Bookpacking’s Blog

This week we’ve been drawing towards the end of the brilliant Stasiland. Some things in life are so subtle and insidious in the way they wreak their destruction, that it’s hard to convey the level of harm they do without sounding histrionic. But Anna Funder’s work steadily plots the low-key psychological violence that lay behind the Stasi’s bid to control every aspect of the DDR citizen’s life. Why draw attention to your organisation’s existence with a high profile execution when, using your network of coerced informants, you can quietly engineer a nervous breakdown for your target?

Many never found out that it was not life conspiring against them, but the state. It is this power, pulling invisible strings and playing God, that gives a stalker their thrill. Being in the secret police rewarded you for taking the path of least resistance and following your more base instincts. In a country of empty shelves, power was the only way to really feel one-up on your supposedly equal peers. And there were perks; if you were going to be thorough in your monitoring, then you had to listen to everything the target did. Who knows what you might hear through pillow talk?

Of course everybody knew the Stasi were everywhere, but doublethink was a key part of the denial and backwards-rationalisation that enabled the regime to exist. Many of the agents of the system knew what they were doing was ridiculous, but in that Emperor’s New Clothes culture the shops were full and everyone was happy, if the Party said so.

Listening to people in the former Eastern Bloc lament the passing of an era where ‘you knew where you were’, you could lull yourself into a 6th form common room rose-tinted view of communism. God only knows – or rather He doesn’t because He didn’t officially exist behind the Iron Curtain – that communism looks good on paper. But reading the intensely personal accounts of state persecution that Funder recorded, one becomes increasingly incredulous at such extreme cynicism; in a culture of suspicion where it seems flippant to apply that overused adjective ‘Kafka-esque’.

The subject – and there were many given there was a Stasi employee for at least every 10 people – was presumed guilty until proven guilty. With a relentless drip of propaganda and the steady application of duress, the authorities corroded the individual’s integrity and morality. They undermined the most basic bonds of humanity in a whole society, to prop up a worldview they only half-believed themselves. Like a twisted pyramid scheme, a citizen who was under suspicion could make it easy on themselves by informing on another suspect, who was informing on someone else who was spying on somone else…

The Nazi war machine, with its industrial might, used the direct route: bullets. But with the DDR’s threadbare infrastructure and austere economy, and the need to create jobs to maintain full employment, it suited the Nazis’ successors to maintain this huge and hidden army of grey men to slowly drain the life out of the individual. They called themselves the Sword and the Shield of the Party but, in a twist on the description sometimes applied to Prussia (and coincidentally the geographical boundaries overlap), this was not a state with a secret police force; but a secret police force with a state.

It’s fascinating, if slightly wearing for anyone with any capacity for empathy.  One’s rising incredulity is inversely proportional to the characters’ dwindling reservoirs of self-belief; slowly ebbing away as a ‘template for undermining’ takes its toll. They certainly killed people, using locations in Leipzig and Dresden for secret executions, and Putin was allegedly stationed in Dresden as the local KGB presence. But for the majority of their victims, they preferred to wear them down until they became a shell of their former selves. And if you finally accepted you never going to make it to the West, it was tempting to retreat instead into your own mind. This withdrawl from daily life even had a name, ‘internal emigration’. Some might say that was the biggest crime of all. Not the  killing of hundreds, but the burying of Hope for millions.

This is not the fate that awaits London’s banking fraternity should the economy worsen (is it?) but a super spot on the Thames to watch the river flow and remember that we are but a blip in the grand scheme of things. Historic boozer the Prospect of Whitby takes its name from a ship that used to moor nearby, and had a famous – or rather infamous – clientele. The Hanging Judge George Jeffreys was a regular; it’s sometimes said that cops and villains have more in common than either would like to admit.

The guest ales reflected the fast approaching St George’s Day, and supping a pint of England’s Glory, our thoughts turned to a North Yorkshire lad who would have known the river well. One of Britain’s premier navigators came from a humble background on the colliers that shuttled up and down the east coast bringing coal from the North East to London: the legendary Captain James Cook (BTW, anyone ever made the connection with Star Trek? For “USS Enterprise” read “HMS Endeavour”; for James Kirk read James Cook).

Author Herman Hesse uses a river as a metaphor of timelessness in the cult work Siddhartha. And there’s something very soothing about being near water. Looking at the Thames and remembering that some 2,000 years ago people were going about their business in more or less the same spot, it’s a great way to eat a little humble pie and get back a little perspective in this hectic city of inflated salaries and egos.

The warehouses along here may now be tiny overpriced flats – supply and demand will get you every time in London town – but it’s not hard to imagine trading ships from all over the world tied up; many of them coming from lands where the sun never set, that pink third of the mapped world that denoted the British Empire.

One can picture Conrad watching a mysterious vessel bob gently, and a little light bulb going off as he tried to figure out which obscure and exotic location it had come from. Or Dickens, on one of his many perambulations, surveying the comings and goings like some sort of self-appointed overseer.

And the river is still busy today. Catamaran clippers to and fro at a heady rate of knots, passing the slower sightseeing boats, as commuters escape to Greenwich. But even these sleek new machines are humbled as tourists bounce past them in a RIB (rigid inflatable boat), slewing across their bows: hard a-port in a G-force inducing semi-circle. We come and go; but like Hesse said, the river flows on.

Strolling through cosy Clerkenwell with its publishing operations and media village vibe, Bookpacking found ourselves in The City where there was an air of excitement as the suited and booted around the Barbican sensed spring in the air. Jackets were slung over shoulders, and outside tables filled up as the light at the end of the winter tunnel finally became visible.

But there was only one place to be tonight, and that was Brick Lane. Over at Rough Trade*, the legendary (and bilingual Francophile) Marianne Faithful played a free instore gig to mark her new album launch. Further down the lane at Eastside Books a group of budding authors gathered to critique each others’ work, and a few doors up the Brick Lane Gallery was hosting an opening for the Art in Mind show, including contributions from the amusingly-monickered Art Tart.

Title of the night went to an artist called Loz, for his funkily minimalist piece “Man Ray Stops Bullets”. Sometimes artists are loathe to deconstruct their work; because it takes away from the subjective element where we create our own meanings. Or because they just can’t be bothered. Or, for the extremely cynical, because it’d reveal how superficial the ‘concept’ was.

Not Loz though, who happily explained the fairly elementary symbolism, and seemed pleased that someone had shown an interest. Art, like it or not, is a business and a highly competitive one at that; there’s absolutely no getting around it. And in business, marketing is key. So a title that sticks in the mind is a shrewd move on the part of the artist. Like writing, talent is nothing without application. No marketing means no sales and in 2009 the notion of noble poverty ain’t what it used to be.

* if you don’t know the derivation of this name, a quick bit o’ Googling may amuse…

AKA Leffe-Lovers’ Left Bank Lunacy

Bookpacking had the good fortune to find ourselves at a loose end in Paris this Monday evening with a partner in crime; having serendipitously bumped into a fellow vagabond, from the same part of the globe as ourselves, that we see every year or so in France through work. After a suitably literary event at Shakespeare & Co, we hit the bars of Rue Descartes where the lure of Leffe at only €4 per pint was to prove our undoing. We made our way unceremoniously up Rue Mouffetard to savour the Kwak in The Mayflower, as the full force of Belgian brewing was unleashed on our unsuspecting British bodies.

We were following in the footsteps of some of the biggest names in western literature; such as Papa Hemingway himself. The big man was scathing of F Scott Fitzgerald’s lack of drinking prowess, shamelessly shaming him in his famous Lost Generation memoirs A Moveable Feast. Despite writing the classic ‘Gatsby’, for anyone who’s done a bit of digging, Fitzgerald is publicly pilloried for eternity – thanks to the jugular-targeting judgments found in his competitive ‘friend’s’ diary. We can only be glad that the sole epistolary witness to Monday’s over-hydration is a little more discreet.

Leaving the high street and stepping into a great period piece pub like the Palace Bar, there’s a sense of time stood still. Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Beehan and Flann O’Brien must have enjoyed the same sensation when they nursed their pints among the hacks in Fleet Street.

The tide of conversation ebbs and flows; groups come and go. Movement, yet rest. A laugh in one corner, a dispute in another. It’s all here: lovers; friends; colleagues; strangers; tolerated drunks. There’s stilted conversation with a visiting boss and the fizzy flirtation of the newly courting.

A television shows Man Utd v Inter Milan with the volume set low, while a fan revolves slowly far above, like a drone surveilling the friendly mob. Wars happen elsewhere and economic woes become abstract; any relationship problems recede as rounds arrive. The foetal familiarity of a welcoming pub keeps a bad world at bay; the only clue to any external environment is the TV’s gentle roar of a football crowd.

Old leather seats are ranged against the back walls, like a doctor’s surgery. A surprising amount of light makes its way to the back, silhouetting ornaments on the semi-partition: a horse and jockey are suspended over a hedge. The next obstacle for this frozen pair would be a hurling stick: not cod, for once.

Contrasting conversations swirl into one generic river of noise that lulls me into a pleasant lassitude. Then a raucous laugh cuts through the bar, jarring me wide awake – the crack of the craic. A gesticulating man on a mobile stands half-hidden by the partition’s opaque glass. His right side casts a large shadow on it, creating a bizarre mismatch with his exposed life-sized left.

Streams of chatter come from the islands of conversation spread across the lounge, pooling around me in a rich reservoir of dialogue. Two professors discuss the merits of a certain girl: presumably a pretty protégé. Fighting over teaching rights, perhaps? A serious tourist couple map out their mini-break over Lonely Planet. Endless variations of the same themes: X had a baby, Y passed away, Z’s stressed at work.

All the planet’s a stage, but tonight I’m an observer not a player. Alone in a crowd, the vignettes keep flowing, as I become one with the walls and fade into the Palace’s furniture.

But you can judge a potential lover by their choice of reading, according to tonight’s whimsical lurv article in the London Paper. Using years of research by leading sociologists – or maybe just having a bit of fun drafting a press release – Penguin’s dating site has come up with a few general book genres and some ideas about the sort of people you’d find reading them.

Wait, did we just say Penguin’s dating site? Brand extension has a lot to answer for, Mr Branson. Or does it; because for flirting booklovers the most exciting flashes of electricity can come when we find an interesting other who loves the same literature as us.

If an art gallery is supposedly a great place to meet potential partners (choose your exhibition very carefully we say), then why shouldn’t a mutual appreciation of the same piece of print be the spark that spurs an epic love story?

TNT Magazine had its latest travel show this weekend and a high calibre of guest speaker contributed to a full house. Bookpacking was unable to get in to hear Paul Kilduff telling the tall tales behind Ruinair - How to be treated like Sh*** in 15 Different Countries and Still Quite Like It – a rant-turned-book, as Times Online called it.

After kicking our heels in a coffee bar for an hour, we eventually got in and heard Mitch from Eastern Trekker extolling the delights of Eastern Europe. Having just returned ourselves, we can confirm that it’s a fascinating region and well worth a visit. Credit to Mitch, he talked about the region with a real passion and love, but he didn’t push his own product once.

But they saved the best till last. A lot of the younger crowd had gone home, but there was still a good turnout to hear modern day tales of derring-do from Lonely Planet author Frances Linzee Gordon. From Ethiopian war zones, to aborted helicopter rescues and covert exploration of Saudi Arabia in disguise – this young lady has already lived quite a life.

Her inspirational talk about going off the beaten track touched on travel principles that aren’t a million miles away from the ones we listed here last week, but this woman is hard core. Sometimes you can feel that travelling is a self-indulgent frippery for the decadent dilettante; but on the road Frances has clearly gained a lot of sociological and psychological insights into the people and places she’s explored/logged/photographed. When she checks the FCO website prior to her trips, she probably knows more than the people writing the advice.

With a useful mixture of common sense, a veteran’s insight and some life-coaching pep, it wasn’t hard to see why she’s on the LP roll of travelwriting honour. We like it when the good people give of themselves for free, and Bookpacking will definitely be incorporating her tips into our next travel plan.

 Czech Republic; Prague; Kafka Museum

Kafka is often credited with having anticipated the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century. Visiting the Kafka Museum in Prague, it’s easy to see why. The powerless individual helpless against an unfair and uncaring system whose decisions make no sense perfectly sums up the life under communism that one often reads about; everybody agreeing that the sky is green while staring directly into the clear blue.

Yet it was obvious that Kafka was a prisoner not of some external system, but of his own mind. As one display panel points out, he was never able to commit to a relationship because he was never able to “shake himself free of the rules he himself had imposed”. Just like one of his major writing influences, Flaubert, he also sought refuge in long-distance relationships and the abstract world of a love conducted by letters; where he could control things.

Kafka is yet another tortured artist who seems to prove the maxim that the best art comes out of pain. The allegorical Prague he dreamt up was composed of walls and boundaries which he had built for himself. Self-loathing and a hatred of his own body meant he was always held back. He found solace in the “Prague Four” band of intellectual friends, and gave himself eventually to his first love – literature.

He was the perfect example of the frustrated artist, driven to the edge of insanity by the mundane of a 9-5 that he hated. One of the sections of the museum is called “The Endless Office”. Anyone who has been in job that feels like a slow cerebral death can sympathise with that feeling of being trapped; a purgatorial paralysis of the mind and a overwhelming sense of stagnation. One of the displays refers to those “infinite” eight hours of the working day.

But if there is a hero in this realm of anti’s, it is Kafka’s comrade Max Brod. Nietzsche was dishonoured in death by a sister who manipulated his pre-life coaching message of liberation from the self (the “will to power”) to suit Nazi ends; but Kafka owes Brod a big posthumous debt. In life, Brod had recognised and nurtured Kafka’s superior talent. In death, Brod went against the wishes of his loved and respected friend, and bravely but guiltily disregarded Kafka’s request to burn his manuscripts. A tree fell in the literary forest; and thanks to Brod, we heard it.

A bitter breeze blew off the Baltic and the towering masts of a ‘tall ship’ swayed gently in the night sky to the sound of waves. This lonely outpost on the end of a pier in Gdynia seemed an appropriate location for the squat grey head of Joseph Conrad to sit in contemplation. Though, given his penchant for travel and mystery it would have been more appropriate for him to be looking out to sea, and not towards the most westerly of the Tri-City group.

From west to east they are Gdynia, Sopot and Gdansk. The middle one is known as a fashionable resort, the other two for building ships. A rose between two thorns if you were being uncharitable, were it not that Gdansk is actually quite pretty and on this desolate winter’s night Gdynia appeared only plain, not ugly.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, to give him his full and un-anglicised name, was born in what is now Ukraine, but used to be Poland (Yalta rears its head again, the 1945 carving-up of newly-liberated Europe between the Allies). We heard this is the only statue of him in Poland, though there is a plaque in Krakow at one of the places he used to live. He became a British subject in 1886, and with titles like “The Secret Agent” lived and wrote a life of adventure and travel.

Respected novels like “Nostromo” were lost on Bookpacking as a sixth-former, we weren’t really interested in the “taciturn capitaz de cargadores”. It always seemed that our teacher hated school even more than us, so perhaps that had an influence. Our French teacher was committed and not a little ruthless; today we speak almost fluent French, so read into that what you will.

Despite this, whenever we are near London’s East End, we think of the 1800s, and a ship on the Thames – gateway to a relatively unknown world for a maritime nation built on Empire – and the starting point for Conrad’s most famous book. Presciently, given the horrors that swept Europe in the following century it was this Pole who gave us the “Heart of Darkness”.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised; in broad terms it’s a backwater of the psyche he’s talking about, and not a particular geographical location. But if you’d asked around in the cafes and parlours of Western Europe, we bet his contemporaries would have said of the savagery: “It couldn’t happen here”.

History casts a long shadow in Gdansk, and so we do. Bookpacking loves this kind of light and spent hours photographing the old and the new in this city. This is the old German street of Biskupia, and if you look hard enough you’ll see the odd bit of German lettering. Heading up the steep cobbles it was hard to believe it was only 10 minutes walk from the city centre.

When Gdansk was known as Danzig this area would have presumably reverberated to the sound of German not Polish, a la “Tin Drum”. Today the Polish postie stops to chew the fat with a couple of local ladies and all is tranquil in the sharp winter sunshine. The only skull and crossbones designs we see now are the ‘danger of death’ signs on the electricity junction boxes.