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