The Chapel of Light aka, When Not to Take Pictures

Hidden away like a precious secret, or a memory, at the centre of Berlin, there is a small, quiet space, surrounded and protected by tall dark trees within a tall grey wall. You can only find it by making your way through a tangle of tramlines, empty spaces where buildings once stood, tourist cafes, U-Bahns and roads busy with lorries going in and out of the Charité hospital. But the Dorotheenstadt cemetery on Chausseestrasse is a bit like the Tardis – once you go in, it feels bigger than it did from the outside, and you start to forget that the outside is even there. I felt I could easily stay there til dusk, content to fall asleep next to the calm gravestones and sheltering trees.

Although I had never even heard of it until this year, it's a famous place, a place suffused with Berlin memories and histories. Stories about Berlin suddenly become less abstract, more human, as I see the names of the people buried here: Bertoldt Brecht, Helene Weigel, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Berlin's architects Schinkel and Stüler, Johann Borsig (one of Berlin´s first industrialists, the factories named after him are still going); the writers Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf, the GDR dramatist Heiner Müller, Sven Lehmann of "Herr Lehmann" fame (actor and poet late of Kreuzberg, dead at 42), Gisele May (actress of Berlin renown, dead at 90-odd after a last stint on the Ku'damm); poets and actors, architects and politicians, philosophers and men of industry (not to mention the man who invented the pillars you put adverts on in Germany, Mr. Litfass). Their Berlin bones all lie here and speak to us of Berlin itself. Brecht and Helene Weigel lived next door when they returned to Germany; Johann Borsig worked here a century earlier in a huge grey house that survived the bombs and still bears his name above the pompous, larger than life statue that decorates the façade. People bring flowers (or cigars, or whisky, or photographs of Ibiza) and leave them for their heroes or heroines.


 But it is surprisingly quiet. When I went there first, on my own, a couple of months back, there was hardly anyone about. The noise of the city seemed to suddenly dim as I made my way through the gates and up the sandy paths towards the little cafe. A large black cat with stripy paws like monochrome socks was licking its paws casually in the middle of the path. A Berlin-chic, middle-aged couple with leather jackets and bleached hair argued quietly over coffee before continuing their argument amongst the gravestones, but they turned out to be the people who look after the graves (obviously even the volunteers are glamorous). Some Japanese tourists with black umbrellas clutched coffee as they stood uncertainly by some of the more imposing graves.  All these people, and the cat, kept disappearing and reappearing out of the little paths as I wandered slowly from place to place absorbing the strangeness and quiet of it all, as if the cemetery liked to keep its visitors to itself; they seemed a long way away. It felt as though a thirst I didn't know I had was being slaked; a thirst for stillness, continuity, a sense of the past, a sense that people's bodies are still connected to the earth and the trees, even in this most disconnected of cities.

Gravestone of the poet Becher

Two ladies buried together...

But there's also an oddly futuristic element to it. Again like the Tardis, the strange simultaneity of history is conspicuous, bringing you smack bang up against the odd nature of past and future everywhere. Towards the back of the cemetery is a wall commemorating the family of the Austrian Ambassador in the nineteenth century; he and his wife are buried there with their five French-sounding daughters, who all predeceased them in the space of months. Yet, the wall is also marked with the scars of shells fired in the last days of the Second World War. Just along the way, a delicate pillar marks Schinkel´s tomb, surprisingly modest, recalling for us an elegant, enlightened Berlin. But his life overlapped with the industrial revolution right here on this street. Johann Borsig, buried a few yards away, built one of Berlin's first factories on the corner of Chausseestrasse itself, shortly before Schinkel's death, and evidently enjoyed bombast; in a disconcerting homage to Schinkel, Borsig's tomb is designed like a miniature opera house, complete with a miniature copy of Schinkel's design for The Magic Flute decorating the interior of its dome. It also has a touchingly large stone plate commemorating his wife: a Prussian, not overly elegant matron in stone, surrounded by cherubs.

Schinkel's tomb (front)

Borsig's tomb and the memorial plate to his wife; Stuler's grave beyond, left

 

Borsig-Haus, Chausseestrasse

But as you enter the cemetery, one thing stands out oddly, a bright white plain building that at first glance appears to have no particular relation to the rest of the graveyard. This is the chapel, where we came on a Friday night to see James Turrell´s light installation, something I´d heard about but never seen.

            James Turrell is a Canadian artist who specialises in light. Light for him is a revelation of many mysteries and he designed the installation for Berlin some years ago. Every evening, the light in the chapel gradually changes, bathing the building, and its visitors, in different combinations of colour and shadow. Around 50 of us had gathered on the plain wooden benches inside as it got darker outside. One of the guides introduced us to what was going to happen. It was impossible to see where the light changes were coming from, but gradually, we became aware of how the white altar now looked blue, or turquoise, or grey. And as the light changed, our brains changed their perceptions too. Our brain creates colour in response to other colours; if our eyes are exposed in a particular way to blue, for example, we will see other things as orange even if they “are not actually” orange. Orange is the complement to blue as green is to red.  And so gradually we became immersed in a pool of light where we also were actors, creating the colours around us that in turn influence our own emotions and mood.

Our guide asked us, at the artist's request, not to take photos, although it is not forbidden. She didn't say why, but this is my guess. Photographs act by capturing light, pinning it down. And they also try to pin down a moment of time: this is exactly what this looked like when...But the installation questions our perceptions, not only of light but of time; light is what informs our perception of time. The cemetery questions our perception of time too, and the chapel had its own Tardis-like aspect; as the light changed, it seemed sometimes bigger, sometimes smaller than it had from the outside. This can't be seen on a picture, but something of the beauty of the colours can be felt. Maybe.

Over the next few days, as we visited gardens, lakes and buildings, I wondered what pictures I was creating in my brain and how one thing I saw was influencing all the others things I was seeing. Like in Milan, where after I'd seen hundreds of Renaissance paintings, I started seeing the people around me as if an artist had grouped them with a profound intent. Their meaning began to shine out differently; time seemed to slow down as I looked at them. 

            And here are some pictures after all –  not ones I took, but postcards that the cemetery administration has produced in order for people like me to find a compromise and tell other people to come and see the installation for themselves. So you see, I can't resist a good picture either. Even though my pictures of pictures are only the tiniest reflection of what the experience was like...

Beauty in strange places, aka a trip to the Wuhlheide

It's been hard to write about things that are personal when all around you things are changing faster than you can keep up with, and the discourse about what is happening is so involving and intriguing...though also, of course, boring. But I have to remember, the personal is still also political. And more importantly local. Very local sometimes...

I recently returned from a trip to Canada and the US; I was alone on a strange continent! Fear and elation tipped in the balance, but I was left with a feeling of thankfulness; a very American feeling, judging from what they so often say (how to understand the emotions of people who talk about their emotions so often?), but also just a human one. 

But coming back to Berlin, I was also thankful. For the freedoms we have here, for the lack of drama, and surprisingly, most of all for "the green" as the Germans would say. German is good at that; keeping things simple by turning an adjective, grün, into a noun, das Grüne. Green spaces, leafy places, trees, grass, lakes...even parks. It's not always complimentary, though; Leben im Grünen is also a commercial phrase designed to attract home-owners and investors to buy houses out in the sticks, and so it can be used with irony, even disapproval by those hard-core city-dwellers in Neukölln or Kreuzberg when we tell them where we live.

But it's true. We do live in the green. Birches and sycamores, now a darker, deeper and dustier green than when I left their spring-like brilliance four weeks ago, surround our flat; the view beyond the houses recedes into the green distance of the Berlin Forest with its canals and rivers, and eventually, out to Wannsee. The plants on our balcony (sage, honeysuckle, thyme, coriander, mint, box...) have sprung into lush, bright green life, especially after the storms, floods and sunshine of the past week; my morning commute by bicycle to the S-Bahn at Schlachtensee takes me through airy green corridors of beeches, birches, firs and oaks, along green fields (now yellowing in the heat) grazed by large, composed-looking white cattle and small, over-excitable white sheep. Before getting the train, I run down to the water for a quick swim; moving out to the centre of the lake, the sun on my face, I turn on my back and am surrounded by a circle of bright green trees and dark green water, the bowl of blue sky overhead mirroring the bowl of green lake below, both full of life, seen and unseen.

At my conference in the US, I attended a seminar called "On Beauty". People are pretty consistent about what they find beautiful, and I'm no exception (the sea, the sky, lakes, trees, mountains, the Fernsehturm...). But finding beauty and finding things beautiful are two different things. Finding beauty is not always easy. Beauty can't be separated from whether you are able to access it; how lucky you can be, or not, to have it offered, withheld or simply never seen as even important.

And this brings me back to Berlin. In fact, to East Berlin, which is not, one has to admit, a place one would instantly think of as beautiful. But Berlin offers its citizens beauty (as well as ugliness) in many forms, and though not all of them sound beautiful to start with, the fact that nearly anyone can access them makes them beautiful in a special kind of way.

As if to prove this,  last weekend we found beauty in a particularly strange place. Looking through our book of 111 Things Not to Miss in Berlin (highly recommended), I suddenly noticed something. "Mel! There's a miniature railway! In the Wuhlheide!" No sooner said than Googled: "And today they're having – OMG, there's a steam special." It took a surprisingly short time for us to pack our bags and a picnic and get on our bikes before catching the self-important, indispensable S7 train line all the way across town to Ostkreuz, where we threw ourselves onto its unimportant, obscure cousin, the tiny S3 with just two carriages full of holidaymakers, teenagers with fizzy drinks, disapprovingly tutting elderly people("Tuh! Irresponsible cyclists!") and small children with already exhausted parents. It was only midday, but already it felt like an adventure, as we were carried out of the familiar surroundings of Friedrichshain and Treptow out east to Rummelsburg, Köpenick and eventually the "Wuhlheide", the Wuhl Heath. 

I had never stopped here before. My previous experience of the Wuhlheide had consisted mostly of avoiding it, as a friend and I cycled, heady with the romance of a Berlin summer, to the vastness of Müggelsee, on a hot, hot Sunday with nowhere to stop and rest until we got there. That was seventeen years ago and there was no European Bike Trail then, just the rushing road and endless cars, lorries and dust. We thought of the Wuhlheide as a place for East German families to listen to Schlager while drinking beer and eating Wurst in improbable quantities; after all, it was called a People's Park, Volkspark (anything with the prefix "Volks-" is best avoided in the view of many younger Germans). We imagined it as a naff, yet also intimidating place full of neonazis and Goths intent on hunting each other down, with us, helpless intellectuals, caught in the middle, possibly under the ironic gaze of brightly-coloured plastic Volksgnomes. 

Heading into the heath

But now, seeing it this time, I was unironically enchanted. No gnomes were visible. Instead, as we arrived at the platform, stumbling out with our bikes, we suddenly stopped at the sound of a loud whistle. Then there was the hiss of a steam engine, and there was the engine itself, a tiny black smoking monster shining in the glare of the midday sun, with wooden carriages full of people in the back. And to our amazement, they were both smiling and waving; we've never before seen Germans wave from public transport, unlike the British, who seem to take any opportunity to do so. We waved back as enthusiastically as we dared.

Here, however, the similarity to British miniature railways ended. The railway at the Wuhlheide, which opened in 1956, has a special history. It was a Pioniereisenbahn, one of many narrow gauge railways in the Eastern Bloc designed for young railway "pioneers" to prepare for their adult life as proud servants of the people (the Volk - a word which, I suddenly realise, here has an altogether different implication to what I'd assumed). Here, the East German railway company – the Deutsche Reichsbahn – trained children and young adults as drivers, stokers, ticket collectors and guards. And if that sounds unlikely, how about this - the Wuhlheide, then known as the Pionierrepublik Ernst Thälmann, also contained a training centre for young astronauts.

Where's the driver? Our train, the Luise

But although the Parkeisenbahn (park railway), as it is now known, is still partly run by children and young people, its ethos and ownership has changed. After the fall of the Wall, as agreements were made, often controversially and painfully, between industries in East and West, the Reichsbahn no longer wanted to pay for upkeep of the railway. Instead, a charitable trust was formed; and, realising that nostalgia for steam is not just a British invention, it had the brilliant idea of using steam engines alongside the diesel ones that the DR had employed, gifted to the Wuhlheide by other German miniature railways. Now the locomotives come from as far away as Indonesia and Poland; the Indonesian engine, Merapi, though built in 1925 in Hanover, was used on a sugar plantation in Java before returning to Germany.

But one part of the DDR ethos was not lost. The trust held onto the policy of encouraging children to run the railways – forget Scouting, become a train driver! And we soon saw the results for ourselves. After a bicycle ride through what seemed like endless woodland and heath, getting lost as we followed the confusing sounds of the trains, we finally managed to find the Hauptbahnhof, the main station. And here we saw the railway in its full glory. Young boys, from the age of about 8 or 9 up, and young men checked our tickets, manned the signals, and shouted obscure messages up to the train drivers, who have to be 18 or over. No girls appeared to be involved, although they are apparently welcome. But a girl sold us our tickets, and for just 6 euros each, we got to climb on to the wooden carriages, sit in the sun and look out at the woods and at other enthusiastic passers-by, holding up their small children to wave – yes, really! – as we travelled the whole 7 kilometres of the railways. The Chinese man in front of us and laughed with his toddler son. Trainspotters took pictures. Mums and dads let their children lean dangerously out of the wooden carriages for a better look at the engine up front. 

Health and safety...

"This could never happen in the UK!" Mel shook her head. "This is amazing. Look at us, just a thin metal chain between us and falling out of the train, and a whole train journey for just 6 euros. And everyone is so happy! And safe."

We later found out it had not always been so safe; a child abuse scandal spoilt the reputation of the railway for a while in the 1990s. Thereafter, social workers and teachers were brought in and the policies sharpened up; recruitment and management was changed. But the main principle did not change; children are still judged sensible and clever enough to run railways. And they do.

We marvelled at the space children and adults have out here to be themselves and to enjoy things outdoors without any worry or interference. We marvelled at the huge size of the park, which, once past the parts designed for entertainment (beer stalls, children's pools, etc) revealed itself to be as much of a true heath as in East Anglia or Yorkshire, a vast space where birds and insects can live alongside people. And we marvelled at how unexpectedly beautiful it was; despite the Schlager at the beer stall, or perhaps also because of them.

This spaciousness, the living in the green, is a gift; whatever your politics, whatever your income, you can find it, reach it, and be in it. You do not have to be rich or privileged, or own a car, as in America. This is a beauty that Berlin gives to us all for the price of an S-Bahn ticket, or as we found out on the way back along the Radweg (European R1), for a ferry ticket on Berlin's shortest ferry journey across the Spree; two minutes on the F11 for the price of a Kurzstrecke ticket. Swallows dipped around us and fish swam beneath. Something not just for the whole family, but for the whole Volk - whoever that now is, in Berlin, wherever we are from - to enjoy.

On the ferry