Bookpacking’s Blog

Those poor plucky Poles. Sometimes an alliterative and slightly patronising cliché can be justified. In this case it was the only thing Bookpacking could think to say in Gdansk on reading the region’s history. It’s amazing they have any culture, given the concerted attempts of Hitler and Stalin to wipe out intellectuals, artists or indeed anyone at all who might just offer any kind of inspiration or leadership to a doomed populace who saw WW2 “liberation” turn into half-a-century of oppression.

Like an empty crisp packet on the beach, Poland’s borders have blown this way and that as other empires re-divided a place seen not so much as a country, but as a junction on a route between more powerful destinations. WW2 actually started in Gdansk, in a place called Westerplatte, when (how cynical) a German battleship on a supposed goodwill visit fired the first shots of 1st September 1939. The free city of Danzig, as it was then known, was part of the “Polish corridor” which gave the Poles access to the sea and divided up Prussia; Hitler wanted this important Baltic port back in German hands. Poles would later play a vital role in Battle of Britain, and despite the idea that Poland was a pushover, they held out for a week at Westerplatte.

German author Gunter Grass based “The Tin Drum” around these times in Danzig, though his celebrity status in Germany has been recently dimmed by his finally admitting he was in the SS. He never killed anyone though, ok! (No-one ever does, which makes you wonder how the death tolls get so high?). Mass rape followed the Soviet invasion, just in case the Poles were getting too chirpy about the Nazi’s departure, and of course at Katyn they’d already wiped out the officer class.

Miraculously though, under communist auspices the old town of Gdansk was completely rebuilt as it used to be several hundred years ago. With a nod to Flemish architecture, the elaborate facades give the main street a carefully constructed olde worlde charm that you wouldn’t expect from Stalin’s lackeys. They’ve moved on, and Gdansk is now well worth a weekend, if not a week. The funky beach resort of Sopot sits only a half-hour away, but with its museums and alleyways Gdansk was a revelation to Bookpacking who was expecting the whole spectrum of naught but grey. Those stereotypes’ll creep up on you when you least expect them…

One thing was very clear tonight: Winston Churchill drank an inordinate amount of  booze. Whisky in the morning, champagne in the afternoon and evening, and a little brandy to top it off. Carrying on the best traditions of the eccentric upper classes, he is supposed to have supped his way through 42,000 bottles of champers. Never in the field of human boozing had so much been drunk by so few.

At Notting Hill pub The Churchill Arms they were celebrating the big man’s birthday, complete with wartime uniforms and memorabilia. An impersonator with an uncanny resemblance gave one of the speeches that Churchill delivered so effectively. The right man at the time for the job of leading Britain against the Nazis, he was actually loathed in some parts of the UK.

Bookpacking mentioned his name to an elderly relative who remembered the Depression and the General Strike of 1926. She remembered her husband walking for an hour in the dark to get to a job he hated – crawling underground in precarious 18-inch high tunnels, with the constant threat of accident or explosion.

And when Churchill ordered the troops in, to deal with Welsh miners in 1926, she remembered his instructions to send “the rats back down their holes”. He also advocated the use of poison gas against Kurds and other troublesome ‘colonials’ around 1917. So while Bookpacking enjoyed the bonhomie tonight, we were understandably reluctant to carried away toasting the man himself, rather than his (WW2) achievements.

What really stuck in our mind tonight was a minor detail: a song playing in the background. A song ignored in the hubbub of beer-fuelled banter, as khaki-clad barmen with Sam Browne belts squeezed through the throng collecting glasses; young lads who’d have been called up in 1940. A song that – despite its cheery tone – was laden with pathos. A song that might be the last one you ever heard: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye…not a tear but a cheer…goodbye everybody, I’ll do my best for ye.”

On this day in 1978 the secret life ex-Baader-Meinhof member Astrid Proll was leading, in London’s leafy West Hampstead, came to an end. On a typical suburban street, Special Branch came to take away an atypical woman: an urban guerilla who had lived a dramatic life outside the margins and now taught teenagers how to fix cars.

Bearing in mind this was the Britain of the 1970s, one can only imagine the metaphorical balls it took to work in an environment like that. From stealing and driving getaway cars, to the sensory deprivation in an isolation cell that would drive Ulrike Meinhof to suicide; to working with disadvantaged youngsters in a country where people were still fixated on WW2 – it was a life less ordinary.

Interestingly, for someone who had fought the state at home, she found herself teaching as part of a government training scheme in Britain. Bookpacking was lucky enough to speak to someone who had befriended Proll and was there when the police arrived. Vilified at home, this lady had nothing but kind words for her here. It’s a story full of contradictions and shades of grey.

The forthcoming film The Baader-Meinhof Complex will dig all this up again, and there is talk of the place in the national psyche that the German Autumn holds in the national psyche. But when Bookpacking read contemporary reports in the London newspapers it really did seem like a different world. Perhaps history is more ‘done and dusted’ in some countries, especially ones that feel they can laud their recent past. While others struggle to come to turns with what is another tear in a barely closed wound.

It’s difficult to imagine that Prenzlauerberg was ever anything but a playground for the stylish young professionals of Berlin. Boutique shops sell the latest retro sportswear look for local hipsters, while tattooed 20-somethings brush the pavement outside low key bars that will later be filled with creative and media types sipping on premium beers. Yummy mummies drop into the local bakery for some of that richly fibrous bread that Germans adore and which makes them turn their noses up at anaemic British breakfast offerings.

There are kids everywhere in what was recently declared one of the most fertile spots in Europe; the ratio of children to adults shot up as it became the place to settle with your firstborn when suburbia is a wrench too far for the still young parent who has yet to leave books, bars and me-time behind. And it is very civilised. Having dodged HGV’s in London’s erratic and intermittent cycle lanes, it’s a sight to behold these phalanxes of mothers – and the odd father – sedately crossing the boulevards on dedicated cycle paths with their own set of signals. You know for a fact that everything is recycled here.

And the art! The walls are a living canvas. Ironic exchanges of postcommunist banter: “Capitalism sucks” then the answering “Communism sucks” mix with the latest in stencil art. Huge dayglow pink letters on flyposters seem to challenge you to a fight as they announce “F*** Amerika”. Dark stone buildings from another age have their gravitas subverted with rampant spray can colours and a plethora of pop art posters.

But these contradictions run deeper than the imposition of 21st Century culture onto pre-war buildings, where parents obliviously push their single child under a sign for a club which shouts “B*stard”. When I told a German girl I was going to visit my friend on Kastanienallee (Chestnut Tree Avenue) she immediately said: “Well she’s not from the East then, if she lives there”. She smiled as she said it, but with that trace of a raised eyebrow that accompanies a point being made.

And indeed, my friend isn’t. She’s an academic who moved to Berlin and did reasonably well for herself, and so moved to the steadily-gentrifying Prenzlauerberg to enjoy the fruits of her labour, in every sense. This was my first inkling, as someone new to Germany, that ‘unification’ is a small word for a long drawn out and incomplete process.

The area aroud Schonhauser Allee is the setting for the hilarious vignettes recounted in Vladimir Kaminer’s book Russian Disko. Just like my first time in Prague in ‘97, I had missed by a mile the early wave that the Zeitgeist-chasers spotted years ago, and I pondered how much the area had changed and the disappearance of that naïve sense of freedom that must have followed Die Mauerfall.

But the done-and-dusted appearance of that era’s history belies rifts and the baggage of unfinished business. History is not comprised of discrete boxes that slot neatly next to each other in the academic’s bookcase, but instead of thousands of strands which overlap like a bowl of spaghetti. On one side of the street, a crane, probably engaged in building a cool apartment block for more cool people who want to live in a cool neighbourhood where they can cycle to work and drink coffee in the morning with similarly fashionable friends.

But on the other side of the road is a huge piece of graffiti which some enterprising individuals have managed to put on the side of a 5-storey high building. apartment block despite it being around five storeys high. “Diese stadt ist Aufgekauft!!!”. Something about the size and font instantly tells you this is not some tagging rubbish from juveniles, but a protest. It says: “This state is bought”.

Just down from the street, past an army surplus store with a suitably sinister fighter pilot’s helmet in the window – black and red-starred – is White Trash Fast Food. Here, check-shirted German rockabilly staff serve burgers in a Chinese-themed room to an international crowd who lap up country tributes from visiting American retro bands.

But over the road, and a little more discreet, is the legendary Kaffee Burger. One of the great things about Berlin – in a city where so many are single and so many are disenchanted with the meat and two veg’ daily fare of more ‘vanilla’ capitals where they couldn’t find what they were looking for – is that you can go out alone to a bar or café like this and not feel awkward.

As midnight approaches and it starts to fill up, I’m relaxing at the bar when I get talking to Wolfgang and his girlfriend. A native, like many others, he has been priced out by the ‘yuppy invasion’. “I live further out now, in Wedding. A lot of people live out there, artists and musicians, because we can’t afford it here in Prenzlauerberg. Foreign investors are buying apartments and then they push up the rents so the locals can’t afford it.”

It’s a familiar story, from Shoreditch to Barcelona – gentrification causing dislocation. The uneven spread of prosperity which is capitalism, carving up a previously static population and diluting the local identity with outsiders.

And there are strong differences. I had come to Kaffee Burger to hear some open-mic German poetry. I don’t speak the language, but it’s possible to appreciate the rhythm and I wanted to see what it was like. You’re always guaranteed an interesting crowd too. One particular poem was drawing a lot of response from the crowd, and I could tell by the tone that something or someone was being mocked.

Asking someone on the periphery, they told me that the politician Wolfgang Bohmer was getting it in the neck for his dig at the folk of the former-DDR. That week he had been in the news, after allegedly saying that Godlessness had encouraged a cavalier attitude to abortion and even infanticide. Statistics had struck again, but no-one wanted to hear any conclusions.

Needless to say, this touched a nerve and many of these east of the former divide were incensed. It suggested a primitive populace who have still not caught up with their western brothers, despite millions of marks poured into their ailing infrastructure by a victorious west – an investment resented by some on the ‘winning’ side. I tried asking a few mothers on Kastanienallee what they thought, but they said hadn’t been following the news – and they would have been Wessis anyway, living in the protective bubble that money provides.

Just like the tv tower which looks down on so much of East Berlin, the present is  ambiguous. Shades of grey replace the black and white clarity of the polarised past. On the one hand, this shiny space rocket is symbolic of an energetic and arty city which draws people from all over the world; a European version of San Francisco, a playground where you can reinvent yourself. On the other, it’s a reminder of recent revolution and of a scarred pysche.