Over the next few months I will be walking around the outskirts of Berlin, starting each walk where I finished the last, until I complete a loop of the edge of the city. These walks will be written up for a new book project, and here on Under a Grey Sky I will publish some postcards from along the way…

Across the street from the Eastgate shopping centre, on the other side of the S-Bahn tracks, is a cemetery. This has been a place of burial for decades; a pauper’s graveyard long before the S-Bahn came, the high-rise apartment blocks and the shopping mall. The memories contained in these spaces between the trees, tell the stories of this corner of the Berlin outskirts. Of villagers from when this was the countryside beyond the city limits. Of more recent residents of the huge housing estates built during the GDR. Of the victims of war and the Nazi regime.

Just north of cemetery is the spot where the Nazis interned hundreds of Sinti and Roma, brought here during the 1936 Olympics. From Marzahn they would be later shipped east, to the concentration camps and the extermination camps. A memorial stands in the cemetery and another outside the gates, telling their story. There are other memorials too, to the forced labourers of nearby factories and to Red Army soldiers who died during the battle for Berlin. To the victims of fascism and the victims of Stalinism. And on the grass, between the trees, row after row of small headstones. I kneel down to brush the snow from the stone closest to the path.

UNERKANNTER
SOLDAT
1945
1939-45

It is the resting place of an unknown soldier. Of tens of unknown soldiers. All that can be remembered is the year they died and the conflict that killed them. But in their numbers, these comrades have a power that is perhaps even heightened by their anonymity. It makes me think of the words of the old East German anthem, written on the walls of another graveyard, a few hundred kilometres north of here:

Dass nie eine Mutter mehr / Ihren Sohn beweint

That never again, a mother mourns her son. That is the message the unknown soldiers have for me, on this cold and bitter February morning.