On the 17 November 1989 a group of students set out on a candlelit procession through the streets of Prague, following the funeral route of Jan Opletal, a medical student killed by the Nazis in 1939. Fifty years later, with central and eastern Europe revolting against Communist rule, the students of 1989 were in no mood to follow the agreed route. Instead they made their way along the river bank to the National Theatre and turned right onto Národní třída, heading for Wenceslas Square. Met by riot police they held out flowers, put their candles on the road in front of them, and held out their bare hands to show their non-violent intentions. The response was brutal, and truncheon blows rained down on the students and the other men, women and children that had joined the peaceful demonstration. It was, in the words of Timothy Garton Ash, “the spark that set Czechoslovakia alight”.

The memorial to mark this momentous first step in the Velvet Revolution that would end Communist rule in just a couple of weeks, is pretty difficult to find. It is on Národní třída, hidden in a small passageway at the point on the street where the students met the riot police. It is close to the Cafe Louvre, where Kafka and Einstein once hung out, and the Reduta Jazz Club where President Havel took President Clinton during a visit that seemed to take in more basement watering holes that palace reception rooms. The simple memorial shows a set of hands. “We have bare hands,” the students told the police, and regardless of the violent response, the protests would remain peaceful. That, and the speed of change, is one of the remarkable achievements of the events of November and December 1989. Continue reading →

Last Saturday as part of our Printed Matters indie publishing day in Berlin that we hosted through Elsewhere, I led a neighbourhood walk in the area around the venue. The walk took us to two squares – Arkonaplatz and Zionskirchplatz – my home neighbourhood for about a decade before we moved a few kilometres north about five years ago. So as I was telling stories of industrialisation and the divided city, I was also walking through some very personal memories. A few days later I decided to go back on my own and chase some of them down.

Arkonaplatz. One of the first pieces I ever had published was a short piece in the Guardian Weekly. I wrote about the Sunday flea market at the end of the road and the bargain hunters chasing GDR-kitsch. I wondered whether we had a potential goldmine in our basement on Wolliner Straße, just around the corner, or whether Katrin’s family had such treasures in theirs. I wrote that piece in the summer of 2006, not long after we had moved to Wolliner Straße and just after Lotte was born. Now she is approaching her tenth birthday, we have been gone from the apartment on Wolliner Straße longer than we ever lived there. We have lost some of our family too. I write this at Katrin’s grandmother’s desk. Wine glasses and bowls stand in the cabinet. Too many memories from when we knew each other, and for Katrin, even longer. Too precious for any flea market.

On the square I stop and watch a couple of guys play table tennis on the concrete tables, despite the single-digit temperatures and the cold late-November wind racing through the cobbled streets. These streets were built as part of Berlin’s great expansion in the second half of the 19th century, when the city was transformed from garrison town to Weltstadt. Northern Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg and Wedding were industrial neighbourhoods, working class and poor. Heinrich Zille, the cartoonist famous for his illustrations of working class life in Berlin, once painted the Christmas Market at Arkonaplatz, the twinkling lights losing the battle against the grime and the smog. Now Arkonaplatz has some of the highest real estate prices in the city. Continue reading →

At the harbour in Rathenow on a sunny, summer’s day, the atmosphere is fine. People take pictures of the “lock spitters”, a memorial to the piece workers who used to kill time whilst waiting for the barges to pick them up by holding spitting competitions against the canal. Others queue at the specially-erected wooden info stands for their maps and tickets for the BUGA, Germany’s premier flower show being hosted in 2015 by Rathenow and other communities in the west of Brandenburg. The BUGA has brought many people to the town, and it seems well-scrubbed in anticipation of their visit. The streets are clean and the bicycles lanes smooth, the balconies of the GDR-era Plattenbau filled with flowers, and every shop and cafe seems to be welcoming the flower-peepers to their corner of Westhavelland, proud of their town.

But as we cross the bridge from the harbour and into the old town – a collection of cobbled streets around the church – I get the sense of something missing… the old town itself. For in Rathenow, the Altstadt only contains a handful of pre-war buildings. The red brick church (itself needing massive renovation over recent decades) and some half-timbered houses, but otherwise most of the the old town seems to have been built either during the years when Rathenow was part of the German Democratic Republic, or even since. It is not that it is bad, or it is ugly, but just you cannot help but get a sense of loss as you walk the streets… and you want to find out more.

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