Among the tombs

Readers may recall I blogged about a fascinating walk I did last year, in the company of the poet Stephen Watts, exploring hidden corners of the East End that appear in WG Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Keen to revisit some of those locations, my Hercules co-publisher Vici MacDonald and I took a small group of generous sponsors of Heart Archives (including author Sue Rose) on a short perambulation around the old Jewish cemeteries of Mile End. We were fortunate in meeting up with Susie Clapham, architect and chronicler of lost street furniture http://anomaliesofloststreetfurniture.blogspot.co.uk/. She has taken a special interest in the cemeteries, especially the one at Bancroft Road. More on that later.

We began in Alderney Road, where Stephen also began with his group some months back. As I mentioned in my previous post, Alderney Road is the location of the oldest Ashkenazi cemetery in the UK. Although Sebald chose to situate his protagonist in a house adjacent to the burial ground, he is unable to see into over the high wall. This seems to me to be a typical Sebaldean device – to give us a glimpse, a speck of knowledge, so that the quest becomes as crucial as the discovery. But just as Austerlitz is one day lucky enough to come across the open door in the wall, we too were given access.

 It is, as I’ve said before, a beautiful and moving place, as Austerlitz says, ‘a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time.’ It may have meant more seeing as a fair proportion our little group, including Sue and myself, have Ashkenazi roots. Standing there I was reminded of a line from one of Sue’s poems, ‘Mahler 9’, in which she writes: ‘we all carry our dead / with us on a quest for new homes, the klezmer dance / in our head propelling us forward, the fiddle pulling us back.’

Susie took us round the corner into the Bancroft Road cemetery, which I had previously only seen from the street (many only glimpse it momentarily from the train, as they arrive into London via Liverpool Street), and what struck me most was how vulnerable that small plot feels amid the council blocks and early Victorian terraces of Stepney. The apple tree stranded at the far end by the fence, its fruit rotten and spoiled on the ground, seemed a metaphor for what has happened to the place, bombed in the war, vandalised in later years. There were a few stones still standing, some still legible. We were moved by the grave of a child, his stone although toppled, intact.

That ‘quest for new homes’ is something too that struck a chord with our group, assembled as we were from America, Canada and the Czech Republic. We found ourselves next on the Queen Mary campus, surrounded by bleary-eyed weekend students, viewing the Velho Novo Cemetery, a desert of the dead amidst the stark brick architecture of the modern university. I have written about the history of the Sephardi cemeteries when I visited with Stephen, but it is worth mentioning how strange these sites are in their modern context, especially the one bang in the middle of campus.

But it was the Velho Old which was most hidden, most secret of them all. A security guard escorted us through back alleys of the campus to a gate on the side of one of the dormitories, then through a courtyard enclosed in a metal fence, before finally opening a gate at the end. There is a fascinating history of the Velho Old site here: http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=cr&CRid=2246135. It is the oldest Jewish cemetery in the UK, the land gifted to the Sephardic community by Oliver Cromwell. It must be one of the most peaceful locations in London, but also one of the most alien. The traces of Hebrew and Portuguese (most of the inscriptions have been rubbed clean by age and pollution), the foreignness of the names we could still make out – all seemed to belong not only to another age, but another land altogether.

Possibly the oddest moment of our tour was when a local resident on the other side of the fence (ironically, an American) started speaking to us, shocked to find anyone in the cemetery (‘no one is ever in here’, he said). ‘Don’t worry, we’re not ghosts’ one of our party replied. But actually, it felt as if we were, as I always feel when visiting a cemetery, that strange exhilaration of being alive, with the dead under my feet, and thinking of the famous epitaph as I am now so you shall be.

Landscape with fake dictionary

I’ve been trying to work out what it is I love about Antwerp. On one level, it’s like a fantasy, with its dark Medieval spires, cobbled streets and Netherlandish gargoyles crouching in the doorways of patrician stone buildings. There is something about scale as well; I know I’ve written here before of the charm of smaller cities, ones where the centre fits onto a single map and you feel you might be able to get the measure of the place in a few days.

It’s also very beautiful. We first meet the eponymous hero of Sebald’s Austerlitz as he is sketching the waiting room in the grand Centraal Station, and what follows is an amazing history of its construction:

when Belgium, a little patch of yellowish grey barely visible on the map of the world, spread its sphere of influence to the African continent with its colonial enterprises, when deals of huge proportions were done on the capital markets and raw-materials exchanges of Brussels, and the citizens of Belgium, full of boundless optimism, believed that their country, which had been subject so long to foreign rule and was divided and disunited in itself, was about to become a great new economic power. 

It’s where the novel begins, in that incredible vast bourgeois station, which lends drama and opulence to arrival. Something of that sense of spreading across continents remains too as you exit the station: the citizens of the dissolved empire are all around. The station is next door to the zoo – I can’t think of another major city where you would find such a juxtaposition, which strikes me somehow as very Belgian, or at least Flemish – the more I travel around Flanders, the more I get the Belgian sense of humour, which is a bit rude, a little surreal. I love the sound of Flemish, its guttural drama. So much less refined than French; a dirty joke would certainly sound better in Flemish (maybe that accounts for their bawdiness). Part of the beauty of Flemish for me is not understanding a word of it, allowing the sound to float over me like some discordant piece of music.

And so to Zeno X, and the new Mark Manders show. I discovered Manders’ work when he was representing the Netherlands at the 2013 Venice Biennale (he is Dutch, but has been based in Ghent for many years) and posted my impressions here at the time. Going to his show first, almost straight off the train, grounded me for the rest of the weekend. Manders’ project is about how we define ourselves in relation to our surroundings, so that many of the works are variations on the theme of self-portrait (the next day, I found myself thinking of Manders while staring at Van Eyke’s depictions of the great and the good of his day).

It’s an important consideration in a place like Belgium, where people move in and out of different languages – the most obvious shift being from Flemish to French. His work always seems to be in the process of being made, so nothing is ever quite finished, even once it appears within the pristine walls of the gallery. His piece, Landscape with Fake Dictionary, suggests this dilemma  of navigating a city where many different languages are being spoken, but you can’t understand any of them. It put me in mind of the ‘fake newspapers’ he created for his Biennale show – all real (English) words, but thrown together to create nonsense.

Fakes kept appearing after that, from Manders’ fellow Zeno X artist Kees Goudzwaard, and his trompe-l'œil paintings that appear to be held together by strips of tape – he constructs a model with tape and then meticulously paints strips that give the illusion of tape.

And then the many extraordinary still lives from the collection of the Royal Academy, which at the moment have found a temporary space in the seventeenth-century mansion of the former mayor, Nicholas Rockox. How exciting to find these paintings in the sort of setting they were made for – domestic and intimate. The curators have constructed cabinets of curiosities around the building, matching the painted still lives with assemblages of rocks and stones and glass.

A kind of fake – at the very least, highly theatrical but at home in a place that suits theatre, the evening light gilding the spire of Our Lady.

Bloodlines

In his essay, On the Natural History of Destruction, WG Sebald describes he RAF and US Air Force raids on Hamburg on 27^th July 1943. The aim of the operation was to destroy as much of the city as possible:

Within a few minutes huge fires were burning all over the target area, which covered some 20 square kilometres, and they merged so rapidly that only quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Another five minutes later, at 1.20 am, a firestorm of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible arose. The fire, now rising 2000 metres into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their stops pulled out. The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising hoardings through the air, tore trees from the ground and drove human beings before it like living torches.

It is hard not to think of the wholesale destruction of Hamburg (and of so many German cities) even now when you are standing in its spotless squares. After all, it is only seventy years ago, still within living memory, that these unthinkable acts occurred – thousands of civilians simply set alight in their homes and on the streets.

Undoubtedly, the city bears its scars, if you know where to look. Sebald talks about the reluctance of many Germans, then and now, to speak of the air raids – perhaps for Sebald it was easier to face, as he was an infant when the war ended, and he spent much of his adult life in the UK, where the war is still very visible, constantly reassessed and discussed.

Hamburg, to a casual visitor’s eye, is a very peaceful and friendly city. We arrived at the Hauptbahnhof in the late afternoon, just as the light was fading. I was thinking a lot about Sebald after my walk around the East End of London a few weeks ago; I was inspired to reread Austerlitz, whose eponymous hero is a connoisseur of grand train stations. Parts of the Hauptbahnhof were bombed during the war, but it is still an imposing building, a symbol of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s Imperial might. 

As most of the station remains, it is easy to picture what this bit of the city would have looked like in 1938, before it was destroyed, when hundreds of children were put onto trains heading for the Netherlands and France via the Kindertransport. Eva Hesse was two years old when she left her native city. We think of her these days as one of the most radical New York sculptors of the sixties, in her cold water studio in the Bowery (back in the days when the Bowery was truly edgy), shaping latex and plastic into strange almost-organic forms. She must have carried Germany with her – although too young to remember Hamburg, something of the fear of the small child fleeing a war-torn place stayed with her. The attempt to use salvaged and post-industrial materials is all about taking things which are discarded, which do not appear to have an intrinsic value, and making something new of them. The spectre of death is everywhere – there are boxes she makes us peer into, like tombs; messy strands of rope-like tendrils that might have risen from some hellish swamp. Her mother survived the camps, and made it to New York, but committed suicide a few years later, when Eva was still a child. Eva faced illness as something inevitable – she died at the age of 34, but left a huge catalogue of work behind, as if she knew she had to work fast before her time was up. 

At the Kunsthalle, the recent retrospective of Hesse’s work was paired with a new show of pieces by Gertrude Goldschmidt, known as Gego. Hesse and Gego share many similarities – both were strong-willed Jewish women artists who fled Hamburg to escape the Nazis – although Gego is a generation older. When the two-year-old Eva was boarding her train at the Hauptbahnhof, Gego was soon to follow, but by then she was twenty-six, already trained as an architect. She scanned the globe for somewhere she would be accepted, and chose Venezuela as a destination because it seemed to be the sort of place she could practice – a country that embraced modernism (at the same time that the Nazis were destroying any art they labelled as ‘degenerate’), where the war was a distant episode. The Caracas she arrived to was a vibrant and growing city, full of opportunity. It was here she made a name for herself designing a number of public projects, developing her ideas of kinetic movement, ‘drawings without paper’.  

By putting these two artists side by side, the Kunsthalle created a dialogue between them – one that begins with the line as a vehicle for connection and cohesion, a way of finding a wordless order within the chaos they both fled. Gego continued to work until her death at the age of 82. She remained in Caracas her whole life, but like Hesse, never forgot her roots.