Muscles honed, destination achieved, the long-distance architect took on the world. Trenching the dust of the prison yard in summer, kicking aside the fallen leaves, leaving footprints in the snow, Speer pushed on in the direction attempted by Céline and imagined by Francis Stuart, across northern Germany, into Russia and Siberia. Fording the frozen Bering Straits, he limped down the west coast of America, towards the proper destination for surrealists and psychogeographers: Mexico. By now he was one of the last two inmates in this madhouse-prison. When they let him go, turning him loose into a twilight of self-justifying interviews, he was thirty-five kilometres south of Guadalajara. Starting there, I brooded, it should be possible to reverse the trek of this mental traveller, all those miles and years, back to Berlin. The demolished prison would then rise from the dirt and Speer’s small plot of ground, the wilderness corner of the yard he called his ‘Garden of Eden’, would flower again. Revealing this escapee from the cabinet of Dr Caligari as another premature ecologist.
On the last morning of our Berlin visit, we decided to adopt the excursionist mood of Menschen am Sonntag, by taking the S-Bahn to the end of the line, to Potsdam. Here was the Filmpark Babelsberg, a Disneyfied reminder of the great days of Fritz Lang and the Ufa Studios, when Leytonstone’s Alfred Hitchcock served his apprenticeship and witnessed the making of Metropolis. In Potsdam you could take your choice of palaces, museums and memorials to the conference at which post-war Europe was carved up by the victors. Mindful of Herzog, we were not tourists. We were pilgrims searching for a final structure to complete my triangulation: Fernsehturm, Bell Tower, Einstein Tower.
We were soon among green places, botanical gardens, quiet suburbs, glimpses of white sails on water. A Chinese man stood beside me, so that his young daughter could take a seat. I remembered Christopher Isherwood’s excursion to a villa at Wannsee. His host, the manager of a great Jewish department store in Berlin, describes his summer residence as an English ‘country cottage’. But it is nothing of the kind: ‘tame baroque, elegant and rather colourless’. The sort of villa acquired, at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, for the notorious conference convened by Reinhard Heydrich to fix the mundane technicalities of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. The subject of Chris Petit’s novel The Human Pool.
Touts come at you hard as you step from the train, offering bus trips and riverboat excursions. When I confess that my sole interest today is Erich Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm, they are happy to provide me with a map. Potsdam, from the station on, is a magical topography in which visionary architecture meets astrophysics in a forgotten crease of history. A place smelling of pine-resin and good coffee.
The railway station, for some reason, is occupied by lizard-headed extraterrestrials, crouching Neanderthals, zipped apes and dinosaurs modelled in hard plastic. SMASH FASCISM! Walls at the bottom of the hill have been painted with cartoons of pylons in an electrical storm. The red-purple skies of nuclear catastrophe. We are on the right track.
Through banks of golden sunflowers and well-kept houses, we turn into Telegrafenberg, a science park open to visitors. A woman, descending briskly, asks where we have come from. ‘The station.’ ‘By which bus?’ ‘We walked.’ ‘You walked, right from the station?’ She is astonished and a little alarmed. It is unmannerly, she implies, to pass up the opportunity of experiencing the efficiency of public transport available in the capital of Brandenburg.
An occasional gardener is glimpsed, at a distance: this park is a silent world. One building, fronted with picnic tables, is the Polar Institute. The Institute of Astrophysics has a sympathetic connection with Frau im Mond, the film Fritz Lang made for Ufa from a script (based on her own novel) by his wife, Thea von Harbou. The surface of the moon was created in Babelsberg by importing truckloads of sand from the Baltic. The warp of space–time relativity is much in evidence. Equations laid out in Lang’s speculative movie form the basis for Wernher von Braun’s V-1 and V-2 calculations. East London is flattened by rockets rushed into production to publicize Lang’s last silent film. Professor Hermann Oberth, who advised the monocled director on Frau im Mond, was frequently quoted by Von Braun, at the period when he was responsible for research and development at Peenemünde. He liked Oberth’s proposal for a spacecraft carrying a mirror, with a diameter of many kilometres, capable of concentrating the sun’s rays to control terrestrial weather and manipulate hot spots.
The migrant dunes with which the texture of Lang’s moon was constructed came from beaches near the secure site where Von Braun and his associates were adapting fantasies of interplanetary travel into a technology for turning London into a lunar desert of craters and rubble. Petit told me that when the Russians arrived in Potsdam, they occupied the Babelsberg studios, dressing themselves in costumes from a Napoleonic epic and driving their cattle through the palaces and plywood cities. Terrified Potsdam inhabitants, primed by propaganda from Goebbels, were ready to believe anything, even Cossacks with shaggy ponies and camels. They accepted the latest invaders as a regiment of Frenchmen from 1815, returned from their battlefield graves to avenge the deeds of the Prussians at Waterloo.
On sandy paths, among the woods of Telegrafenberg, we are the aliens. I’m dressed in the sort of many-pocketed waistcoat associated with Joseph Beuys. To be strolling here, so far from Hackney, is as eccentric as the solitary marches of Samuel Beckett in Tiergarten, or the nocturnal ramblings of Francis Stuart, both of whom espoused a cultural relativism: curving movements through time and space, attempting to bring into focus their point of origin. Ireland is experienced most vividly when furthest away. And Dublin, that fabled walkers’ city, with its crescent bay, is grooved into the memory by pilgrimages through other countries, where equivalents are found for every bar and bench. Phoenix Park into Tiergarten, Ballsbridge into Charlottenburg.
Even the contemporary boom town, spreading up the coast like Los Angeles, a cancer of failed developments and ghost estates, had a defining image for me: young women, early in the morning, smartly presented, clicking down Baggot Street into the Georgian squares with their polished brass plates, carrying trays from which polystyrene coffee beakers depend like udders. As if, in a flash, milkmaids had become women of the city. The grand squares with their trumpeted literary associations were now active in the holy hour of old (when the pubs would shut for a post-lunch lull), with upmarket prostitutes servicing the corporate clones who could not afford to take time away from their laptops. That awkward business briskly dealt with before a late return to Sandycove, Dalkey or Beckett’s Foxrock.
In a Telegrafenberg clearing, we came across a group of abandoned tin huts, so haunting that I had to photograph them. A Viking settlement of upturned boats constructed from overlapping sheets of corrugated iron. A hangar for some experiment worthy of Dr Mabuse. An exercise in mind control. I thought of a report by Francis Stuart. After walking for many miles, struggling to make sense of Berlin, he strains for a metaphor taken from his native Ireland: the iron hut.
‘He continued his walk which was not, after all, the exploration of a tourist but in the nature of a pre-pilgrimage to places, at present unhallowed, which might become as haunted for him as, say, certain corners of Dublin or the row of iron huts on the Curragh plain. How little he foresaw that nothing from the past had prepared him for what was to come!’
Erich Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm was suddenly there, of its time and ours. The realized signature of an idea: deep steps, recessed windows, an unashamedly priapic form. A sketch, swift and sure, manifested in the world, creating a force field powerful enough to keep witnesses at a respectful distance. The tower grew out of a lawn, set among the woods, like the periscope of a submarine emerging from the earth. The thrust of a shamanic observatory from an era of discontinued modernism. Concrete maturing into radiant white skin.
A note was pinned to the door: ‘Dear Visitors – The Einsteinturm is no museum but a Solar Observatory of the Astrophysical Institute of Potsdam.’ We had walked, therefore, beyond the city
of museums, beyond towers that were open to the public, sanctioned sites where tourists are invited to wonder at the achievements of past generations of men. In progressing around the meandering paths of the hill, we had triggered a more complex narrative, which would somehow play itself out against the shape of this expressionist structure.
The visionary homage to Einstein belonged in the film studios, down below us, with the wild-eyed scientists and mesmerists of Fritz Lang and Robert Wiene. In 1923, a year of hyperinflation in Germany, when loaves of bread cost 428 billion marks, Lang’s scientific adviser, Hermann Oberth, published a 92-page book called Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (‘The Rocket into Interplanetary Space’). Inspired by his childhood reading of Jules Verne, Oberth – who lived, like Hitler, in Munich – contrived a text to fascinate film-makers, as well as industrialists and ambitious students of engineering like Wernher von Braun. ‘Interest in spaceflight often seemed to coincide with flight into hard-right politics,’ wrote Wayne Biddle in The Dark Side of the Moon.
The Einsteinturm, built to test the validity of the Theory of Relativity, worked in ways far beyond its original remit. Mendelsohn described it as a ‘heavenly project’. The authorities in Potsdam dragged their feet over budgets and technical specifications, delaying completion to the point where the tower became operational at the very moment when Oberth’s book was published. The white stump on its solid base was a launch pad for pure research. Equations formulated here were as dangerous in their implications as the Peenemünde rocket experiments that curved towards urban devastation, astral policing and dreams of total war.
Einstein’s thesis having been tested and proved elsewhere, Mendelsohn’s tower became an occupied sculpture conceived by a Jewish architect to honour a Jewish scientist: as well as a demonstration of the technological heritage of the defeated Reich. In its present form, after extensive restoration in 1999, the declared aim of the tower is: ‘to gather data on solar and nuclear physics’. While its covert purpose, I discovered, was to shred received notions and dissolve them into the cosmic stew, a general theory of everything: physics and poetry, Dublin and Berlin. Celtic myths and the dark gods of the forest intertwined like vegetative script from The Book of Kells.
The physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who generalized Einstein’s relativity by using four-dimensional geometry with antisymmetric components and connections, received a personal invitation from De Valera to move to Ireland to help establish an Institute for Advanced Studies in Clontarf. Appointed as Director of the School of Theoretical Physics in 1940, Schrödinger stayed in Dublin for seventeen years, fathering two children after involvements with students, and becoming a devotee of the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. Individual consciousness, he believed, was only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe. He apologized to Einstein for recanting on his outspoken criticism of the Nazis, a position he was forced to adopt in order to safeguard his tenure at the University of Graz. It was in correspondence with Einstein that he proposed the thought experiment in which a cat is neither alive nor dead. Or both at the same time.
Affected by the vision of the tower, I returned with Anna for a fortnight’s stay in Dublin, the city in which we had met as students, but never revisited. Space–time anomalies permitted us, like Schrödinger’s cat, to be in two places at once; blessed with a special tenderness for the sea town in the rain, as we walked or rewalked half-remembered routes between Howth Head and Dalkey. Anna said that she had seen more in this brief stay than in the four years of her student life, which was now a kind of dream. A trio of old folk, out on the razzle, made it their business to find us the site of the vanished hotel where we spent the first night of our married life. In the long, light evenings, possessed by an agenda of her own, Anna tracked down the bars that had survived and the ones that had transformed themselves into Mexican restaurants or tourist hotels. The priests had vanished from the streets and the beggars were now site-specific professionals from the Balkans. One night we took ourselves off to a travelling circus pitched alongside the house where Bram Stoker was born.
We had been on the move for so many months that it was impossible to fix our coordinates. We slumped on a bench, in a damp park, or a windblown square in mid-construction, and the world raced past us. Potsdam on the S-Bahn was Shepperton out of Waterloo: woods, reservoirs, film studios, the connection to the city stretched to its limits. Hermann Oberth’s proposal for the spacecraft with the giant mirror could have come straight from Ballard’s Vermilion Sands. When Brigid Marlin sent me back to The Kindness of Women in search of her fictionalized presence, I found an incident that could only happen when time was being sucked into a black hole. Ballard and Fritz Lang, two confirmed self-mythologizers, come face to face. And it happens in South America.
‘An elderly man in an oversized tuxedo sat on a straightbacked chair turned sideways to the wall. He slumped in the chair like an abandoned ventriloquist’s dummy, buffeted by the noise and music, the light show dappling his grey hair a vivid blue and green. He looked infinitely weary, and I thought that he might have died among these garish film people. When I shook his hand and briefly told him how much I admired his films, there was a flicker of response. An ironic gleam flitted through one eye, as if the director of Metropolis had realised that the dystopia he had visualised had come true in a way he had least expected.’
The Colossus of Maroussi
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis … It’s what we have rescued from madness … There are obligations attached to such a visit.
– Don DeLillo
They were going to hunt dogs with guns, the Berliner said, to clear the streets for the Olympics. He was in Hackney now, where the buzz was, an architect, but he had been in Athens in 2002, when the deals were going down and the grand project was under way. And the inspectors, flown in from all corners, lavishly lodged and entertained, were getting nervous. I sat in an afternoon pub, beside a street market that seemed to have migrated across town from Notting Hill, close to a stretch of the Regent’s Canal that had been peremptorily closed, fenced, drained. Instead of dogs, perhaps they were going to kill fish, or the birds that feed on them. No work was in progress, but the exclusion zone was briskly set up and policed by the usual yellow tabards. The challenge, trying to discommode stubborn pedestrians, always comes from the wrong direction: ‘What are you doing on the towpath?’ Good question. I’ve been trying to find an answer for years. But it is where I am, where I like to be, every morning. At their first appearance, the invaders assume absolute authority, without explanation or apology. What are you doing here? And from where does the conviction, about the rightness of your piracy, emanate?
The double-banked lines of narrowboats, council-tax dodgers, have been dispersed. Cyclists are thrown into the murderous stream of Mare Street. A procession of women, all ages, being taught how to swing their arms while marching (and talking) at pace, runs slap against the plywood barrier. As a precaution, the authorities have painted a white line around the former boating lake in Victoria Park. You can’t be too careful of this stuff, the alien medium: water. Comb off the algae carpet, the duckweed, and prepare to airlift in a dune or two of cheap sand, with deckchairs and parasols, for the creation of an urban beach. A rising hysteria grips the fortunate Olympic boroughs, funny money is available, in serious quantities, for those who can come up with the right kind of fun. If you are going to hunt dogs, Victoria Park would not be a bad place to start. But that’s not what the German meant, it must have been his wicked sense of humour. He was part of a nocturnal cycle patrol, middle-class professionals, architects, graphic designers, financial journalists, who cruise the city searching out interesting properties to squat, hip industrial sites preferred, with visible pipes and naked brickwork, Crittall windows.
Pre-Olympic Hackney was an open city: Bill Parry-Davies told me that he hoped to get £200,000 from the council, to allow the long-term squatter known as ‘The Owl Man of Albion Drive’ to relocate with his
wounded birds to the country. The budget for the transport-hub slab at Dalston Junction, serving bus routes, climbed vertiginously, and without explanation, from £26 million to something closer to £60 million. The consortium involved in this project, Balfour Beatty and Carillion, was alleged to have been engaged in bid-rigging activities over public contracts in the Midlands. After what appeared to be some American-style ‘plea bargaining’, a reduced fine of £10 million was paid. TfL reassure us that Best Value is integral to the planning process. And central government confirm that a ‘transport interchange’ is essential for the 2012 Olympics. Even though, as Lord Low of Dalston points out in a letter to the Hackney Gazette, none of the buses using this facility will actually go anywhere near the Olympic Park.
Those dogs stayed with me when I left for Athens. I had seen film footage shot two years after the 2004 Games: loping beasts, freelance caretakers patrolling the overgrown wilderness of the futurist sculpture park that once housed the Olympic complex, out at Maroussi. Furtive ghosts in shaggy coats demonstrating a classical trajectory of fate: how those who are condemned, without justification, become the sole occupiers of the deserted palace for which they were the intended sacrifice. Now, starting early, to get to the new Acropolis Museum before the promised crowds, I noticed cats scavenging from the lip of a brightly polished litter bin; sleek, piebald creatures leaning back, using fat tails for balance, as they sniff the refuse. Pavements are rain-washed and scrupulously clean. The graffiti, in this high-visibility tourist zone, is Arabic, framed in cracked marble panels at the base of the steps like calligraphy by Cy Twombly.
The tribal dogs, wolfish spirits of place, skulking guardians of something that has been lost, circumambulate the major tourist attractions without feeling an obligation to tout or charm. They are the unculled, collateral victims of the Olympic gaze: heavy-pelted German-shepherd types, down on their luck, war veterans with a folk memory of clover-munching sheep. And fluffed-up, pinkish creatures also, on very thin legs, like wealthy matrons from the Kolonaki district caught in the rain without their dark glasses. Feral packs roamed the old city, it’s what dogs do: test architecture designed to be abandoned and recall the years before they were enslaved as household pets. They scrounged at restaurants and tavernas with Balkan insouciance. While unaffiliated cats blanketed roofs like gently stirring fur underlay; they stretch, arch, settle on the corrugated iron of Monastiraki Station or the skeleton of the wrecked café, halfway up the limestone plug of Lycabettus Hill.
Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project Page 38