03/10/2009
“The ‘Lettre International’ has now appeared. Lettre International 86. ‘Berlin auf der Couch’ issue. My piece translates as: ‘Zwei Türme Plus Einer: Alexanderplatz, Olympiastadion, Telegraphenberg – Feldforschungen.’
Iain Sinclair”

An extract from ‘Two Towers, Plus One’, a Berlin walk commissioned by ‘Lettre International’ (Germany). To be published in October 2009. Many thanks to Lettre International for allowing us to publish this extract.

“[...]
Fortuitously, at the moment I was invited to make my first visit to Berlin, I was devouring a rather distressed copy of Alfred Döblin’s 1929 novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz. How I had lived without it, up to this point, was a mystery. As was my shaming inability to read the book in the original, or to speak the language. My performance in German was on a par with Jack Kennedy: ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’  Berliners, apparently, being a type of doughnut. Which, by accident, is not a bad description of how it felt to exist within the walled and fenced city of the Cold War, the human zoo with its parks, restaurants, museums and memories. Francis Stuart, an Irish writer with a preternatural 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 spoiled loves. Stuart, a good walker but a lousy linguist, developed a phonetic system for coping with German. He broke standard phrases down into sounds on a card, symbols which approximated the basic social requirements of his exile.  When I interviewed him in his old age, another kind of exile in a bungalow beside a long straight road in Ireland, his grunts had diminished to a single phrase: ‘That’s right.’ Red bulb of a nose, pitted like a raspberry. Eyes drifting to the drowned landscape, beads of rain sliding down the greasy window. ‘That’s right.’ Yeats. Beckett. The sound of wet tyres as he sat in his favourite Berlin restaurant. My questions grew longer, with more subordinate clauses, to compensate for silence like the silence of an old tree. After such a life, what was there to say? Berlin brought the best out of him; ruin and treachery, flight and displacement. They fed the best of his novels: The Pillar of Cloud and Black List, Section H. ‘That’s right.’ Admit everything, reveal nothing.

The momentum of 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, documentation and reportage becoming epic through rhythm and repetition. Voices in the head. Overheard street talk. Trains. Bars. Songs. Folk tales. Thieves. Whores. Black marketeers. Surgeons. Detectives. Berlin in the late-Twenties was the world city, the city of spectres, casualties of war, and the viral city of speed, movement, neurosis, collision. 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 interwoven Berlin stories of Christopher Isherwood, which are set between 1930 and 1933. Isherwood’s material lends itself to Hollywood schmaltz, the flaky English girl Sally Bowles transmogrified into a full-throttle Liza Minnelli. Where Berlin Alexanderpltaz is scrupulously, sweatily, reinvented by Rainer Werner Fassbinder as a tapeworm epic for our own times: a sepia nightmare of the soul, exemplary performers crushed by the intimate sets that contain them. And by the memory of a book that is honoured but little read in the new Europe.

‘But then his glance slid involuntarily up to the house-fronts, examined them, made sure they were standing still and did not stir, although really a house like that has lots of windows and could easily get top-heavy and lean over. That might make the roofs begin sliding, carry them along with it; they could start rocking. They might begin to shake, to rock, to jolt.’

Döblin’s protagonist, Franz Biberkopf, released from Tegel Prison, endures the shudder of the city: earthed trauma, coming catastrophe. He leans against walls that tremble. He finds himself in an apocalyptic landscape painted by Ludwig Meidner; a volcanic Berlin of cracked streets, tumbling houses captured by shockwaves running out ahead of European 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 fugue by an Orthodox Jew who brings him out of the sunlight, into a crowded interior, and tells him a story.

My Berlin quest begins with this, with a name: Alexanderplatz. It was everywhere, in all the books I skimmed as background research. Characters in Len Deighton thrillers stare eastwards: ‘to where the spike of the East German TV tower rose out of Alexanderplatz’. In Berlin Game, Deighton talks of the square. ‘Once it was the heart of the city, where pedestrians dodged bikes, bikes dodged cars, and cars dodged the trams that came through a five-way intersection of frightening speeds.’ Francis Stuart, typically, abstained. ‘Whatever was going on in Alexanderplatz… he’d forego until he 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 (my book of the moment) to the Olympic Stadium on the west of the city, by way of that triumphal avenue, Unter den Linden. An idiot-simple notion. From which a story would evolve. Or disintegrate. Coincidences were already biting. Like the shambling sentimentalist, Franz Biberkopf, I started by finding transport from Tegel. 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, the traffic lights and the walkers in shorts and loose T-shirts pushing infants in buggies.

Angela Merkel hangs from lampposts at busy junctions. An election is pending.  Colour multiples of so many politicians, willing to serve, willing you, with hypnotic stares and fixed smiles, to approve them. The women, groomed and handsome, unexceptional, look very much like models chosen to advertise spectacles. The style of glasses you favour is a badge of seriousness. As a politician you are not frivolous, but you are prepared to make the best of your appearance. European football managers, taking up appointments in England, demonstrate their character – firmly progressive, modestly wealthy – by their designer spectacles: Sven-Göran Eriksson, Fabio Capello. The male politicians in their airbrushed studio portraits remind me of smoothed and well-fed versions of the English cricket captain, Andrew Strauss: fit for purpose, middle management with unexceptional opinions, hard work rather than suspect brilliance. The truth is that football is now the real politics and politics a sport for those who are not quite good enough for anything else.” (continued)