Category Archives: Places

Postcards from the Edge, Part Six: Borderland Suburbia

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…

The path runs right through the middle of the field, a dusty trail that has smoothed away the ploughed furrows on either side. A hundred metres to the right is the Berlin Wall Trail and the edge of the city. Where I am walking would have once been a restricted zone. Now it is the last stretch of Brandenburg before the city limits. I am aiming at a collection of pastel yellow houses; a new estate occupying what had once been a farmer’s field, then the border fortifications of the GDR and then a field again. This mini-suburb, only partly finished, clings to the bottom of Berlin like a barnacle on a ship’s hull. Some of the gardens are neat, lawns laid and patio furniture waiting for the summer to come. Others are still sandy soil, the tracks of diggers and trucks still visible where one day there will be grass and trampolines, barbecue sets and wooden decking.

As the path approaches these new houses the ploughed field gives way to a patch of uncultivated and unbuilt land, an edgeland space about the width of a football pitch between the countryside and the new suburbia beyond. This land, presumably where the construction crews of the new estate parked their vehicles and their portaloos, now contains the remnants of all the activities that come to unclaimed spaces such as these; places that are neither here nor there. A fly-tipped refrigerator. The burned circle of a bonfire. Empty beer bottles. Dirt bike treads. And then, two steps, and my feet leave the squelchy, muddy ground and hit the tarmac of the new street.

I move quickly through the estate. The houses feel too-close together, the gardens mean. You’d better get on with your neighbours. I follow the road around and now it is right on the boundary to Berlin, the new estate facing the more established West Berlin suburbia of detached houses and allotment gardens on the other side. It appears the authorities have been unable to agree on shared infrastructure, as two streets run parallel to each other, divided only by a line of raised kerbstones. On the Brandenburg side the street is new, recently-laid and smooth. In Berlin it is uneven, potholed and neglected. The Berlin Wall is long gone, but here at least the dividing line is clear to see. Borders can still make a difference it seems, even when the concrete and wire are nothing but a three-decade-old memory.

Baltic: Capturing the stories of the shore

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We have travelled north again, following those well-travelled routes through the pine trees and past the lakes that have taken us back and forth to the Baltic shore over the past couple of years. Our destination is Koserow on Usedom and this time we are travelling with friends, here for a week to make a short film that will be a companion piece for my upcoming book about this coastline and the stories it can tell. It is fitting that we have come to Koserow, because it was here that the idea for the Ghosts on the Shore came to me. It was during the easter holidays and I had two books with me. One was Europe by Jan Morris. The other was Marshland by Gareth E. Rees.

Sitting in an old GDR-era dacha at the foot of the Streckelsberg with its ivy-clad beech trees and legends of witches and gluttonous cities lost to the waves, I sat one night with some beer and whiskey and wrote down an idea for an essay or maybe something longer that would tell some of the stories of the German Baltic between the old inner-German border to the west and the line in the sand that divides Germany and Poland to the east. Marshland inspired me because it suggested to me that there are many ways to tell the stories of place. Jan Morris provided me with a quote:

The Baltic she wrote, is the most ominous and eerie of Europe’s waters.

Why is that? I scribbled it down on my notebook. To answer that question became the starting point for my own explorations. The next day I talked to Katrin about the idea, about her own family history that would become a central part of what I wanted to write.

That was nearly three years ago and now the book is finished, to be published by Influx Press – just like Marshland – in June. Over this week we have returned to some of the places I travelled to for the book, to create this visual companion. We have talked a lot about the stories of this shore, of previous visits, of memory and legends. We have been to the beach and the town, the frozen inland sea and to the top of the Streckelsberg. And once again I have been captured by the melancholy beauty of this part of the world. It is amazing what can happen, given four days in a cabin by the woods, a couple of good books, and the time and space for a few drinks and a lot of conversation.

Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along the German Baltic coast will be published by Influx Press in June, and you can already order your copy via their website now.

Postcards from the Edge, Part Four: The Müggelberge

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The last time I walked these woods it was with friends and family, stretched out along the path as we crossed the small range of hills in the south-east of Berlin that separate the Müggelsee from the Langer See, the Dahme from the Spree. Today, having not met a soul on that same path, I feel alone in the woods, although someone, somewhere, is using a chainsaw. I am aiming for the top of the hills, where a tower was built in the 1960s to replace one that burned down in the 1950s, although it will be closed when I get there, its panoramic views of Berlin and Brandenburg protected from me by a high metal fence and a padlock.

But in the German forest, even a small one like this, you are never really alone. As I push on up the hill, avoiding the path that is treacherous with ice, I am walking with the characters that live here in the Müggelberge – on the hilltops, the tiny valleys or in the depths of the Devil’s Lake. Fontane told me these stories; tales of the Wassermann and the ghosts that appear when nocturnal wanderers pass a certain stone by the path. There is also a Princess, whose palace was once swallowed by the marshland on the edge of the lake, who can take you and show you, or demand to be carried to the church in Köpenick, a few kilometres back down the track…

Fontane seems to like these stories, like he likes the Müggelberge themselves. More than any other collection of hills that rise modestly from the sandy soil of the Brandenburg plain, he thinks that these are the most like mountains in miniature, with their summits and their gulleys, their “high” passes and icy lakes. The Müggelberge are an artists’ impression sketched on a pad. An architect’s model, laid out a table. They are an experiment by nature, a first attempt, perhaps, before more ambitious projects down in the south.

Postcards from the Edge, Part Three: Parkfriedhof Marzahn

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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.

Postcards from the Edge, Part Two: Blankenfelde

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For what feels like hours I have been walking alone. Blankenfelde is Berlin’s most sparsely populated locality, once dominated by a wide expanse of sewage fields which are now farmed beneath big skies, all combining to make the solitary walker following the path between the monochrome fields and the iced-up drainage ditches feel small and insignificant. On the horizon, faded in the mist, a collection of tall structures that all help us keep warm and connected in this second decade of the 21st century: windfarms and electricity pylons, telephone wires and mobile phone masts. Some bare trees in the distance. A moody-looking church steeple. Otherwise, not much at all.

This is probably going to be the longest of my walks around the edge of Berlin, and probably the loneliest. There is little sound out here in the fields. The odd bird. The distant rubble of the cross-continental trucks on the motorway. A plane high and invisible above me. And then, all of a sudden, I get the sense that I am being watched. Observed. I turn and look behind me, across a rutted and snow-mottled field. Three deer have stopped in the open and are looking at me. They are standing about a hundred metres away, and the four of us stand frozen, staring at each other for a moment or two. Then I lift my camera from the bag and that is enough. They turn tail and run for cover, aiming for a small copse not far from where they had been standing. I watch the go through the lens, trying to capture their escape. Once they are out of sight I continue my walk, but this brief encounter is a reminder that when walking the outskirts I am never truly alone, not even in the emptiest corner of Berlin.

Postcards from the Edge, Part One: Tegeler Fließ

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At the Heimatmuseum they tell me that the first human settlements in Berlin were here, eleven thousand years ago. Reindeer hunters who caught the migrating animals as they crossed the river on their back and forth journeys each year, before the planet warmed and they headed north, to the Arctic, for good. I stand on the path and look out across the reed beds, the alder marshes and the stream itself, winding this way and that. On this side of the path it is easier to imagine the reindeer hunters. On the other, a row of suburban gardens and their collection of trampolines, compost bins and patio furniture. Looking this way, the leap of imagination is further.

This contrast between the two sides of the footpath continues as I walk on, following the waymarked Barnimer Dörferweg across the northern edge of Berlin. Gaps in high fences offer a glimpse at neat lawns and greenhouses in one direction. Signs warning me to keep to the path because these wet meadows are the nesting ground for rare birds in the other. So I stick to the prescribed route, here at least, and the sound of my feet crunching on the grit and the ice, and the rat-a-tat-tat of a woodpecker hitting a tree. At least, I think it is a woodpecker. It might also be the sound of an early riser, lifting the shutters of their bedroom window, to let in the half-light of this January morning on the outskirts.

Words & Picture: Paul Scraton

Fleet: A London Walk

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How do you plan a walk through a city? I am in London, ready to walk, and already lost in the sense of possibilities that the city has to offer. I could follow the Thames, this way or that. I could choose a neighbourhood and try and walk every street. I could follow a famous road, or the quickest route between two well-known landmarks. Or I could follow a river, a lost river, buried beneath the city streets.

Standing at Blackfriars Bridge, looking back across the river to the south bank from where I came, across to the Shard and the other buildings that remind me I have never spent enough time in these city to be able to account for and date the changes, it is the last of these ideas that I am putting into action. Inspired by Tom Bolton and his London’s Lost Rivers I am going to follow the route of the Fleet, the best I can, from Blackfriars to King’s Cross and to see what I see along the way.

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On Heinrich-Heine-Straße, Berlin

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I am early, so I take some time on the corner with the man who is always there, looking out across the junction towards the kebab shop and the U-Bahn station; to where the crowds gather waiting to gain entrance to the club; to the Plattenbau walls and their balconies; beneath the wintergarten windows still shining with the lights of a Christmas already past. The cars move along the street that bears the name of the man for whom this memorial – surrounded by trees atop a small plaza of crooked flagstones – was built. Beneath the ground the U-Bahn trains stop at the station of the same name, a station that was closed for 28 years when the wall divided the city and divided the street a few hundred metres to the south, complete with barriers, checkpoints and border controls.

Heinrich-Heine-Straße is one of those corners of Berlin I had never had any real reason to spend time in, although my daughter’s friend lives down the street so I have emerged onto this corner a few times recently, and usually too early. When I do, I spend some time at the memorial, following the man’s gaze as he looks out across the street and the traffic. Heinrich Heine lived in the first half of the 19th century, a writer of narrative poems, plays, essays and travelogues; a man who wrote the words “where they burn books, they will ultimately burn people too” in 1821. In 1933, 102 years later, Heine’s books were among those burned on the Bebelplatz by the Nazis in Berlin, and those sadly prophetic words are now engraved at the spot.

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Five years under grey skies

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It was on the 29th December 2011 that I launched this blog by looking back over the previous twelve months, which included trips to Spain and Anglesey, the Baltic coast and walks in and around Berlin. I am not really sure now, five years on and once more immersed in the not-unpleasant limbo of the Christmas-New Year period, what I was hoping to do with this website. Early on I searched for and encouraged others to contribute to the site, launching (and the quietly abandoning) ideas for different series of posts, before it settled down to being what it is now.

So what is it? It is a place where I can write about the things that interest me; the places I have visited, the ideas and reflections that are inspired by “adventures beyond the front door” – the original tagline for the site. It turned from a collaborative project to a personal one, for my words but also for the photography of my partner Katrin. We realised over the five years that Under a Grey Sky was becoming an inspiration to us as a family, to get us out that front door and down the river bank, up the hill or to a new neighbourhood of the city. “It’ll make a good blog,” became the rallying cry; reason enough to visit someplace new or head back for another look at a familiar haunt.

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A Berlin Story

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We had not been running the tours at Slow Travel Berlin very long when we got the request. A couple, new to Berlin, wanted a private tour of Wedding and Gesundbrunnen for them and their friends. “My husband is in his eighties,” the message ended. “So it might be a little slower than usual!”

We met at the ice cream cafe on Prinzenallee, on the corner of Badstraße. The couple were already there, drinking coffee and waiting for their friends to arrive. Once the group had gathered, and after another round of coffees, we began to walk. The route starts at the site of the old Luisenbad in Gesundbrunnen, and then moves through the historic neighbourhood of Wedding; along the Panke river and across Nettelbeckplatz; to Leopoldplatz and then back through the side streets to Humboldthain and the top of the flak tower.

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