Notes on the Text
eins :
| The first stanza refers to the lack of current (at time of writing) media interest in the war in Ukraine, since Russia invaded the country in February 2022.
| Mikhail Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” for a place allowing us to roam through time and space, where the past is visible in the present.
zwei :
| Treptower Park contains the Soviet War Memorial, built to commemorate Red Army soldiers who were killed during the Battle of Berlin in April-May 1945. It is also known as the Tomb of the Unknown Rapist due to the mass rapes by Red Army soldiers of German women during the Soviet occupation.
drei :
| The wide promenade leading up to the sarcophagi in Treptower Park is flanked by weeping birches.
vier:
| In Berlin, common with many European cities in 2022-2023, the Ukrainian Flag (yellow and blue) is frequently flying as a show of support against Putin and Russian Army aggression.
| The national flag of unified Germany is the tricolour schwarz (black), rot (red), gold (gold).
| Six million is the estimated number of Jewish people murdered by the Nazis during their pogrom.
| 6000 a day is the estimated number of people (predominantly Jews, but also disabled people, Roma and Gypsies, and homosexuals) murdered every day in the gas chambers in Auschwitz alone.
| 566 minutes refers to the length of the 1985 documentary film Shoah directed by Claude Lanzmann.
| Berlin is constantly under construction, and in order to drain groundwater from building sites, large pipes channel this waters into the river Spree. Many are painted pink or blue.
fünf :
| Faded yellow index cards refers to the documentation taken by the Stasi (Ministerium für Staatssicherheit) on the East German population.
| After the Wall fell in 1989 and the subsequent collapse of the GDR, Stasi officials started destroying their files. In January 1990, a protest formed outside, eventually able to overpower the guards and ‘storm the fortress’ to prevent the destruction of incriminating documents.
| ‘Everyone’s pain has a different smell’ is from Craig Raine’s poem A Martian Sends a Postcard Home.
| Department 12 of the State Security (Stasi) was responsible for managing agents who infiltrated and spied on NATO members and other European countries.
| Totenkopf is the German word for skull. It was an emblem used by the Nazi paramilitary group the SS-Totenkopfverbände (Death’s Head Units) responsible for managing the Nazi extermination camps.
| Teufelsberg, meaning Devil’s Mountain in German, is a man-made hill in the Grunewald area of former West Berlin, created out of the rubble of a Nazi military college. During the Cold War, the hill housed a U.S. listening station.
| ‘a spectre stalks the streets’ is a paraphrase of the introduction to The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: “A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism”.
sechs :
| The first stanza paraphrases lines from the opening of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin.
| ‘140 beats per minute’ is a common speed for Techno music.
| The Kit Kat Club is the club featured in the musical and film Cabaret, inspired by John Van Druton’s stage play I Am A Camera, based on Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. The modern day KitKatClub in Berlin harks back to the sexual liberation of the Weimar era.
| ‘the universe a gay suicide’ is from Georges Bataille’s poem The Archangelical: The Tomb, translated by Mark Spitzer
| ‘parading through streets’ refers to Berlin’s infamous Love Parade which ran (almost) annually from 1989 to 2010.
| The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft was run by Magnus Hirschfeld and was pioneering in the study of sexology. Its unique research library was destroyed by the Nazi-led Deutsche Studentenschaft in 1933 when an estimated 20,000 books and materials were burned.
| Berghain night club in Berlin is notoriously difficult to get into, and equally notorious for its dark rooms for sex.
| Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth) is an orchestral song cycle written by the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler in 1908-09 but not premiered until after his death in 1911. The text is from Hans Bethge’s translations of Chinese Tang dynasty poetry.
| Boxhagener Platz is a small market square in Friedrichshain, Berlin. Prevously in East Berlin, it was an area housing many squats and counter-cultural communities, especially feminist and lesbian groups.
| Liebig 34 was one of the squats in this area, the home of an anarchist-feminist co-operative since 1990. The residents were evicted in 2020.
sieben :
| ‘Everything was new and nothing was impossible’ is a line from Goodbye to Berlin.
| Hansa Studios is a recording studio in Kreuzberg, situated only 150 metres from the former Berlin Wall. Arguably one of the most well-known albums recorded there was David Bowie’s “Heroes” in 1977. The second of his so-called ‘Berlin Trilogy’, it was the only one recorded solely in Berlin, whilst Bowie was living there.
| ‘sound garden’ is a reference to the music on the first two of these albums, and a conflation of the tracks Sound and Vision (on Low) and Moss Garden (on “Heroes”)
| ‘motorik’ is the name given to the driving 4/4 often used in “krautrock” bands.
| ‘metal machine’ refers both to this beat, the influence of Deutsche Elektronische Musik, and Lou Reed’s album Metal Machine Music, released in 1975. Recorded on the German brand Uher machine, it was first performed live in Berlin in 2002.
| Schöneberg was the Berlin neighbourhood most notable (or safe) for queer men and women in the Weimar era of the 1920s-1930s.
| Cafe-Bar Himmelreich, meaning Heaven in German, is a predominantly lesbian bar in Friedrichshain.
| Splitting of the atom (nuclear fission) enabled the creation of atomic bombs, which were first developed by the U.S. Army under the direction of J. Robert Oppenheimer as the Manhattan Project. The bombs Little Boy and Fat Man were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 in an attempt to stop World War II.
acht :
| ‘hide in suitcases | climb inside car engines | crawl through waste pipes’ were all methods of escape, or attempted escape by East Berlin residents into West Berlin.
| ‘This fractured line is not a metaphor’ is a line from Goodbye to Berlin.
neun :
| Rummelsburger Bucht is an internal bay of the River Spree, close to Treptower Park and the Wall previously dividing East and West Berlin.
| An ‘imbiss’ is a small food stand or stall selling food on the street.
| ‘walking the red line’ the former Berlin Wall is demarcated across much of the city by a red line.
| ‘crossing the green line’ refers to another divided city, Nicosia in Cyprus, where residents need to pass through immigration checks to move between North and South Cyprus. It also refers to the ‘Green Line’ demarcation set out between Israel and neighbouring countries following the First Arab-Israeli War in 1948 and the subsequent division of Jerusalem.
| ‘the East Side’ refers to former East Berlin.
| ‘the West Bank’ refers to the Israeli-occupied state of Palestine.
| ‘the Death Strip’ refers to sections of the Berlin Wall that consisted of two walls, with empty land in between, in which were placed watchtowers, floodlights, guard dogs, and trip-wire machine guns.
| Nicosia, Sarajevo, Jerusalem and Mostar are all cities which have been divided geographically by war. Mostar has since been reunited.
| ‘Babies born into bombed hospitals’ refers specifically to an attack in Kabul on an MSF-run maternity hospital, and more generally to many other attacks on hospitals in recent warfare, particularly in Kunduz (Afghanistan) and Yemen.
| ‘washed up on our beaches’ refers to the tragedy of death at sea from people escaping conflict and seeking asylum.
| ‘cursed are those who withhold justice from the foreigner’ is from Deuteronomy 27:19 NIV
zehn :
| ‘The war rages across the newspapers’ is from Derek Jarman’s film Blue.
| These cities have all suffered extreme destruction during previous or current warfare.
JP Seabright 