The dead remind us – the Memorial to the Socialists, Berlin

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“Freiheit ist immer Freiheit der Andersdenkenden”
(Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently) – Rosa Luxemburg

Alexanderplatz was frozen and empty on Sunday morning, the shops shuttered against the cold wind that seemed to be blowing in directly from Siberia along the Karl-Marx-Allee. From the station in the shadow of the TV Tower we climbed down the stairs to the underground line east, catching the U5 to Lichtenberg. It was busy, surprisingly so for a Sunday morning. But the occasional rolled and red flag leaning against the side of the carriage, or the more common sight of a bunch of red carnations carried in gloved hands told the story of all this early morning activity. At Frankfurter Tor half the carriage emptied, at Lichtenberg the other half did likewise. Different departure points but they – we – all had the same destination in mind; the Memorial to the Socialists at the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery.

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Ainsdale Woods, the Sefton Coast, UK

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By Chris Hughes:

Following the article that featured the wonderful photographs of Michael Lange of the forests of Germany I revisited the photographs I have taken in the woods of Ainsdale Nature Reserve just a 10 minute walk from my house. No-one would say that we live in the countryside but we are very privileged to enjoy the proximity not only of the woodland but one of the finest dune systems, beach and both salt marsh and freshwater marsh environments in Europe. This is the Sefton coastline, stretching 21 miles from Crosby in the south to Hesketh Bank in the north.

The woodlands were planted well before the Nature Reserve was established in 1980, initially in the 18th century but more so in 1887 and in 1893 when the first Corsican Pines were planted and by 1925 most of the woodland of today had been planted. Now managed by Natural England and The National Trust the woodlands do provide a supply of timber now that the trees are fully mature but far more importantly provide a habitat for animals, birds and plants, many of which are rare and found only in unspoilt dune systems.

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Where the seagulls follow the trawler – Wieck, Germany

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At breakfast we watch the small fishing boat, the crew of three wrapped up in their waterproof overalls, as it chugs through the narrow channel at the mouth of the river and into the bay. We are in Wieck, a small village that belongs to the Hanseatic city of Greifswald in the north east of Germany, and our hotel sits right on the point where the river Ryck meets the Griefswalder Bodden – a huge bay enclosed by the island of Rügen and the sweep of the mainland east of Greifswald to Usedom. During East German times the Wieck harbour was home to a Marine Training School and the military sailing boat the “Wilhelm Pieck”, named for the former President of the GDR. Now the training school is a holiday camp for school and youth groups, and the sailing boat has been renamed the “Greif”, although a cocktail bar at one end of the old complex maintains the old institutional name for posterity.

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Burning houses and a walk in the woods

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The third part of our Bad Saarow diary, in one of our favourite places only an hour or so by car or train from Berlin:

A lot of the joy of our trips to Bad Saarow is, as I mentioned in the first part of this diary, the joy of the familiar… returning to a place that you know well can be comforting as well as filling you with (hopefully) happy and positive memories. But I am always happy when you have the possibility to discover something new about a place that you thought was fully explored, and the small footpath we stumbled upon during our Boxing Day walk was one such happy discovery.

It was not long, perhaps a hundred metres or even less, that linked a small estate of houses set back from the main road and the footpath that follows the edge of the Wierichswiesen, a half-farmed marshland surrounded by villas that include the marital home of famous boxer Max Schmeling (who died in 2005, aged 99) and the family home of his wife, the actress Anny Ondra. They married in Bad Saarow in 1933, and moved into a villa overlooking this marshland following the ceremony. When that house burned down, having been hit by lightning, they moved into the house of Ondra’s mother. That too would burn down, twenty-odd years later; a fate that appeared to befall many of these villas around the marshland, and which perhaps explains why the fire station is only a single street away.

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The New Year in Belfast

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Last year on Under a Grey Sky Phil Scraton took us on a Saturday morning walk from his house in Belfast. After another such walk last weekend, he reflects on the current situation in the city:

It’s the 5^th January, midwinter in Belfast. At this time of year the sun appears briefly above roof-tops before slipping away. Yet it warms my face as I walk through the park. It’s only 9.30am and the joggers are out in shorts and vests, the golfers cheerful in short-sleeved shirts, the birds singing prematurely anticipating Spring.

At this time two years ago the big freeze and sudden thaw wrecked the back of our house yet today the temperature reaches 13 Celsius. The Southern light breeze encourages walkers to remove gloves and scarves and busy squirrels are clearly content as their food comes easy.

Down on the Lagan the rowers are in full flow, instructions barked by megaphone from their cycling coaches. The water is like glass until disturbed by the bows of the sleek boats. There has been little rainfall for over a week but the river is tidal and high. A heron, startled by the kerfuffle rises from the overgrown riverbank and heads upstream.

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Christmas by the lake

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The second part of our Bad Saarow diary, from one of our favourite places only an hour or so by car or train from Berlin:

Through an open bedroom window I hear the sound of a family walking along the street outside. There is talk of a Christmas tree (perhaps they are even dragging it along as they speak) and excited chatter of presents anticipated, if only Father Christmas or time itself would get a move on. Downstairs Katrin, Lotte and Sean are making little pastry parcels, the potato salad sitting in a bowl on the countertop, all part of our mingle-mangled Anglo-German Christmas traditions that have, over the last couple of years, all fallen into place.

Once the pastries are made we will go for another walk down to the lake, the main road through the village busy with drivers that had to work on Christmas Eve and are now rushing home to the fireside and the family. And it does feel overly festive out on the streets, with the twinkling lights on the trees by the station, the smell of wood-smoke in the air, and the family down the street from our house that have lit a fire in their driveway and are standing around it with steaming mugs of glühwein in their hand.

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A Bad Saarow Diary

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The snow began to fall as we left Berlin. The car was so packed full – of presents, food and drinks – that there was not space for us all to travel along the autobahn together, so half of the party made the short underground hop to Alexanderplatz and the regional train east. The Saturday before Christmas, and the train was filled with returnees, leaving the capital or coming in from further afield, to make their way out to the towns and villages that sit amongst the lakes and the trees between Berlin and the Polish border. On the seats opposite us two young women chatted with the distanced familiarity of old friends who have not seen each other for a while, scattered during term time to universities elsewhere in Germany but brought together for the holidays, coincidentally climbing aboard the same carriage on the train home.

We were, on the other hand, escaping. A week in the countryside to fill the festive period. A house by the railway tracks, not far from the lake. I had been looking forward to it since the moment we landed upon the idea. But in a way, it felt like a return for us as well, to this small town that has become our bolt-hole from the city on more than one occasion, to this house we have stayed in before. At Fürstenwalde we changed over from the top-heavy double-decker regional train to a single carriage that would take us to Bad Saarow, a train that is smaller than the trams that rumble along the Osloer Straße beneath our bedroom window, but that is all part of the charm of the trip. As it rolled south through the forests, wet snow splattering against the window, I was happy that the car had been full and we had been forced to take the train.

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And here we go again…

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We have been away, taking a break from all elements of everyday life including Under a Grey Sky. In the next week or so you will get an idea of some of the things we have been up to as normal service resumes. So we hope you all enjoyed a restful festive period and that all readers and contributors have a very happy New Year and many more adventures beyond the front door in 2013…

Under December’s Grey Skies

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The illustration that accompanies this piece is by a good friend Julia Stone, who created it as a companion to the Shadows and Reflections article I wrote for Caught by the River. It is a lovely series of posts, as the different contributors to the website reflect on the year that has passed, and having made my own contribution it also means that I do not want to go over the same ground here. What I would like to do in what will most likely be the final Under a Grey Sky entry of 2012 is reflect a little on this place, which began almost a year ago in those muted and melancholic days between Christmas and the New Year.

When I began Under a Grey Sky I had a loose idea of what I wanted to create. I knew that I wanted it to be somewhere that explored the nature of “place”, the adventures that can be had beyond the front door whether in the city, town or country, on the fens or in the high mountains, in the woods or on the water. I did not want to write it alone, and it has been the biggest source of pleasure during this first year of Under a Grey Sky that so many people have chosen to contribute their words and their pictures, and the list that you will find on this page shows the range of interests and locations of those who have been part of the project so far.

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At the Christmas Market

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I am an unashamed fan of the Christmas Market, whether it is a small collection of wooden stalls in an cobblestoned square of some small town, or one of the countless versions that we can enjoy here in Berlin, and the four weeks of advent during which they operate is one of the highlights of my year. There is one particular market in Berlin, in the shadow of the opera house, that is called the “Nostalgie Markt” or nostalgia market, which got me thinking the other day as I strolled through the wooden huts, past the glühwein stands and intricate little wooden handicrafts, the smell of roasting chestnuts mingling with the meat on the grill as the big wheel turned against the backdrop of a Plattenbau, that in the end, aren’t all Christmas Markets “Nostalgia Markets” in a certain way?

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