By Anja Ahrens:

Almost thirty years ago, when I was still a child, my Grandfather attempted to teach me Theodor Fontane’s poem Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in his original tongue – Plattdeutsch, a dialect of German from the north of Germany – as I spent my summer holidays with him in the countryside. I did not understand the poem then, and try as I might I was unable to memorise it. That was the summer before my grandfather died.

Years later I remembered his wish for me to know this particular poem, and knowing that he had died soon after, and having finally come to understanding the story, I always felt as if he had been trying to tell me something… that in some way he wanted to leave something behind in a different way than the Herr von Ribbeck:

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It is over a decade since I was last in Sarajevo. When I look back on it now, that journey in the early winter of 2001 was something I had been building up to ever since I had watched the scenes from the city and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia unfolding on our teatime television screens during my teenage years. It was to become a major part of my studies, both during by BA and MA at the University of Leeds, and during my university years I made my first trips to some of the countries that were once part of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and which culminated in a bus ride from Zagreb to Sarajevo which will live long on my memory. Here is something from my notebook, written in Berlin after the trip was over:

The two men stand across from each other, separated by the sixty-four squares of their battlefield, their knee-high soldiers awaiting instructions. The game has been progressing for some twenty minutes, and even to untrained eyes it is the older of the two who has the upper hand. He is relaxed, continually joking with the band of spectators gathered around the outdoor chessboard, rejecting advice with a wave of the hand, barely contemplating the situation before making a move. His opponent, younger and dressed in a suit, is quieter, his energies focussed on the game. But it is all to no avail, as age and experience finally triumphs. Checkmate achieved the victor takes the congratulations of the onlookers as he re-sets the pieces, ready for the next opponent.

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No, this post is not about the Botanic Gardens of Berlin, so wonderfully captured recently on the überlin blog. The reason for this post is somewhat more personal, as I caught the S-Bahn this morning from Bornholmer Straße south to Steglitz and the Botanischer Garten stop. This was my first neighbourhood in Berlin, back in the winter of 2001/2. Having moved to the city without a place to stay, one of my colleagues who was also studying at the Free University offered me a room in his apartment. The flat was on the ground floor, which made it a little dark – and happily cool when it came to the summer – but this was made up for by the fact that we had an overgrown garden out the back door that only Thomas and I had access to.

Altogether I lived down by Botanischer Garten for about nine months, before Thomas returned to Australia and I moved north, to Prenzlauer Berg, Mitte and, eventually, where we are now in Wedding. But I have very strong memories of that time, perhaps because it was my first months in the city. We would travel into the city on the S-Bahn, although if we were caught in town after the last train we would catch a night bus that took us on moonlight ride through deserted streets for over an hour, from Hackerscher Markt through Checkpoint Charlie to Kreuzberg and Schöneberg, before finally stopping in the shadow of the Rathaus tower in Steglitz. Sometimes, when Thomas had worked late and I was on an early shift, we would meet on the platform of the Botanischer Garten station, both of us bleary-eyed at opposite ends of our respective days.

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Since I moved to Germany I have made a handful of trips south to Dresden, that grand old city on the Elbe with its beautiful Altstadt and bustling and buzzing Neustadt on opposite banks of the river. The first time we went there we caught the train sometime in January, walking through the snow past some suitably eastern bloc socialist modernist architecture before we reached those buildings that made the city famous and that can, with a squint and a bit of imagination, return us to the city as painted by Bellotto during the 18^th Century, a period when Dresden was renowned for its art and architecture, and which inspired Schiller to write his Ode to Joy, his poem celebrating brotherhood and unity of all mankind.

The wide sweep of the river separates the old and the new towns – and the flood meadows that seem to stretch almost as wide as the Elbe itself highlight the sense of distance between either side. On another visit I came south with a friend to play Petanque, tossing those boules along pathways in the manicured gardens of the Japanese Palace on the northern bank, our view back across to the old town distracting in its beauty. It was around about then that they finished the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche, and it is at this point we come to the unavoidable fact about Dresden and one which cannot help but shape your view of the city however many times you visit.

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In December 1886 Captain Daniel O’Neil climbed aboard his ship, the “Annie Maguire” for a voyage north from Buenos Aires to Quebec. With him for the voyage were thirteen crew, two mates, his wife and his twelve year old son. Caught in bad weather just off the coast of Maine on Christmas Eve, O’Neil was aiming for Portland Harbour in order to take shelter and ride out the storm. On land, in the Portland Head Lighthouse atop the rocky cliffs of Cape Elizabeth, lighthouse keeper Joshua Strout was keeping watch as the clock approached midnight. It may have been Christmas Eve, but it would not be a quiet shift.

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