Category Archives: Memory

Remembering 15 April: Reflections on Memory and Place

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(above: Majdanek concentration camp. Photo: Ralf Lotys)

by Phil Scraton:

We left the coach quietly, idle conversations of the journey overtaken by due reverence to our destination. Wandering the path through well-kept grass speckled by bright red poppies, I entered the red brick building alone. Inside it was barren, empty. Above my head were rusting shower heads. A bath house, a death chamber into which Zyklon B was released to gas people of all ages and diverse backgrounds; naked not for showering, but for swift transportation to mass graves or incineration.

Overwhelmed and without warning I sobbed uncontrollably. Leaning on the wall against which the dying collapsed, I pressed my flushed cheek against cold brick as if to self-inflict pain. On leaving the desolation of the chamber to the blue sky, bright sun and rustling trees I trembled, overcome by vicarious grief. Walking slowly I looked across Majdanek where some 80,000 perished, over 18,000 on one November day in 1943. In the foreground stand the huts, fences, watch-towers and the Mausoleum containing the excavated ashes of so many who died. The backdrop is the busy Polish city of Lublin. Continue reading →

Walking the Neighbourhood

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Do you remember when, we used to sing…

This week the Pictoplasma festival of character design and art is taking place in Berlin, and alongside the conference and screenings that make up the central focus of the event, twenty venues mostly in the neighbourhood of Mitte (including The Circus) are hosting small exhibitions. Pictoplasma have distributed maps as part of this Character Walk, and people are tramping the streets to see what weird and wonderful things they can discover.

It is a lovely idea, and we joined in. What struck me as we were walking, first along the Torstraße and then along the Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße to Alexandeplatz and then back up past Hackescher Markt to Rosenthaler Platz, is that this triangle has been the centre of my Berlin life ever since I moved here over a decade ago, despite the fact that apart from the first weeks at the hostel, I never actually lived within it. It was in the small hostel bar on Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße (now an office) and then Kaffee Burger that I spent my first evening in the city. I ate kebabs from a shack where now the Wombat’s Hostel now stands.  I walked down to Alexanderplatz to buy the Guardian, and stopped for a coffee in a café that has long since disappeared.

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Unnamed and unacknowledged: exploring the Edgelands

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(above: Pankow, Berlin – Garages, Railway Lines and Allotments)

Edgelands: Journeys into England’s true wilderness is written by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts and is a fascinating book, exploring as it does those places that are neither city or countryside, but the edgelands in between. The two writers have a clear and obvious passion for these edgelands, which they describe in the introduction:

“Somewhere in the hollows and spaces between our carefully managed wilderness areas and the creeping, flattening effects of global capitalism, there are still places where an overlooked England truly exists, places where ruderals familiar here since the last ice sheets retreated have found a way to live with each successive wave of new arrivals, places where the city’s dirty secrets are laid bare, and successive human utilities scar the earth or stand cheek by jowl with one another; complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard, if we could only put aside our nostalgia for places we’ve never really known and see them afresh.”

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On Morecambe Bay

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by Phil Scraton:

It is often remarked that death knows no hierarchy: born naked, die naked. Yet how the living transform death’s meaning. Understandably when tragedy strikes we stand emotionally and physically alongside the bereaved as they mourn their loved ones. In the aftermath of multiple deaths the intensity is collective. The randomness of disasters, of who survives – who perishes, reminds us that it could have been me, my brother or sister, my mother or father, my son or daughter, my friend or neighbour. Towns, cities, villages become forever blighted by the deep sadness associated with their names.

Throughout the year, particularly in summer, the sands of Morecombe Bay, to the west of Lancashire’s coastline and the south of Cumbria’s beautiful Lake District, attract thousands of walkers. The most famous Morecambe Bay walk crosses the mouth of the River Kent, from Arnside to Kent’s Bank. Guides understand the complex movement of the tides and the channels they weave between and within the ever-shifting sand banks. What attracts walkers – the miles of flat sand against the backdrop of the northern mountains, the desolation and openness – is also its inherent, seemingly benign, danger. Continue reading →

Spiritualized – Lay Back in the Sun

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From the review of the recent Spiritualized concert in Manchester on Louder than War:

“‘Lay back in the Sun (good dope, good fun) is the original feel good hit of the Summer and brought a smile to the glowing crowd no doubt topping off a rare lazy Sunday spent drinking in back gardens or in overpriced smoking areas of pubs.”

Reading those words and listening to the song I am taken back to our old back yard on Raven Road in that last summer in Leeds, to the beer gardens of Headingley, and then even further, to the final evening of Glastonbury in 1998, caked in mud and yet happy as the sky cleared for the only time of the weekend as Spiritualized took to the stage to perform as the sun went down, a glorious, epic and uplifting hour to send us deliriously on our way in the middle of the night to be pulled from the car park field by a tractor before driving along the country lanes through the night to Malvern. At least, that’s how I remember it now…

Words: Paul Scraton

Battle of the Nations – the Völkerschlachtdenkmal in Leipzig

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A photo diary by Katrin Schönig:

Between the 16th and the 19th October 1813 the allied armies of Prussia, Russia and Austria convened on the battlefields just outside Leipzig to defeat Napoleon’s army in what was the biggest mass battle of the century. There were over half a million soldiers fighting on those days, and one in five never made it home. The villages and the landscape were left in ruin, but the Battle of the Nations would prove to be decisive. A year later and the coalition forces invaded France. Napoleon was forced to abdicate, and though he would return to power, it proved to be only in order to suffer a final defeat at Waterloo and exile for the remainder of his life on St Helena. Continue reading →

Walking the Berlin Wall Trail

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Berlin’s Mauerweg – The Berlin Wall Trail:

Borders are always interesting places. As someone who grew up on an island where a land border meant waiting for the first signs of ARAF painted on the tarmac as we left Cheshire for North Wales, the idea of crossing from one country to another by car or, even better, by foot remains a fascinating proposition. For the urban wanderer borders are also the location for much that is worth discovering, whether it is the border between neighbourhoods, between the inner city and suburbia, or the edgelands that mark the often muddled and blurred boundary between the urban and its hinterland.

In Berlin of course we have a structure – or for the most part the memory of a structure – that if you follow its 160 kilometre length will offer up all of the above, as well as the reminder that once where Wedding becomes Prenzlauer Berg or Mitte becomes Kreuzberg was not just the matter of crossing a street from one neighbourhood to the next, but an international border guarded by concrete slabs, barbed wire, and guards with guns. Continue reading →

Embassies of Prenzlauer Berg

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Walking through Berlin you often stumble across reminders of the long division of the city. There are of course the famous examples, such as the stretches of Berlin Wall at the East Side Gallery or on Bernauer Straße, the Checkpoint Charlie museum or the line of cobblestones that cross city streets along the path of the wall to remind you how this incredible, brutal structure split Berlin in two. There are other symbols as well that are perhaps less obvious. The tram that runs past my house is one of only a couple of stretches of working tram-track that run through the western districts of the city. Before the division the whole of Berlin was served by the tram network, but in the west they were replaced by buses. Now, in parts of the city, they are returning but in general you can apply the rule; if you can see a tram, you are in the old east. Then there are the differences in architecture, the newspaper reading habits in different neighbourhoods, and even voting patterns… Berlin is coming together, but it could take more years than the wall actually stood before all the traces of the division have been removed from the city. Continue reading →

A bungalow by the sea

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Sea mist hangs over the rutted, ploughed fields. It hangs between the long line of poplar trees and the narrow dirt track that leads from the bungalows, through the dunes to the beach. Down there, looking out to sea, visibility is perhaps fifty metres at most. Waves roll through the mist, the world enveloped in grey, the air damp and chilly.

Most of the bungalows that stand in this colony beneath the poplar trees during the days of the German Democratic Republic. They are in varying states of repair, some peeling and flaky as if the last substantial work was done during the socialist era, whilst others are mini-palaces complete with satellite dishes and fine collections of cheerful garden gnomes. Continue reading →

Llanberis slate quarries – A photographic essay

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Chris Hughes has often passed by the Dinorwig quarries across the lake from Llanberis and has photographed them from afar. For this photographic essay he got inside, to reflect on the miners, the climbers and the wildlife that have staked a claim to this corner of North Wales:

In the late 1960s we visited the slate quarries of Tilberthwaite in the Lake District, usually on wet days when we had been rained off climbing on the ‘better’ crags. Later we set up long abseils in the Cathedral quarry to impress the PE students we took there as part of their outdoor activities course. But it wasn’t the activity that was remembered, it was the incredible grandeur of the rock architecture, the wonderful effects of light and shade created within these deep pits and the quiet and stillness where once there had been the noise, constant movement, and the general mayhem of the hard and dangerous job of quarrying slate.

Driving through Llanberis you could not fail to notice the monstrous heaps of slate waste and vast rock faces of the Dinorwig quarries across the lake. The whole side of the mountain, and a good part of the inside, had been chopped, sliced, split and generally smashed into pieces. Much of it was thrown away, creating the huge heaps and screes of spoil, whilst the good bits were carted off for roofs, walls and garden rockeries, until it all came to a grinding halt as the price of slate made it all financially unviable. Continue reading →