Waste: dumped, buried. Disturbed. Distributed.
Decay.
Putrefaction.
Tyre mounds.
The crunched metal-and-glass of innumerable breakers’ yards hidden behind convolvulus-draped fences, under the flag of St George. Snarling dogs. Shirtless men smashing white goods with hammers.
And the dust.
The particulates. Hot cinders.
Blind warehouses with bundles of rags and damp paper waiting for insurance fires. Petrol reek. Black ash.
Oily smoke saturates cloth, fouls underwear.
In the dirt, they prospect: the pinstripe outsiders, compliant bureaucrats. Sanctioned buck-passers.
This was where London University carried out experiments with a now-decommissioned nuclear reactor. An area so far off the official map, so hidden within a nexus of dark waterways, that it functioned as the dumping ground of choice for what Parry-Davies refers to as ‘uncontrolled deposits of radioactive thorium’. In an OPEN-Dalston blog, Bill presents a photograph by Mike Wells showing ‘clouds of dust, and a skip with unsealed bags of asbestos material, during demolition of the Clays Lane Estate’.
In the Leabank Square Estate, from which the Chinese jogger had emerged for his restorative morning circuit, mediating rather than remediating the territory, residents were concerned about dust from the Olympic site. ‘A recognized pathway to contamination,’ Parry-Davies said, ‘is by a person inhaling radioactive dust particles. Thorium is particularly hazardous.’ On the estate, as the summer barbecue season opened, families found themselves ‘literally eating’ a relish of airborne dust, a mega-chilli bite on their steaks and sausages. When their worries were published on a website, the ODA threatened the Leabank whistle-blower with legal proceedings. And sent in a dust-sweeping vehicle to patrol the yellow-brick avenues.
Rumours were rife. I was told that the only consequence of the remediating exercise was to spread low-level radioactivity across the entire landscape of the Olympic enclosure, the divided fiefdoms of competing contractors. Toxic soil removed from the stadium was stored alongside bundles of Japanese knotweed, suggesting delirious Quatermass mutations, vegetal Triffid creatures slouching towards Westfield to be born. Richard Mabey pointed out that all Japanese knotweed, along the Lea, is female; the bounteous harem of a single potent male plant.
The Olympic Park was a newsreel of the fall of Berlin run backwards, from present boasts about urban renewal to the bombed and blasted killing fields, as the Russian advance decimated a pitiful remnant of boy soldiers, cripples and SS fanatics, in the Götterdämmerung endgame of Hitler’s insane vision of a capital made from neoclassical facsimiles. In the Reichssportfeld, beside Berlin’s 1936 Olympic Stadium, tanks, emerging from the woods, demolished trenches dug for military rehearsals. A sergeant, in command of a ragtag group of frightened children, had the only bazooka. When he stood up to fire it, his head was blown from his shoulders. What remains in these ravished topographies is a category of war-zone architecture: concrete bunkers, electrified fences, unexplained posts, burnt-out warehouses, stripped woodland, fouled water. Grand Project development is accidental archaeology. A seance with ruins.
On Dalston Lane I met the globetrotting Sicilian photographer Mimi Mollica, a native of Hackney Wick. He swerved through the traffic to embrace me: a friendly face in a bleak environment. Many of his Wick neighbours had been expelled; the free-floating anarcho-communal days were over. There was a general drift in the direction of Berlin: more space, a vibrant culture. With the capture of Hackney, there was now a clear direction of travel: Berlin or Dagenham. Go east, young man. With his rent pitched at an impossible level, Mimi relocated to one of the generic blocks on Dalston Lane. A pristine apartment in all probability conceived by a Russian developer. If I wanted to follow the story, I would have to mug up my Fritz Lang DVDs and book a flight to Berlin.
‘You have a name for your book?’ Mimi said.
‘Ghost Milk.’
‘What does this mean?
‘CGI smears on the blue fence. Real juice from a virtual host. Embalming fluid. A soup of photographic negatives. Soul food for the dead. The universal element in which we sink and swim.’
‘Crazy, Mr Sinclair,’ Mimi said. ‘Crazy again.’
Berlin Alexanderplatz
Great cities take a day. This is the test of a great city.
– Don DeLillo
Descending through cloud cover over Berlin-Tegel, I feel the jolt as weary metaphors turn themselves inside out. For so many years, discussing London’s edgelands, the lazy reflex has been to refer this embattled topography, and the mindset responsible for it, to the old East Germany. A dystopian myth: Germany, Year Zero. The circle of invaders massing around a capital that was always separate from the rest of the country; more dissidents, more anarchists, an island-state mentality.
Ghosts press, taking up the spare seats, provoking memory-films of a place I have never visited. This thin-skinned cigar tube, in which we suck up dead air, craning our necks to view cloud reefs outside the portholes, is populated with earlier Tegel pilgrims, their masks stitched from celluloid. Before Peter Falk flew into town, as a shop-soiled angel, in Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders, the granite lump of Eddie Constantine did the job for Chris Petit in Flight to Berlin. ‘My film is erasure,’ Petit said, ‘but it pre-dates Wenders, in terms of dealing with the city. Wim was hanging around at the time. He cut the trailer.’
It was Petit who found me a copy of Godard’s Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro. Like Berlin itself, the film was new to me, even though I was in the habit of describing it. At length. Constantine, eight years after his experience with Petit, was back in Germany, hat on head, briefcase in hand, wearing a heavy coat like a shroud draped over a statue of Beethoven. He wanders the land: one of the undead on a fated pilgrimage. Godard’s meticulously edited essay reminded me of structural elements in the films of Patrick Keiller. Industrial wastelands frozen in steady-stare compositions. Pertinent texts quoted. And misquoted. Constantine was twice exiled: from America – I’d witnessed him in Reno, a bit as a casino thief in Phil Karlson’s Five Against the House – and then again from Paris, where he growled through Lemmie Caution programmers, before achieving apotheosis as a comic-strip hero in Godard’s Alphaville. Like Keiller’s invisible Robinson (drawn from Kafka), Constantine has the ambition of becoming a spy, but he isn’t sure who to approach. With marmoreal gravitas, he transfers the Daniel Defoe Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain to Germany: double-agent, elegiac poet, haunter of borders. A man with the profile of a dynamited rock sculpture. A spectre drifting through ruins, railing against the non-spaces of global capital, rasping the last breath of romanticism.
Old Berlin haunted my part of London. We were the Osties, but our wall hadn’t disappeared, it was newly erected in blue plywood. Urban planners and local politicians, honouring the Stalinist paradigm, returned from their sponsored excursions, the hospitality of Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, with eyes shining and visions of imposing a new social order on the Lower Lea Valley. An order expressed by the destruction of historic theatres, inconvenient Georgian terraces, early-modernist factories, to make way for utilitarian blocks rapidly assembled in the cheapest possible materials. Secretly, we envied Berlin its iconic symbol: the 155-kilometre barrier that the artist Joseph Beuys plotted to destroy by adding five centimetres to its height. He understood that a minimal shift in the proportions of the wall would be enough to make the world aware of the absurd lack of proportion in the original intervention.
1936, 2012: build the stadium and the world will come. As Christopher Hilton pointed out in Hitler’s Olympics (2006): ‘Goebbels understood that the Germans had the first organised global press relations triumph within their grasp.’ Newspapers, under orders to ‘use the Olympic Games and preparations for them for extensive propaganda’, were advised to avoid inflammatory or racist editorials for the duration of the athletic competition. ‘No attacks against foreign customs and habits s
hould be reported.’
Following the blueprint of the construction of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium and Park, New Labour were ruthless about acquiring real estate for the two-week extravaganza. Hilton explains that if Goebbels ‘wanted an amphitheatre on the site, accommodating 100,000 spectators, this is what he would get’. Hitler decreed that land operated by a popular racecourse would be taken over. The owners were compensated. Short-term sacrifices must be made for future generations and a spurious ‘legacy’.
Coming out of the clouds over the flat Brandenburg plain, with its neat clusters of red roofs, managed forests, traffic flowing on white roads, I put aside the queasy rhetoric of Leni Riefenstahl and Triumph of the Will, the throb of the engines, the man of destiny, and shifted my role-play to the romance of the burnt-out case. The English spook, hard-drinking, short-sighted, returning to a divided city to oversee some botched escape from the East. Berlin was the borderline between cynicism and sentimentality. Coffee-and-cigar breakfasts in a bar that never closes, where men in fur-collared coats play along with the pretence that a fondly recalled black market in nylons and penicillin is still active. And red-mouthed women with high heels and raw blisters can be bought on the promise of an introduction to Fritz Lang. Hitler understood legacy very well: apocalypse, firestorm, death of the gods. An architect manqué, he patronized the obliging Albert Speer and his ‘theory of ruin value’. Speer floated the notion that civic structures should be conceived as future monuments. Broken pillars and domes excavated from smouldering rubble. Athens, with its clear, hard light, its Acropolis, was to be spared the devastation of bombing, the ruins were already in place. Hitler’s Greek invasion was the act of a warped aesthete, a compulsive collector. It was a perverse homage to Heinrich Schliemann and his unearthing of the treasures of Troy. Imposing museums, secular temples stacked with colonial plunder, become the cultural ballast of the benignly democratic new Germany. Contemporary Berlin, bereft of its iconic symbol, the Wall, settles for an identity as a permanent City of Culture, positioned on the European map between Paris and St Petersburg. Museums are provided with their own island, surrounded by tributaries of the Spree. This is a city of museums, accessed by wide steps, propped on Corinthian columns, weighed down with overblown statuary.
This is why my reflex metaphor, new Hackney as old East Berlin, was so inadequate. Surveillance, security barriers, grand projects carried through despite the objections of local interests, we had them all in London. Our Olympic Park, according to surveys based on wartime records, was planted with unexploded ordnance. We were obliterating communities, tearing up allotments, expelling scrap-dealers, artists and travellers, to make space for a self-assembly rip-off based on Werner March’s elegant oval, the 1936 Olympic Stadium. The smart aspect of March’s design is that the running track, which surrounds a central area wide enough to be used by the Hertha Berlin football team, is sunk into the ground; from the air, flying in, the stadium is impressive without feeling the need to overwhelm. London has opted for the approximate model in kit form. The stadium alongside the Northern Sewage Outfall has no predetermined height. The story changes according to the latest surveys, popularity polls, responses in the media. It might be sold off to a rugby franchise. It might, with a wink and a nudge from Newham Council, and a bunch of overlapping quangos desperate not to renege on airy promises, go to West Ham. It might be wholly or partly dismantled. The best bet is another Earth Centre eco-wilderness: before O2 step in with an offer that can’t be refused for a music venue and multiscreen cinema complex.
Fortuitously, at the moment I decided to make my first visit to Berlin, I was devouring a distressed copy of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. I found it in a seemingly abandoned conservatory in Orford, Suffolk, where customers were trusted to put a coin or two in a box by the door. How I had lived without it, up to this point in my life, was a mystery. As was my shaming inability to read the book in the original or to speak one word of Döblin’s language. When W. G. Sebald arrives in Orford, in The Rings of Saturn, he sees the shingle spit, with its Secret Weapons Research Establishment, as ‘a penal colony in the Far East’.
Francis Stuart, an Irish writer with a sublime gift for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, sat out the 1940s in Berlin, half-heartedly teaching the English classics, making propaganda broadcasts and angling for a ticket to Moscow; where he hoped to fulfil his gambler’s destiny as the Dostoevsky of tragic literature and spoilt loves. A good walker but a lousy linguist, Stuart developed a phonetic system for coping with German. He broke down standard phrases into sounds he could spell out on a card, symbols which approximated to the basic requirements of his exile. When I interviewed him in his old age, another kind of exile in a bungalow beside a long, straight road, an hour out of Dublin, his grunts had diminished to a single phrase: ‘That’s right.’ Red bulb of nose, pitted like a raspberry. Pudding-basin of shock-white hair. Watery eyes drifting away to a drowned landscape. Beads of rain sliding down a greasy window. ‘That’s right.’ Yeats. Beckett. Iseult, his beautiful wife. He fiddles with the tie holding up custard-coloured cricket flannels. And remembers the sound of wet tyres, as he sat with an English newspaper in his favourite Kurfürstendamm restaurant. My questions grew longer, with more subordinate clauses, to compensate for silence like the silence of an ancient tree. After such a life, what was there to say? Berlin brought the best out of him: ruin and treachery, flight and displacement. The novels thrive on shame and lacerating confession: The Pillar of Cloud, Redemption. Black List, Section H. Lovers crawling through rubble with cardboard suitcases. Hanging around crowded offices waiting for identity papers.‘That’s right.’ Admit everything, reveal nothing.
When Berlin prepared itself for the Russian tanks in April 1945, the pro-Nazi Irish Nationalists at Ireland-Redaktion were one of the last satellite broadcasting stations to fall silent. They went out on the attack, accusing the Anglo-American axis of handing Europe on a salver to the ravening Slavic tribes. Francis Stuart, like P. G. Wodehouse and Ezra Pound, was given better access to the microphone, as an honoured alien, than at any other period of his doomed career. In a city under siege, poets are free to speak, on the understanding that their next monologue will be drafted in the dock. Metaphors ran wild. A major defensive slab, flak tower and bunker, was sited in Berlin’s Zoo. Lions died in their cages. Hippos boiled in the tanks. Surrealism recaptured the streets. Orgies were reported at the Grossdeutscher Rundfunk on the Masurenallee, where two-thirds of the surviving staff were women, many of them drunk and fearful of what was to come when the Russians stormed the building. ‘There was indiscriminate copulation,’ Antony Beevor reported, ‘amid the stacks of the sound archive.’
The physical momentum of the prose in Berlin Alexanderplatz was exhilarating, like the rush of Walter Ruttmann’s film from the same period, Berlin – Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt. Language and image cut fast. Trains. Bars. Songs. Black marketeers. Whores of all sexes. Surgeons. Detectives. Berlin in the late 1920s was the world city, city of war-damaged grotesques out of George Grosz and Otto Dix. How dynamic Döblin’s book now seems, an outgrowth of the energies of place, and how muted, in comparison, how lightweight and strategically charming, the Berlin snapshots of Christopher Isherwood, which were laid out between 1930 and 1933. Isherwood’s material lends itself to Hollywood schmaltz, with his English girl, Sally Bowles, swallowed alive by a full-throttle Liza Minnelli. Berlin Alexanderplatz is scrupulously, sweatily, reimagined and composed afresh by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: a tapeworm epic for ourown times, funded by new German television money in Cologne. Actors, taken to the edge, perform miracles of choreographed self-exposure. They are crushed but not obliterated by the claustrophobic sets that contain them. And by the troubling memory of a book more honoured than read in a Europe that is not quite prepared to revive it.
Döblin’s protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, released from Tegel Prison, endures the shudder of the city. He leans against walls that tremble. He finds himself in an apocalyp
tic vision painted by Ludwig Meidner: cracked streets and tumbling houses skewed by shock waves running out ahead of the next war. Biberkopf’s tram to Alexanderplatz belongs to that cinema of lyrical documentation, to Ruttmann or Menschen am Sonntag (made in 1929 by Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer). He is rescued from his depressive fugue by an Orthodox Jew who brings him out of the sunlight, into a domestic interior, and tells him a story.
My Berlin quest begins with a name: Alexanderplatz. It was everywhere, in all the books I skimmed as background research. And the DVDs I rented from the shop in Broadway Market: ‘Alex. Alex. Alex.’ Haunting paranoid Fritz Lang thrillers as a source of power, police headquarters. And in films about the Red Army Faction. Characters in Len Deighton thrillers look east ‘to where the spike of the East German TV tower rose out of Alexanderplatz’. Francis Stuart, typically, abstains. ‘Whatever was going on in Alexanderplatz … he’d forgo until he’d deciphered the urgent messages reaching the fringe of his mind.’
Reporting from Berlin, in a couple of days, was madness. I decided to walk from Alexanderplatz to the Olympic Stadium in the west of the city, by way of that triumphal avenue, Unter den Linden. Somewhere in my scrambled geography was a memory of the final stand of the Third Reich, a strip of fifteen kilometres from Alexanderplatz to the Reichssportfeld, a last redoubt guarded by Hitler Youth detachments and the terminally sick. Like Döblin’s shambling bear, Franz Biberkopf, I started by finding transport from Tegel. A system of equivalents. Prison = Airport. Tram = Taxi. That familiar disorientation, the shuttle with a temporary guide, from airport to hotel. The hoardings you find in every city, the allotments, traffic lights, and walkers in shorts and loose T-shirts pushing infants in buggies.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 35