The radically abridged story on a gravestone

Dateline: Westendallee

Berlin*

Population: 3 677 472

Distance from Cape Town: 9 625km

Arrival date: 20 March 2023

Today’s temperature: 5 Deg Celsius

This week’s Dateline Love Letter is a bit crammed. There are four parts to it:

1. A walk in a cemetery

2. Berlin-ing around – things I did in Berlin this week

3. Notes on walking

4. Recommendations for reading, watching or listening to things around these three themes

Pick and choose, or read the whole caboodle.

Love,

K.

---

A walk in a cemetery

When I felt stuck with work, I put on warm things, one over the other, until I looked like a Teddy bear, and headed down Westendallee towards the road that leads to the Olympic Stadium.

There is a well-known Imbiss (a little van that sells predictable Berlin delights) on Olympiastraße, where I stopped to have my first and probably my last Pommes mit Mayo. Because, Lord knows, I need to rein things in on the edible Berlin delights front. The trees of the cemetery provide the background to this elegant meal. Picture: KARIN SCHIMKE

My destination was the cemetery, a forested burial ground nearby that descends in terraces towards a little lake. My grandmother is buried here. I wasn’t expecting to find her grave – and I didn’t – without my aunt, but I wanted to see the place.

Death rites and traditions are an almost non-existent aspect of my culturally confused white South Africanness. I’ve never had to think much about what happens to the dead. In my limited experience, they are mostly cremated and sit in people’s cupboards in urns for years until someone can decide what to do with the ashes.

The rituals around death and interment are taken very seriously here.

Burial is a complicated and highly regulated activity in Germany. You have to be buried in a cemetery, even if you are cremated. It’s illegal to strew ashes anywhere. Space is limited, though, so your family rents a burial spot for you for a decade or three, after which a new tenant moves in.

I’m not sure what happens to the remains then. Or what happens if you don’t have family, or don’t have family willing or able to pay your rent. I don’t know what happens to the gravestones either. (And gravestones, I saw yesterday, are a flamboyant art in and of themselves.)

The chapel bells rang sonorously every so often, and birds flitted and twittered, and I could hear the sounds of raking and of wheelbarrows wobbling over cobbles. There are companies you can pay to maintain the graves of your dearly departed, so the cemetery looks like an orderly, if thematically confused, plant nursery on a forest floor.

Most of the graves at Waldfriedhof Heerstraße are very well-tended and some even have fresh flowers on them. The grave of a well-known comedian and cartoonist is decorated with an array of little rubber ducks, probably put there by admirers. The grave of the anti-communist leftist writer Melvin Lasky was marked by a granite block upon which granite books lay in disarray that made me guess it belonged to a journalist before I saw whose grave it was.

One small gravestone bore German words meaning: ‘Born to see; compelled to look.’ I don’t know whether the person buried there was a politically engaged artist or writer, but the inscription made me think they had to have been.

Some of the graves were untended, though still neat. Perhaps there is no one left in the city, or in the world even, to look after them or pay to have them looked after.

Gravestones are literally stone into which a mason has chiselled a name, some dates perhaps, and sometimes something else, like the script above, or like the word ‘Mutterle’, which I thought was another way of saying ‘Mütterchen’, (little mother). I fleetingly hoped that would not be the way I would be remembered, but later checked and discovered that ‘Mutterle’ is a surname even fewer people own than people who go by ‘Schimke’.

‘To be remembered’ is a strange wish. At some point, everyone is forgotten. Graves aren’t necessarily visited by children, even less so by grandchildren and great-grandchildren. If your life’s work was memorable and your legacy undeniable, your name doesn’t need stone and chisel, but nor will it necessarily outlast a headstone.

All this made me wonder what we might leave behind if the gravestones, like our lives, are temporary space fillers.

When I got back to the flat, I made a cup of hot chocolate and sat down to read the life story of a man who wrote about himself in longhand. His daughter later typed it up on what looks like a typewriter from the Eighties.

Who, other than his daughter and wife, and now me, will have read this story?

The man was, on the face of it, quite ordinary, though to himself and his family he would have been all kinds of things but ordinary. Reading his story is an extraordinary experience though. I thought, as I read, that in some obscure way, he is getting another little life because I’m reading his words. His life is happening again for a brief time.

Perhaps the longest life we have is in the stories we tell or write. It’s our best shot at an extended life.

Stories have such sticking power, and when the individual story – the name carved in stone, the bones moved to make space for new bones, the face forgotten – fades into obscurity, then I think it gets absorbed into a ubiquitous mist, where we’re all ourselves, but also just one thing: the story of being human.

That, in any case, was the gigantic leap my brain took between graveyard and yellowed manuscript as I looked up from my reading when the automatic blinds started their daily rumble into the closed position that casts the flat into blackest darkness.

---

Berlin-ing around

• Brunch at Frühstück 3000 in Berlin-Schöneberg last Friday. The food was phenomenal, the vibe was very upmarket hipster. I flattered myself that a sexy waitress was flirting with me by telling me that she admired my glasses.

• This waitress’s mullet was a little more advanced than mine. I am working on a mullet because I won’t be able to keep my hair short and neat as always this year. Earlier this week someone made a snarky remark about people with mullets. ‘Easy Tiger,’ I said, ‘I’m working on a mullet of my own.’ He said: ‘There is a huge difference between people who are getting a mullet now and people who’ve had one since the Eighties.’ He is not wrong.

• I would never have eaten that monster brunch sandwich at Frühstück 3000 (‘Frühstück’ means breakfast) if it wasn’t for a visit from the best German in Germany. Antje spent all weekend keeping me warm and fed. Fed, because she figured that however much I ate, it wouldn’t be as expensive as her having to pay for her own accommodation. Warm, because my uselessness at cold weather fully revealed itself on Saturday. I was so cold at one point, it felt as though my blood was moving too slowly for my brain to work. Antje, whom I met in the mid-nineties on a journalism exchange programme, also works in literature. We walked Berlin flatter than it already is talking about books and authors and publishing and working here (Germany) vs working there (South Africa) and our children and history and politics.

• We visited the Literaturhaus Berlin to meet one of its two directors, Sonja Longolius, and to listen to the photographer Detlef Bluhm talk about his work, which was on exhibition there. Bluhm’s main photographic interest is night photography. Understanding, even as vaguely as I do, how complicated night lighting in photography is, I was interested to hear how he accomplished such sharp precision in the dark. Of course the technicalities mean nothing if the pictures leave the viewer unmoved, which Bluhm’s pictures do not. His night scenes, always devoid of people, are haunting – as though a rapture occurred somewhere between someone getting home from the office and sitting down to supper.

• We pootled around Prenzlauer Berg on Saturday, regularly popping into bookshops and cafès so that I could locate the senses that had been hijacked by the rainy cold.

The Prenzlauer Berg water tower, photographed here against the coldest sky I have ever walked under, is the oldest water tower in Berlin. There are flats in it that were originally used by the people who worked there. Beside the tower, there used to be a machine house. In 1933, when the National Socialists first came to power, they rounded up some Communists, Socialists, Jews and other undesirables, interned them there, and then killed them there. Casual violence. The machine house is gone now, but a plaque with the history commemorates the small horror that preceded the monstrous one. Photo: KARIN SCHIMKE

• We visited the Jewish Museum. Designed by the architect Daniel Libeskind, it is physically unsettling and was designed to be so. It wasn’t my first time, and still, of all the museums I have ever visited, this one has the strongest visceral effect on me. You experience this museum in your whole body rather than in your mind.

• Inside the museum, I was able for the first time to see an installation by the potter Edmund de Waal, whose thinking and speaking and writing I greatly admire.

• I spent Tuesday with a fellow writer from South Africa, seeing for the first time the mind-blowing pomposity of the Soviet War Memorial at Treptower Park, and then drinking too much beer in a brown and smokey old Kneipe (pub).

• I walked home alone in the dark relishing the foreign feeling of being able to walk home alone in the dark.

---

Notes on walking

• ‘Traveller’, with two Ls, is better than ‘traveler’ with one L. The doubling up – especially because lower-case Ls look like two upper-case Is together – is a reminder that there are two of me now: the one who is not from here and the one who is here.

• Distance can be measured but it is always relative. A short distance on a map can take an hour to cover on foot. A distance is shorter when you are lost in thought or in a book, and longer as the urge to pee grows.

• Distance shrinks with engineering, but increases with traffic.

• To walk is a kind of magic, a benevolent sorcery. Healing, blessing, charms, incantations, connections, surprises and songs follow in walking’s wake. They float alongside the moving body – prayer particles activated by motion – whether you go walking to find them or you’re simply walking to get from one place to another.

• By ‘walk’ I mean engage your hips and legs in the act of ambulation, but I also mean to move through space with the air on your face. Bicycles and wheelchairs count. You walk whether you skip along or use a Zimmerframe or Nordic walking sticks. Whether you amble, sprint, roller-skate, trot, wobble or sit down heavily and panting on every third street bench.

---

What I recommend

A few people have reminded me that I haven’t recommended things in a while. Related to themes of death and interment, of Berlin and of walking, here are some things I’d recommend.

1. I finally watched Der Himmel Über Berlin, a movie every cinephile worth their salt has seen. The movie is called Wings of Desire in English. It’s one of those cult films and for some reason, I’ve never seen it. What I was looking at most intensely was Berlin, but there are many other things to recommend it, and I’m glad I watched it.

2. Pure, by Andrew Miller, is a story in which a young engineer is tasked with exhuming bodies in an ancient Paris cemetery. When I was walking among graves wondering what happens to all the bones we put under the ground, I remembered how much I enjoyed that novel.

3. I’ve read many non-fiction books on walking but two recently-read ones I can recommend are:

   1. The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane

   2. On Looking by Alexander Horowitz

4. A movie about walking I liked was Tracks. There’s also Into The Wild, The Way and Wild, but those three were good in a more Hollywood kind of way, which is not necessarily bad. Just, you know, Hollywood.

5. Listen to ‘Prenzlauerberg’, a song by Beirut on their wonderful album Gulag Orkestar.

6. Watch a trailer/music video of a series I began watching with Antje called Babylon Berlin. It is based on a crime book series by the writer Volker Kutscher. Antje says it just gets better with each episode. Though it has crime at its heart, it shows historical transitions and context beautifully.

7. The Netflix series Cleo set in East and West Berlin in the Eighties and Nineties is an over-the-top festival of kitsch and fashion from that era. It’s also well-acted and funny. First and foremost, though, it is eye-candy.

*Berlin is the capital and largest city of Germany by both area and population. The name Berlin has its roots in the language of West Slavic inhabitants of the area of today's Berlin, and may be related to the Old Polabian stem berl-/birl-("swamp") or Proto-Slavic bьrlogъ, (lair, den). (Source: Wikipedia)

---

Dateline is the travelogue part of Love Letter, and is published on the 7th and 21st of every month. It is free. If you enjoy it, please share it with your friends and colleagues.