding in Berghain or Weekend.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

Sometime around 2009, we began gathering by the pool on summer Sundays, surrounded by trees heavy with leaves, the needled disco ball of the TV Tower just visible over the top. As we walked down the path from the campsite entrance, the rumble of the city faded, replaced by the DJ’s music weaving through the bushes to meet us. At first just the suggestion of that familiar eight-count beat, the rise and fall of a song. Then hooting trumpets, rolling drums, and Ella singing louder until we were there, at the edge of the pool, its blue floor already part-filled with couples connected in an easy embrace, bouncing and twisting their steps to the beat. One, two, triple-step, one, two, triple-step. On and on in a hundred different variations as the sun set, the fairy lights clicked on, and the night air began to cool our sweat-soaked skin. 

After those evenings I would cycle home, breathless and in flight. Soaring past the Reichstag, through the Brandenburg Gate, and down Unter den Linden. All of Berlin’s proudest buildings and boulevards lit up against the ink-black sky, carrying their centuries of history forward in steadfast, unforgettable bricks and mortar that are familiar even to those who have never visited. 

Tentstation was never going to join those ranks. They are out of its league. And anyway, it was never meant to survive. After six summers, the actual owners of the land were finally ready to send in the diggers. I never saw the construction site, never watched the heavy machinery in action, but I recently found a photograph online. A still life of a death. A white digger is parked by the pool. Its steel teeth have ripped up the grass where the tents once stood, turned it into mounds of dirt and excavated a mess of cables that might be electricity, or maybe they have been brought there by construction workers – ready to tie around a diving board and rip it out of the ground. The pool’s blue, graffitied walls are torn at regular, blocky intervals that suggest the teeth of the digger’s bucket have been gnawing at it. 

When the ground was level and the diggers had retreated, the architects and their team moved in. They built a new, shallower pool, surrounded it with timbered patios, sun loungers, and low-roofed buildings. This is Vabali Spa. It offers Eastern-themed wellness and overnight stays to white-robed, well-off customers. I hear it’s very popular, though I haven’t seen it for myself. This description is entirely thanks to Google Images. A few Christmases ago a client of mine gave me a voucher for a day’s pampering there. It occurs to me now that I must have mislaid it. 

And so the void disappeared. Of course it wasn’t the first, and it was small fry by comparison. This is Berlin. The city is laden with places that were once hollow ghosts of the past, now restored to their former grandeur, or filled with bustling office districts, tourist sites, and shopping zones. Potsdamer Platz, Checkpoint Charlie, Alexanderplatz, and all the buildings we dancers flew past as we cycled home beneath the sky over Berlin. Chances are good that you’ve heard of them all. But I doubt you’ve heard of Tentstation.

Photo: Joerg Heidemann

So many parts of a city are never visible to those who don’t live here – never even visible to all those who do live here. My boyfriend has been a Berliner since the 1990s. He is an honest-to-goodness German, not just a card-carrying one like me. And still he had never heard of Tentstation. Why would he have? He has built a different Berlin to mine, one constructed of people I will never know, places I will never remember. 

And yet all of Berlin’s small, secret places like the pool live on, even once they are gone. Not because they are so solid a war can’t crumble them, or so important that they will be rebuilt. But because we were there, danced among their graffiti, took care not to step backwards into the deep end, found friends and a skill we never knew we had. They survive because – to borrow again from the great Colson Whitehead – “what was there before is more real and solid to us than what is there now”.

***

Jen Metcalf is a copywriter, translator, and editor who arrived in Berlin in 2006 and accidentally made it her home. Having spent most of her adult life working on other people’s texts, she recently decided to start creating her own. Berlin is a recurring feature in her essays, which she uses to try and understand her place in a city that now feels like a partner in a long-term relationship -- with all the joy, disappointment and compromises that entails. 

Photos by Joerg Heidemann, who organised the swing dance evenings at Tentstation (and DJ'd and danced at them, too).

Cranes at King's Cross, St Pancras

By John de Plume:

Today, cranes define the skyline of London’s King’s Cross, St Pancras. Their ever presence makes them as if invisible, and yet they are at once unignorable, looming as they do over the proceedings of that immense reservoir of electrical energy. Cranes express the permanent flux of the neoliberal city, the endless growth of capital accumulation made manifest in the endless building and rebuilding of the urban space. Cranes are a concrete representation of the abstract logic of capital, where construction assumes continuation not completion: accumulation with no end other than that of perpetual accumulation as an end in itself.

Each crane alone is an impermanent structure, but cranes and construction remain permanent here. Cranes announce that buildings must be built and, implicitly, that buildings must be torn down too. High in the crane cabin – that liminal space that lays claim to the acquisition of the air by the promised commerce, coming here soon – the atomised subject of capitalist modernity pulls the levers of creation and destruction. Inside or outside of the crane cabin, it makes no difference, such levers are familiar to us all.

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John de Plume is a writer whose work explores political economy, critical theory, and the socio-spatial effects of place. He is a member of Plan C London.