Bookpacking’s Blog

What does it mean to be English? Is it the polyester football shirts, lager and kebabs of the busy high street? Is it John Major’s gentle thwack of leather on willow and warm ale on quiet village greens? Or is it Brick Lane’s curry houses and urban cool?

Is it the stoical clipped tones of the senior civil servant on the 07.17 to Euston, or the extravagant effing and blinding of the bare-chested brickie barreling through Brum in a banger?

Whatever it is – and there is a lot of debate over the success of the ‘multicultural experiment’ – let’s celebrate it today. Without straying into jingoism or nationalism, let’s salute the flag and be proud of where we’re from.

And while we’re at it, let’s tip our metaphorical hat to the world’s most famous playwright who died on the same day. And he is famous the world over. Bookpacking recently asked some South Americans if they had heard of William Shakespeare. We though we were being careful not to be Euro-centric and make cultural assumptions. But they looked at Bookpacking with an expression of hurt, saying something along the lines of “Of course! Do you think we’re from Mars or something?”

We won’t make that mistake again.

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.

One of the delights of the Berlin is just wandering the streets. Today it’s Friedrichshain, which is quashed between Karl Marx Allee and the Spree river and one of many sub-centres of this diffuse city. Berlin feels like an ever-shifting urban canvas, and leaving the new style bars behind in the avenues, we find esoteric treasure in the side streets and alleyways.

Like a plane crash survivor, Berlin is city embraces the now and all the possibilities of existence that brings, yet can never escape the memory of its trauma. Pasted on a garage wall, a riot of CMYK announces another rendezvous of the colourful-but-cool in a venue which will enjoy its moment in the sun, before returning to the tumbledown obscurity from whence it came. This is the city of the Geheimtip, the nod and the wink about a bar, cellar or even someone’s front room which is temporarily the focus of the fickle and fashionable.

But underneath the posters, where yet another team of spray painters have left their mark, a mural depicts a Zeppelin. Immediately recognisable, its shape speaks of a dark past but is somehow softened by a loss of edge that the passage of time gives to memories that cut less deeply the further back they are. From the pre-Hitler era, before Friedrichshain was renamed Horst Wessel Stadt in honour of the Nazi anthem writer, it belongs to a conflict that is less offensive than its successor.

Across the street is a yard full of Volkswagen T25 camper vans. Appropriately VW’s spiritual home Wolfsburg is a short drive to the west. Two African men load a lorry with parts, before approaching us to see what we’re staring at. The vans are not for sale but only for export they tell us. Import/export: the people involved in this business never seem to welcome scrutiny. Presumably, given Berlin’s low costs and the popularity of these vans abroad, they’re being sold overseas. “Das ist Kultauto” we manage to say – a cult car. Unimpressed but satisified we pose no threat, they amble away. Berlin is one of those places where you can sense things happening underground, in hidden places. For good and bad.

Turning another corner onto Modersohnstrasse, one of the many open spaces you find in Berlin (bomb damage or communist lack of care?) is gated with a sign which appears to announce something defiantly to the world. Inside, it is packed with a collection of those distinctive two-axle  trailers that you only see in this part of the world. Like the T25, they have a certain boxiness; but unlike the camper vans in the yard, there are heat shimmers denoting working stoves – they are occupied. A gypsy encampment? A travelling circus? An artistic paradise? We’re seized with a need to know.Then a paramilitary figure, clad all in black, emerges on one of those sit-up-and-beg bikes that are fantastic for stately patrols of the flat Berlin cyclepaths, but would be useless in London. He stops to adjust his phone; such an opportunity is not to be wasted.

His clothes are actually Carhartt rather than military fatigues, the only war he is fighting is the annual one against the bitter Berlin cold. This, he tells us, is a community of squatters. Rather than travellers, they are stay-putters who spied an opportunity in this empty patch of land and took it. Our pragmatic new friend tells us how it is: “This land was empty so we decided to squat. The government said ‘Ok, no problem, we don’t need this right now so you can have it. But when we are ready to build our sports development, you will have to move on.’ But, this is Berlin, so they have no money, so they cannot build it and we are still here.” Ah this city, such a cheap date for the decadent but destitute. “If you look carefully,” a friend once said, “you’ll notice people nursing the same beer for a long time.”

But being Berlin, this cosmopolitan community of squatters are very much in touch with the modern world.  “She works in IT,” he says as woman in a hooded top and baggy jeans slouches past, “So we have very fast internet. Another guy is a businessman and he owns several companies.” Anarchists, alternatives, entrepreneurs and IT specialists – all living cheek by jowl in this soon-to-be-gentrified quarter. But how long can this coexistence last, as capitalism spreads its polarising wealth and business also spies an opportunity. Are the anti-yuppy car burners of Friedrichshain fighting a losing battle?

The Fernsehturm looks pretty now, this 1,200ft long futuristic rocket to the stars. It welcomes you to an ultra-modern city where individuality is welcomed and self-expression encouraged. But spend a few days in Berlin, and read your Stasi history, and you start to see it in a different light.

There it is again, as you cross a street. And over your shoulder as you drink a coffee outside. It’s never out of your view for more than a few minutes. It’s like being shadowed by an impassive silvery spy. Outwardly symbolic of communist construction skills –  and a giant “Up yours” to West Berlin – it would also have jammed TV pictures and Radio Free Europe, just like its Prague counterpart.

And that mirrored glass; maybe a too little like the windows in an interrogation room or the shades on the guy who always happens to turn up when you do in the cafe. The tower once served – like all communist architecture – to dwarf those below it; to remind you that you were nothing compared to the collective, namely the state and its many tentacles. There is a reason why dictators build big, just like they did at the imposing Tempelhof under a different – but equally totalitarian – regime. Always there. Always watching. Always bigger.

Little could they know they would be building one of the city’s top tourist attractions, bringing the enemy from all over the globe to spend their ill-gotten capitalist gains. It is now the drab socialist showpiece of Karl-Marx-Allee that shrinks beneath the tower. And at night, looking up from Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, this trophy of the former anti-fun state resembles a glitter ball in a decadent disco. The Spartacists must be turning in their spartan coffins.

Germany; Weimar; ACC gallery/cafe; “Kangaroos Run Wild in Weimar” exhibition

Another little Weimar bonus tonight. Stopping off at the gallery/café ACC we saw a sign for an event that evening discussing Australia’s image, as portrayed to Germans in mainstream film. Dipping into overdubbed films ranging from Walkabout to Priscilla to Rabbit Proof Fence, local academic/artist Olaf Nenninger presented a compilation of clips to show how manufactured and manipulated this portrayal is.

All countries self-mythologise. America focuses on the Wild West and the Revolution; in Britain we have WW2 when ‘we were all in it together’. But living in Europe and having worked in Australia, Bookpacking is aware that it exists today as a brand; something for foreign tourists like ourselves to buy into.

Thus the recent film with Nicole Kidman can be seen (and visiting Aussie artist and war correspondent George Gittoes confirmed it was) as a huge advertising vehicle, leading a tourist board charge. Fellow Aussie and artist/activist Deborah Kelly pointed out that it is one of the most urbanised countries in the world, yet the images associated with it are of landscapes not cities.

The celebrated Gittoes – who has worked with Michael Moore and has his own Iraq-related release “Soundtrack to War” – has some experience of working with Aborigines in the Northern Territory, and so was qualified to give us a list of what we ought to see to get a more realistic picture of the country and its Aboriginal people.

Gittoes’ list:
They’re a Weird Mob
The Last Wave
Romper Stomper
10 Canoes (highly recommended)

Deborah Kelly also recommends:
The Boys
Head On

An aside from Bookpacking:

One of the curators asked George and Deborah if they could relate to these desert/outback landscapes. A valid question, and they answered in the affirmative.

But if you are a European who has never been to either Australia or America, it can be difficult to fully grasp the scale of the individual countries. An office worker may live in the suburbs of Melbourne, taking a tram to his office job in the cold rain, suited and booted. In the centre, another guy in jeans and bush hat might be working on a cattle station the size of Belgium which is running out of water. Even further north, a Park Ranger in stereotypical Blundstone boots and short-shorts might be dodging crocodiles on the rounds of his tropical reserve.

Of course there’s a certain homogeneity to the culture, but the environments are very different. Cultural/language differences aside, it’d be like asking someone who farms in Morocco if they can relate their surroundings to an office worker in Switzerland. Some things really do have to be seen to be appreciated.

 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.

 Hungary; Budapest; Terror House

History is very much alive in this part of the world. A couple of decades is nothing, and even if the teenagers of today don’t remember Communism, their parents do. And while some countries try to move on as quickly as possible, glossing over the past with a ’sleeping dogs lie’ attitude, others take time to remember what went before.

Contrasting with the Slovakian indifference we found in Bratislava, here the excellent Terror House museum not only commemorates the victims – it names the guilty. From the menacing Soviet tank which sits under victims’ mug-shots, to the chapel-like cellar which contains their names, the moving exhibition tells reminds us not to forget the victims of one of the Eastern Bloc’s relatively moderate regimes. The museum is situated in the very building where the Secret Police of both Nazi and Soviet regimes operated, and it rams home the point that Fascism and Communism were but different brands of the same kind of systemic oppression and control.

But surprisingly, another wall names and shames some of the torturers. Or perhaps that’s not surprising. Perhaps what’s surprising is that there isn’t more of this in the other countries we visited. Is this testament to the power of forgiveness, or an indication of unfinished business and a lack of lustration? Only time will tell.

Find out more about the boozy bad boy Bard – the erudite egalitarian who celebrateshis 250th birthday today – on this Edinburgh pub tour for intellectual inebriates

A Man’s a Man for A’ That - Robert Burns, 1795

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by -
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that, an a’ that!
Our toils obscure, an a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

What though on hamely fare we dine,
Wear hodding grey, an a’ that?
Gie fools their skills, and knaves their wine -
A man’s a man for a’ that.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
Their tinsel show, an a’ that,
The honest man, tho e’er sae poor,
Is king o men for a’ that.

Ye see yon birkie ca’d ‘a lord,’
Wha struts, an stares, an a’ that?
Tho hundreds worship at his word,
He’s but a cuif for a’ that.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
His ribband, star, an a’ that,
The man o independent mind,
He looks an laughs at a’ that.

A prince can mak a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, an a’ that!
But an honest man’s aboon his might -
Guid faith, he mauna fa’ that!
For a’ that, an a’ that,
Their dignities, an a’ that,
The pith o sense an pride o worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that.

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a’ that),
That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth,
Shall bear the gree an a’ that.
For a’ that, an a’ that,
It’s coming yet for a’ that,
That man to man, the world, o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that.

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.