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