My partner, though more experienced in the temporal disorientation associated with long-haul flights, was equally restless. We lay there side by side, listening to distant police sirens whose drones were subtly different to those familiar to us back home. I heaved a sigh, borne partially out of frustration, that made me aware of the uncommon dryness at the back of my throat, doubtless a consequence of too much artificially conditioned air over the past twenty-four hours. At a quarter to six, I finally conceded defeat in my attempt to get back to sleep. “I’m going to find some coffee” I croaked.

New York was still in the grip of winter, despite it being late March. Out on the street it was a degree above freezing and still dark. I might have gained five hours in getting here, but in doing so I appeared to have slipped back a season. Beside the urgent desire for strong coffee, now I was acutely aware of the need for a wash, shave, and a thicker coat. Shivering, I stood there on the street outside the hotel lobby, looking out onto Madison Avenue between 28th and 29th, lapping up the feigned sympathy of the hotel porter standing beside me, who’d no doubt bore witness to this scene a million times before.

So I walked, with no particular direction in mind, along the streets of a city entirely new to me, each step taking me forwards into the unknown. How best to know or to understand a city? To experience it when it is at its most active, in daylight, full of the energy of the rush hour, of traffic and pedestrians and boisterous exchanges and noise? Or to strip everything away and explore nocturnal, empty streets not yet awake to the possibilities of bustle. I passed a closed Dunkin’ Donuts (isn’t this supposed to be the city that never sleeps?) and took the next corner, down a deserted and ill-lit side street. Decaying shops fronts with their shutters pulled down, apartment entrances whose green canopies extended over the pavement. Badly maintained roads and sidewalks, pockmarked with cracks and potholes. Occasional fellow pedestrians in puff jackets, their faces obscured by hoods. Yellow taxicabs racing by, steam rising from manhole covers, fire hydrants, and the rumble of subterranean trains below my feet. Above, the vertical surfaces of many-windowed office and apartment blocks, on top of which were perched shadowy water towers, their forms silhouetted against a slowly brightening sky. Everything, I realised, down to the empty parking lots on empty and unremarkable streets, took on an air of familiarity in this dawn half-light. Every fleeting glance, each lingering gaze, was framed with a cinematic sense of déja-vous, my jumbled thoughts unsure of the reality of the things around me.

I risked getting lost if I wasn’t careful. Here was 5th Avenue, 4th Avenue, I took a right up towards 30th. A dearth of coffee shops here, I remarked silently to myself, so I headed back in the direction that I’d come, becoming increasingly single-minded in my objective of coffee with every step that I took. I thought of the hapless Bud Korpenning in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer: “I want to get to the centre of things.” I continued past silver-skinned fast-food wagons abandoned at street corners, hunchback mailboxes and ubiquitous one-way signs.

Eventually I found a Starbucks coffee shop. Not a franchise I’d normally frequent back home, but suddenly it felt a perfectly natural decision to arrive at. It was a small, narrow and harshly lit affair, with none of the sham cosiness usually invested in such joints. The shop had only just opened, and besides the solitary barista there was no one else inside. “Two regular Americanos … and two breakfast buns please,” I rasped, fumbling unfamiliar banknotes between numb fingers. The barista was a man of few words, and those he did utter in his native accent suggested he wasn’t a great deal more familiar with New York than I was myself. And then I was back on the street, cardboard tray with coffee and buns in one hand, and a fist full of serviettes and wooden paddles in the other. That’s it, I said to myself, as I paced back to the hotel with renewed vigour: my first commercial transaction in New York, successfully completed.

Such formal exchanges, whether or not you conduct them in your native language, are important steps in setting the bar of your expectations in a foreign, unfamiliar place. I felt a renewed sense of confidence that New York and I would get on well together; a sentiment lent further weight when, ten minutes later, after I had returned to the warmth and light of our hotel room, my parter and I supped our coffees together, and began, with rekindled animation, plotting the day ahead.

Berliner Aquarium, Unter den Linden. Circa 1900. Source: Wiki Commons.

On the northwest corner of Schadowstraße and the Unter den Linden, where now there stands an anonymous monolithic block, its walls punctured by repeated rows of dark rectangular apertures, yet still capable of blinding you when the summer sun bounces off their white surfaces, there once stood Berlin’s first public aquarium. I stopped by to look at this particular corner of Berlin after having encountered an old postcard from around the turn of the century, showing the old aquarium—of which no trace remained—in all its former glory.

When I first saw this old postcard I reflected that, were it not for the rather feeble sign perched atop the building’s roof, advertising the presence of the aquarium within, it would have been effortlessly easy to miss the attraction altogether, for the building’s façade was not especially different from any of the other façades erected in the vicinity during the latter half of the nineteenth century; in other words, monumental, ponderous, and rather solemn. And yet, what lay within the building could be considered as one of Berlin’s great nineteenth-century spectacles.

This is turn reminded me of the city’s current aquarium attraction—the Aquadom—located on Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, whose main feature—a giant cylindrical fish tank occupying the space above the reception area of the Radisson Hotel, and which is free for anyone to see—remains as equally well-hidden from passersby on the street outside. For a long time I was oblivious of this free spectacle, having walked past it unawares countless times previously, until one summer, while I was staying in Berlin, a friend tipped me off of its existence by email. On a bright afternoon a few days later, while walking from the reading rooms of the Zentral Bibliothek on Breitestraße towards the train station on Alexanderplatz, passing close by the Radisson Hotel in the process, I remembered the tip-off and, being in no particular hurry, decided to investigate for myself.

I feel obliged to briefly digress here, for this change of direction, from the Rathausstraße to the Radisson Hotel, took me through the Marx-Engels Forum—another Berlin landmark that has undergone irrevocable alternation in readiness for the proposed U55 underground extension. That summer was an especially warm one, even by Berlin’s standards, and I can still recall as if yesterday, the sense of relief I felt as I passed from the harsh sunlight of the street into the cooler shade of the trees clustered in the square. I deliberately avoided the circular forum, where the sun beat down upon Marx and Engels, who were admirably tolerating the sightseers lining up to take their photographs. Instead I stuck to the Spree side of the park, looking across boats filled with hordes of tourists, towards the remains of the Palast der Republik, at that stage little more than a hole in the ground punctured by giant concrete columns, that put me in mind of Anselm Kiefer’s Jericho that I’d seen at the Royal Academy in London a year or so earlier.

Anselm Kiefer, Jericho. Royal Academy, London, March 2007.

My respite from the harsh glare of the sun was brief, and after having negotiated the busy Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, I stood outside the Radisson Hotel. Entering the lobby, I became acutely aware of the fact that I was neither smartly dressed nor had a room reserved in the hotel, unlike most of the people around me who, by the sound of their voices, seemed to be affluent American tourists or wealthy businessmen. But when I noticed that the concierge was wholly preoccupied with the demands of his guests, and that nobody else deigned to notice me, my misgivings quickly evaporated.

The entrance lobby into which I had walked was not a particularly large space—certainly, I thought, not deserving of an expensive hotel. For a start, it had a low ceiling in no way compatible with the idea of a giant fish tank. Unsure of my directions, I pushed forwards through the bustle, my eyes scanning the walls and spaces around me in search of some sign or indication of where I might find the object of my enquiries. And then, quite suddenly, the low, narrow space of the lobby opened up into a huge glass-roofed atrium, at least six storeys high, and at the centre of which stood an enormous glass cylinder of water.

Giant fish tank, Aquadom, Berlin. December 2008.

The aquarium was far bigger than I had anticipated, and I was not surprised when I later learnt that, standing twenty-five metres high, it was the largest free-standing aquarium in the world. The architects of this marvel had, quite shrewdly, mounted the tank above ground level so that its base stood some eight metres off the ground, meaning that it was perfectly invisible from the main lobby and the hotel’s entrance. One had to know it was here to find it. Inside the aquatic blue glow of the tank, I could see numerous species of fishes, most guided by the curved transparent walls in their incessantly circular peregrinations. Small silvery fish darted to and fro in small groups, amongst larger specimens decorated with vertical stripes and yellow fins, and tiny blue creatures that shimmered in the dappled natural light.

Inside the cylinder there stretched, from top to bottom, a rock-like stalagmitic structure, almost tree-like in the uniformity of its shape, and which, immersed inside this watery dreamworld, reminded me of Mariele Neudecker’s vitrines that I’d seen in the Tate Gallery in Cornwall a few years earlier. I gazed up at the aquarium for several minutes, and as my eyes gradually adjusted to the scene, finding a growing number of subtleties and variations in the aquatic shapes and colours inside the tank, I slowly became aware that, at the heart of the cylinder of water, I could see motionless human silhouettes gliding up and down, for there was a lift running back and forth within the hollow centre of the tank.

The fish tanks and other attractions of the old Berliner Aquarium were just as successfully concealed from the street as the fish tank in the reception of the Radisson Hotel is today. Luckily, I was able to find a number of written and visual impressions that brought the interior of the old aquarium back to life, including this excerpt, taken from a 1903 Baedeker guide to Berlin:

The collection is exhibited in a grotto-like corridor about 300 yds. in length, which occupies two floors. We first enter the Reptile House, which contains gigantic lizards and snakes of all kinds, some of the poisonous varieties attaining a length of 12 ft. The Geological Grotto, which comes next, contains birds (gulls, cockatoos) and a large seal. This is followed by the large Bird House, among the inmates of which the weaver-birds are specially worthy of notice. Here also are the cages of the apes (chimpanzees) and monkeys and, to the left and right of the entrance, tanks containing salamanders, crocodiles and tortoises. After these comes the Aquarium proper, with an excellent collection of fresh and salt water fish. We finally descend, with breeding-tanks for salmon and trout on either side, to the lower rooms, containing other curiosities of the deep and a refreshment bar.

The illustrations I found complimented this written description perfectly, making more tangible to me the surreal qualities of the aquarium’s contents. They showed dimly lit cavernous spaces with artificially constructed walls, columns and ceilings of basalt, granite and other rocks extracted from German mines. Amongst their dramatic craggy shapes and rough textures snaked level walkways and regular stone steps lined with ornate iron railings, over which walked visitors in urban Victorian dress. The overall impression was quite bizarre.

Inside the Berliner Aquarium. Source: Wiki Commons.

Curiously, these illustrations lacked one important ingredient: the non-human occupants of the aquarium, and besides the appearance of an unconvincing reptilian creature inhabiting one particular scene, I was forced to turn back back the written accounts of the aquarium to find out more about the animal species residing in the artificial caverns. And when I did so, I read that lizards, snakes, fish of all kinds, beavers and seals, all lived in the grotto’s subtly illuminated alcoves and recesses. There was also a geological exhibit, a grotto in which a model of the earth’s crust was shown in cross section, with its many layers of igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary rocks. Elsewhere, on the topmost floor of the building there was an aviary—a glass-roofed winter garden—in which the aquarium’s curators kept exotic birds, and a number of chimpanzees, monkeys and other mammals housed in iron cages.

Wintergarten/Aviary in the Berliner Aquarium. Source: Wiki Commons.

The Berlin Aquarium was the brainchild of zoologist Alfred Brehm, best known for his series of illustrated volumes entitled Tierleben, first published between 1864 and 1869 by the German Bibliographisches Institit, This book later garnered its author worldwide recognition after its appearance in English as The Life of Animals. In the frontispiece of a reproduction volume of Tierleben, I found a portrait showing the author in his later years, sporting, besides a rather solemn and serious expression, a thick black, bushy and greying beard, close-cropped receding hair, prominent brow and substantial nose. Germany’s answer to the Darwin!

Brehm was born in the small village of Unterrenthendorf in Thuringia in 1829. His father, a church minister, had a keen interest in ornithology;an interest subsequently inherited by his young son. At eighteen, Brehm had shown sufficient academic promise to be invited on a botanical expedition of Africa, organised by the eminent ornithologist Johann Wilhelm von Müller in 1847. Upon his return in 1853, Brehm took up studies in the natural sciences at the university in Jena, with notions of a future dedicated to travelling and writing about the natural sciences already well set in his mind. Though he based himself in Leipzig much of the time, he found time to visit Africa more than once, including Abyssinia, and also travelled through the Scandinavian countries, Lapland and Spain. While he dedicated much of his time to exploring and writing of his discoveries, Brehm also took an active interest in opening zoological institutions, and for much of the 1860s he held the post of director at the Zoological Gardens in Hamburg.

In the late 1860s, with a reputation that preceded him, Brehm travelled to Berlin to set up a new zoological institution in the Prussian capital. At that time, Berlin already boasted zoological gardens of its own, and had done so for two decades. These gardens were situated beyond the walls of the city, out to the west and south of the neighbouring city of Charlottenburg. Brehm and his investors knew that it was senseless opening another zoo in the city, but they were aware that what Berlin lacked was an aquarium of equal prestige, and it was this that Brehm set out to establish in the heart of the city.

With the financial backing of his investors, Brehm set up a public company and purchased a narrow plot of prime real estate at the corner of the Unter den Linden and Schadowstraße. Upon this plot of land, Brehm built his aquarium, housed in a narrow four-storey building executed in an ornate French style, stretching down Schadowstraße. The corner of the building overlooking the Unter den Linden was extravagantly crowned with a steeply sloping and elongated mansard roof that projected, turret-like, above the rest of the building. Above the remainder of the roof space overlooking the Unter den Linden, Brehm had his modest advertising sign erected that simply read: ‘Berliner Aquarium.’

The opening of the Berliner Aquarium was not without its difficulties, one of the most taxing being the artificial production of salt water for use in the tanks containing marine specimens. The first attempts at mimicking sea water resulted in a solution that left the contents of the tank too murky, too opaque, for prospective viewers to see what was living inside. The problem was finally resolved by the appropriately named Doctor Otto Hermes, a chemist who became Brehm’s right-hand man at the aquarium, and who took over the reigns of directorship in 1874 after Brehm’s departure. Under Hermes’ guidance, the Berliner Aquarium enjoyed many years’ success before a gradual decline set in, leading to the final closure of the aquarium on 30th September 1910.

My initial assumption—that the newer aquarium located in the zoological gardens in the West End superseded the Unter den Linden attraction—turned out to be wrong, for I discovered that the zoo’s aquarium did not open until three years later, in 1913. What really did for Brehm’s creation in the end, it transpired, was the simple, blunt-edged truth of Berlin’s property market. Shortly after the turn of the century Doctor Hermes, now well into his old age, resolved to relocate the aquarium elsewhere in Berlin. Negotiations with the zoological gardens in the West End dragged on, and then Hermes passed away in the early spring of 1910. With Berlin growing ever more industrious and prosperous, the ageing attraction—without a champion to protect it—could no longer justify its prime location on the Unter den Linden, nor defend itself from the property developers and financial investors circling above.

Once its animals had been rehoused in zoos elsewhere, Berlin’s first aquarium was demolished to make way for a newer, more profitable use of land, and the city lost another of its great nineteenth-century spectacles.

Further reading:

• Karl Baedeker. Berlin and its Environs. Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1903.
• Harro Strehlow. “Zoos and Aquariums of Berlin” in New Worlds, New Animals: From Menagerie to Zoological Park in the Nineteenth Century (eds. Hoage & Deiss). Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996.

The Kaiser-Panorama. Image reproduced from Wikimedia Commons

The Grandmother presses the handle down and they are already inside. They first encounter a small vestibule, partitioned off from the Panorama by a heavy curtain. Before a table, on which the cash desk stands, sits a powdered girl. Grandmother gives her a silver coin and receives from the powdered lady in return two red tickets, and a nickel and some coppers in change. Josef is allowed to pocket the copper. “For the bank, not for sweets!”

The Grandmother sidles through the curtain with Josef, entering into an almost completely dark room…

Hans Adler, Panorama, 1968

Of all imperial Berlin’s many public attractions, the Kaiser-Panorama arguably had the most enduring appeal for the city’s inhabitants. The device was the brainchild of the German physicist August Fuhrmann, and was first exhibited to the public in Breslau in 1880. Three years later in 1883, Fuhrmann set up one of his devices in Berlin, housed in a large room above the shops and cafés of the recently opened Kaiser-Passage on Friedrichstraße. The longevity and charm of the Kaiser-Panorama was attested by the fact that, while the fortunes of many of Berlin’s commercial amusements dwindled over time, inevitably caught up and overwhelmed in the relentless tide of invention that characterised the modern era, it continued to attract visitors right up until 1939.

The Kaiser-Panorama was not a panorama in the true sense of the term. Whereas the painted panoramas—of which there were at least two in imperial Berlin—enveloped their audiences and projected their image inwards, the Kaiser-Panorama inverted the spatial relationship between the viewer and the image, storing its pictures within itself, and projecting them outwards to the spectators gathered around its exterior. The Kaiser-Panorama was a Victorian precursor to the View-Master stereoscopic slide viewer that millions, like myself, owned and revered as children.

I remember my View-Master vividly. Moulded from bright red plastic, it had two protruding eyepieces at the front, and a large black plastic lever on its right-hand side. On the top of the device there was a wide slot into which cardboard discs, punched with tiny holes filled with coloured acetate images, could be inserted. I remember pressing the red plastic eyepiece to my face, and being mesmerised by the images I saw. There were two discs that I recall most fondly. One displayed three-dimensional images of dinosaurs, the other scenes from the 1970s cartoon series Battle of the Planets. As I squinted through the viewfinder, my thumb seemed to have a mind of its own, seeking out and eagerly pushing down on the lever to move onto the next picture.

The Kaiser-Panorama worked in the same fashion: stereoscopic images arranged around a circular, rotating device. The big difference was one of scale, and this gave the Kaiser-Panorama its advantage, for while my View-Master was a solitary occupation, Fuhrmann conceived of his device as a spectacle for the masses, capable of entertaining up to twenty-five people at any one time.

Of the two or three hundred made, few working Kaiser-Panoramas survive today. One of them can be found in the Märkisches Museum in Berlin. I encountered it for myself purely by chance on one of my earliest visits to the city. I had only ventured into the museum to escape a particularly heavy late-summer thunderstorm; it was barely half an hour till closing time and there were few visitors inside. As I walked along the creaking wooden floorboards of the museum’s first floor, through high-ceilinged rooms, devoid of people but filled with large hunks of period furniture, glass display cases, ostentatious chandeliers and wall hangings, I heard the Panorama long before I saw it; a soft hum reminiscent of a low-powered vacuum cleaner, interspersed with the occasional clear ding of a bell and the click-clacking of mechanical parts.

Ignoring the historic artefacts assembled around me, I negotiated my way through rooms and past exhibits in search of the source of those intriguing sounds, until, in a large and dimly lit space I encountered a huge wooden cylindrical structure, about ten feet in diameter and six feet high. As my eyes adjusted to the low light levels, I could see that the circumference of the machine was divided into wooden panels, from each of which protruded a brass eyepiece. Mounted above each eyepiece was a small brass plaque, stamped with a number from one to twenty-five. Below the eyepiece there projected a small shelf that ran around the entire circumference of the machine. From the underside of that shelf hung a heavy faded green velvet curtain that reached down to the wooden floor. In front of each eyepiece stood a plain chair, inviting you to sit down, lean forward, and press your eyes against the cold brass rims of an eyepiece.

Alone in the room, I submitted to my curiosity without any hesitation. I took a seat at position number seventeen and peered into the viewfinder in front of me, and as I did so I left the present behind, and found myself plunged into the world of the Kaiser and the German Empire; an artificially lit world filled with the bombast and excitement of pre-war modernity. I was immediately captivated by the Kaiser-Panorama, and on subsequent visits to Berlin, when faced with an hour of free time to spare, have frequently headed for the Märkisches Museum to peer at its stereoscopic slideshow. And if I, a product of the modern world with all its attendant visual distractions, could find the Panorama enthralling, then I could barely imagine the stir it must have caused over a hundred years earlier, when photography was still in its infancy, and cinema a mere flight of the imagination.

Berlin’s Kaiser-Panorama proved wildly popular, and every week, children and adults queued for a ride—as it was advertised—on its seats; twenty Pfennigs for adults, ten for children. The popularity of the device spread beyond the capital, and throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Fuhrmann sold over two hundred of his contraptions across Germany and beyond. It was rumoured that the Kaiser himself owned one, as well as the Pope and the Sultan of Turkey. Fuhrmann was aware that, if he was to sustain the public’s appetite for his devices, he must produce a continual supply of stereoscopic images for display; no mean feat considering that Berlin’s Kaiser-Panorama promised two new sets of fifty slides each week.

To this end, Fuhrmann employed a small army of photographers and journalists whom he despatched around the world, assigned with the task of photographing all manner of subjects, whether they be natural spectacles, great human achievements of engineering and science, high-profile public figures, and salient current affairs. Upon their return, the photographers’ black and white films were processed, the twin images transferred to glass plates, then each one hand-painted by one of a team of colourists. In this manner Fuhrmann’s Kaiser-Panorama opened up hitherto unknown, unseen worlds to an eager German public.

What sights would visitors to the Kaiser-Panorama in turn-of-the-century Berlin have witnessed? No doubt they peered at many images of subjects with which they would have been familiar: photographs of the Kaiser and his entourage on horseback, parading past the waving crowds lining the Unter den Linden, or erstwhile politicians opening important new public buildings. Berlin figured frequently in the slides created for the Kaiser-Panorama, for make no mistake, Berliners took a great deal of pride in the newness and modernity of their home city. During the era of the Kaiser-Panorama’s greatest popularity, Berlin felt like a city in a perpetual state of change, and the Panorama’s stereoscopic photographs documented the ambitious construction projects taking place across the city: the colossal new cathedral rising over the Lustgarten, the Reichstag building overlooking the Spree, the soaring spire of the Kaiser-Wilhelm memorial church on the Kurfürstendamm, and the majestic Stadthaus, in the heart of the old city.

Wilhelm I of Prussia seated at his desk. Stereoscopic image used in the Kaiser-Panorama.

In search of images, Fuhrmann sent his reporters beyond the suburbs of rapidly expanding Berlin, and beyond the forests and fields of the Mark. Scouring the German countryside, they captured on film scenes that had barely changed for centuries. Halcyon vistas of peasants driving furrows into the black earth of the Silesian plains under dramatic skies; scenes depicting row upon row of grape vines clinging to the steep slopes of the Thuringian hills, overlooking exquisite villages with their charming church spires and steeply gabled roofs; panoramic views of fishing boats negotiating the sandbanks off the coast of East Frisia, their sails billowing and their nets cast under bleak North Sea skies; scenes of dramatic mountainous vistas from the Black Forest, enveloped in mist and caught in glimpses through the gaps between dark tree trunks; and finally, images of fairytale-like castles perched atop craggy precipices.

Fuhrmann’s photographers travelled even further, crossing the world’s oceans to reach far-flung places, dragging trunks filled with their camera equipment behind them. Max Brod wrote of finding himself in Florence, and then travelling to the city of Bitlis, capital of Kurdistan, and onwards to Ceylon. Hans Adler saw Vesuvius, Niagara Falls, the Pyramid of Cheops and Lima. Not unsurprisingly, Fuhrmann frequently despatched his reporters to Africa, where Europe’s colonial superpowers—including Germany—were fighting over the last scraps of territory on the vast continent. They sent back photographs from Cameroon, showing the indigenous negroes, scantily dressed in their traditional garments and holding their spears and tools, standing proudly outside of immaculately constructed huts of mud and straw. Then the reporters—doubtless guided by their German hosts—took photographs of the natives idling in the heat under the shade of the trees, and then followed these images up with scenes of the natives organised into makeshift police units, equipped with rifles and marching in columns, while their German occupiers looking on approvingly from the sidelines.

Yet more photographs celebrated the newest inventions of the era, and it was pictures such as these that I saw for myself in the Kaiser-Panorama in the Märkisches Museum. How might the man on the street have responded to three-dimensional photographs of the Zeppelin LZ1, pictured floating above Lake Constance in southern Germany, or the Wright Brothers’ flying machines, frozen in time and space by the camera, hovering impossibly just inches above the ground, in a state of either having just taken off or being just about to land. And then there were sequences of photographs showing the latest building developments around Wall Street and Manhattan in New York, with their impossibly high skyscrapers, far taller, far more impressive, than anything the German capital could boast.

At the turn of the century photographs of the German navy were a recurring theme. Viewers frequently saw images of colossal ships like the Blüecher of 1890, and the formidable dreadnoughts of the early 1900s. Awestruck at the scale of such engineering achievements, they marvelled at photographs of these great vessels under construction at Kiel and Wilhelmshaven, which depicted monstrous anchors and propellors, around which dockworkers clambered like ants. The Kaiser-Panorama also presented these great ships at sea, taking part in naval exercises in the North and Baltic seas, no doubt inspiring the German public that, should England declare war on Germany, the Fatherland would be able to defend herself. And in 1914, when war finally did come, Fuhrmann’s devices were recruited as a propaganda tool by the authorities. As the situation on the western front become increasing bloody, bleak and deadlocked, the inhabitants of Berlin saw sanitised stereoscopic images of dry, clean and orderly trenches, occupied by impeccably dressed and well-drilled German soldiers.

After the First World War, Berlin’s Kaiser-Panorama—hidden away in its dark room above the Kaiser-Passage on Friedrichstraße—continued to attract visitors, albeit in increasingly dwindling numbers. The moving images projected onto the screens in the cinema theatres captured the imagination of the public now. And there must have been something dreadfully anachronistic about a device whose name alone associated it with a exiled figurehead and a banished era. And yet the Kaiser-Panorama laboured on, surviving even the closure of the last attractions in the neighbouring panopticon, the radical redesign of the Passage below, and the dramatic economic upheavals and political strife of the early thirties. It wasn’t until 1939 that the doors finally closed upon Berlin’s Kaiser-Panorama. But by then, one suspects, Berlin’s public had far more pressing matters on their minds.

Returning once more to the dark recesses of the Märkisches Museum, where I have spent many a half hour peering at scenes long since gone, long since forgotten, and where it has often struck me that one of the most intriguing aspects about the Kaiser-Panorama is the way in which it regiments time so methodically. Each of the fifty photographs slid into view and remained before my eyes for just a short period of time, and inevitably, the first image I had seen would eventually reappear once more.

The mechanical regularity of the process of viewing—knowing that each image only appeared for a short space of time—did not so much increase the sense of anticipation for the next image, but heighten the feeling of regret at having to take leave of the present one. This anguish was further intensified by the bell that rang to announce the imposition of each new image, which occurred seconds later, a bell that, as Walter Benjamin remembered, had a “small, genuinely disturbing effect” on him as a child, and which he considered as being superior to the “soporific” music that soundtracked the moving images he later saw on the cinema screen.

The sense of melancholy the Kaiser-Panorama was capable of inducing, provoked by the acute awareness of time passing and images (and memories) lost, was, I think, what made the device so compelling, and what allowed it to endure in its darkened room above the Kaiser-Passage in Berlin for so long. This unique quality, that neither the printed photograph nor the moving image on the cinema screen was capable of reproducing, was also what compelled both Benjamin and Adler to re-imagine the Panorama later on in life, from individual standpoints scarred by exile, tragedy and loss.

To them, the Kaiser-Panorama represented not simply the innocent idyll of childhood—young Josef’s visits with his Grandmother, the young Benjamin stopping by before going home to finish his schoolwork—but an innocence latent within the ambitions and aspirations of the Kaiser’s Germany, ambitions and aspirations darkened by the tragedy of subsequent historical events.

Further reading:

• Adler, Hans. Panorama : Roman in zehn Bildern. Olten: Walter-Verlag, 1968.
• Benjamin, Walter. Berlin Childhood around 1900. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press, 2006.
• Brod, Max. Über die Schönheit hässlicher Bider : Ein Vademecum für Romantiker unserer Zeit. Vienna: Paul Zsolnay Verlag, 1967.
• Kaiser (Emperor) Panorama (website: www.ignomini.com)
• Oettermann, Stephan. The Panorama : History of a Mass Medium. New York: Zone Books, 1997.

The Gendarmenmarkt, Berlin. November 2008.

Of all Berlin’s central public spaces, the Gendarmenmarkt is the one I enjoy visiting the most. I think this has much to do with it being one of the few squares in the city that has retained a sense of human proportion. While Berlin’s other notable public spaces, such as Potsdamer Platz, Alexanderplatz, the streets surrounding the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche, the Spittelmarkt and Wilhelmplatz, all bear little or no resemblance to their pre-war appearance, the meticulous reconstruction of the historic buildings of the Gendarmenmarkt throughout the 1980s and 1990s, restored the space to something approaching its original classical symmetry and dimensions. The Konzerthaus and the twin forms of the Französischer and Deutscher cathedrals, grace the square much as they did a century and a half previously.

During one recent September, while staying a few blocks away in a former East German apartment block on Wilhelmstrasse, I often wandered down to the Gendarmenmarkt as the early evening light began to fade. Here, I would spend the remaining half hour of daylight, reflecting upon the inevitable passing of another summer with a quiet sense of melancholy. My favoured panorama of the square was acquired by sitting on the top steps that led up to the south door of the Französischer Dom. Here, I could look out across the square from an elevated viewpoint. Looking south, the Deutscher Dom lay immediately ahead of me, while the Konzerthaus sat to my right. On my left ran the Markgrafenstrasse, whose six-storey blocks closed off the eastern side of the square.

Despite the architectural grandeur of the concert hall and cathedrals, it was this eastern edge of the Gendarmenmarkt—the side bordered by the Markgrafenstrasse—that most fascinated me. The majority of the buildings along the street are postwar Plattenbau blocks; six-storey prefabricated Communist constructions of the type which dominate the landscape of the eastern half of the city, artfully finished with a roughly-textured brown-grey concrete. Obviously, whatever buildings ran along the Markgrafenstrasse before the war were not magnificent enough to warrant their later reconstruction. And frustratingly, it is difficult to ascertain precisely what stood on the street before the War because hardly anyone, it seems, ever bothered taking a photograph of that particular view. Every historical photograph and postcard to be found in the city’s tourist shops and flea markets not surprisingly focuses on the three most photogenic sides of the Gendarmenmarkt. It strikes me that the eastern side of the square along the Markgrafenstrasse is analogous to the so-called ‘fourth-wall’ of the theatre or television set. From my vantage point, I frequently observed the more discerning tourist-photographers—armed with chunky digital cameras fitted with telephoto lenses and aimlessly pursued by their bored-looking other halves—jostle for the vantage point on Markgrafenstrasse that would reward them with the perfect symmetrical shot of the Gendarmenmarkt.

Personally I am content that, whatever did previously grace the Markgrafenstrasse, what is there now—though it’s no architectural tour de force—suitably compliments the historic buildings standing opposite. They perform the admirable task of being unremarkable, and therefore easily unnoticeable. They humbly accept their inferior status, accepting that a square isn’t a square unless it has four sides.

On many an evening I sat here and let my senses be seduced by the respectable proportions and satisfying space of the Gendarmenmarkt. And I do not recall myself ever disdaining the postwar façades along Markgrafenstrasse. In fact, I probably paid more attention to this side of the square. Should this be surprising? As sublime as the cathedrals and concert house are, they are essentially representative of an absolute architectural elegance. The fact that the German authorities committed themselves to such a faithful reconstruction of these buildings is testament to their resolute and unchanging architecture. But while the three most graceful sides of the Gendarmenmarkt stand immutable, the Markgrafenstrasse betrays events of the past, while simultaneously functioning as a canvas for the present. Along the Markgrafenstrasse, one can watch early twentieth-century omnibuses and horse-drawn carriages clatter by, filled with camera-toting tourists. Negotiating their way past the omnibuses and horses are coaches filled with foreign visitors, and top-of-the-range products of German precision innovation—BMWs, Audis and Mercedes—driven by Berlin’s more affluent residents. These sleek black coupés and four-by-fours pull up outside the street’s exclusive jewellery boutiques, and from them step lean, middle-aged and well-tanned women, wrapped in black, chic dresses and expensive sunglasses. As they glide across the pavement, from the kerbside to the boutique’s glass entrance, they appear blissfully unaware that they are—for but a few brief seconds—sharing their personal space with tourists sporting baseball caps and Hawaiian shirts, who drift aimlessly in and out of the Ampelmann shop next door. Elsewhere along the street, the café bars are now strangely silent, having mothballed their outdoor tables and chairs for the season. Another indication that summer is drawing to an end.

As the daylight drains out of the sky to the east, I watch the last of the tourists linger around the square. They stand around in groups, holding their camera phones above their heads, the silent pulses of their camera flashes unable to penetrate far in the twilight. Finally, the surfaces and objects before me lose their colour. Now, as the gloaming takes over, the elegant many-headed lanterns dotted around the square bathe the space in a warm and subtle glow, complimented by the myriad spotlights that point upwards, tastefully illuminating the surrounding buildings. The last of the tourists begin to melt away into the surrounding side streets. As they wander back to their hotels, they are serenaded by the solitary violin or harp player, who mournfully plays on under Schiller’s watchful gaze at the centre of the now near-empty square. In the darkness, the air quickly cools, as an invisible layer of chill settles over the city. The hardness of the stone steps against my backside impels me to move, so I slowly and stiffly descend from my vantage point, and head towards the bright lights and illuminated window displays on the nearby Friedrichstrasse.

© Mark Hobbs 2010

Gleisdreieck, Berlin. February 2005.

I can recall with peculiar clarity my first visit to Berlin. It was a week-long study trip during the winter half-term break in mid February, and an important component of the postgraduate art history course I was then enrolled on. Our schedule included visits to the Neue Nationalgalerie, the Berlinische Galerie, the cavernous subterranean rooms of the Hamburger Bahnhof, and the Bauhaus Archiv. Unfortunately for us, our visit coincided with an extensive renovation programme that had closed the Brücke museum in Dahlem. We flew from Bristol late one afternoon, and arrived after dark at Schönefeld Airport, formerly the main air terminal for Communist East Berlin. When we stepped out from the airport arrivals lounge, we were confronted with a brutally cold February evening.

I nearly didn’t make the trip to Berlin, for I had been incapacitated with a severe bout of the flu that had confined me to my bed, right up until two days before my departure. During this two-week-long illness, I endured restless and feverish nights of anguish in which, on at least one occasion, I suffered from vivid hallucinations. I can recall waking one night, drenched in sweat and shaking uncontrollably under my bedcovers, convinced that I had some sort of metal corkscrew-like contraption trapped within my chest. An infernal device that was slowly expanding as it unwound itself, and threatening to tear me asunder. I lay there, tossing, turning and unable for a long time to think coherently enough to realise that all I need do was reach over and take another paracetamol tablet. I can still recall how swiftly the relief came, as my temperature lowered and the delirium subsided. It was only on the day prior to my departure, when I awoke from the first deep and untroubled sleep that I had had in a fortnight, that I felt confident enough to make a trip that I was all but resigned to missing out on. I suspect that, had I consulted a doctor on the issue, he or she would have sternly advised me against making my excursion, coming as it did so swiftly after a debilitating illness. And they would probably have been right, for I felt extraordinarily frail and tired during that week in Berlin, so much so in fact, that I retired to our hotel each day after lunch, whereupon I slept soundly throughout the afternoon, before emerging in time for dinner.

My physical deficiencies, combined with the fact that, throughout the entire week the city was covered by a veil of dull and murky weather, meant that I saw very little of Berlin during that week-long visit. And yet I would counter that my fragile state, which existed in both a corporeal and an emotional sense, allowed me to experience Berlin in a profoundly raw, powerful and real manner. I felt like the storyteller of Edgar Allen Poe’s Man of the Crowd, who, while convalescing from his own debilitating illness, sat in the window of a London coffee shop with his cigar and newspaper, watching the thronging crowds mill past outside. Poe’s narrator acknowledged the strength that was slowly returning to him, and the joy of his recovery filled him with an unparalleled keenness and inquisitiveness, an interest in all things in life, a genuine joie de vivre. As I, accompanied by three fellow students, travelled by taxi from Schönefeld airport to the hotel on that cold February evening, I myself, and despite my continued fragility, felt a tentative sense of excitement, akin to that which Poe had described. As we moved silently through the near-empty suburbs of Berlin, I found myself looking out upon a succession of darkly lit streets, buildings, road signs and advertising hoardings, all of which were alien to me. Gropiusstadt, Buckow, Britz, Tempelhof, Schöneberg. These strange names, glimpsed on street signs of unfamiliar colour, typography, shape and size. This alien cityscape, comprised of buildings with façades, roofs and proportions with which I was unaccustomed. This unfamiliarity instilled in me once more a simple fervour for living. It emptied my mind of all its prejudices and preconceptions, ensuring that, in the coming days, both my heart and my mind would be seduced and intrigued by this enigmatic city.

Situated on a quiet and unassuming backstreet, our hotel was an extremely modern and clean establishment, if rather bland, like any new hotel tends to be. On the ground floor there stood a formal reception desk, and behind this, a bar and restaurant area furnished in an intriguing combination of pine veneer, mirrors and green lighting.

According to our trip itinerary, we were due to spend the morning of our first full day in the city exploring the modern treasures of the Neue Nationalgalerie: Kirchner, Grosz, Dix and more. At breakfast we consulted our street maps and tourist guides, plotting the best route from our hotel to the Kulturforum, the complex of postwar cultural institutions of which the Neue Nationalgalerie—Mies van der Rohe’s most notable contribution to Berlin—was part.

Unsurprisingly, most of my colleagues opted for infinitely wiser and warmer option of taking the metro to the gallery. But for the four of us who felt more adventurous, the prospect of making the journey on foot seemed far more enticing. The route was straightforward; all we need do was follow the main road north, up to the Landwehrkanal, and then follow the canal itself in an easterly direction towards Potsdamer Platz.

A modest amount of snow had fallen overnight, lightly dusting the pavements with what looked like icing sugar. Above us the sky was leaden grey, while the temperature remained stuck at several degrees below zero. For the first leg of our journey, we encountered a succession of drab postwar edifices: bland developments built by the West during the Cold War, and occupied by an equally bland procession of corporate hotel chains. As we sauntered alongside the busy main carriageway An der Urania, we looked into the windows of these establishments, exchanging blind glances with groups of American and Japanese tourists who were busy enjoying their continental breakfasts.

As we crossed the Landwehrkanal and turned right into Von-der-Heydt-Straße, the character of the buildings around us changed dramatically. Here, a great deal many more historic buildings had survived the air raids of the Second World War. Thankfully also, the road along which we now walked was far more peaceful than the dual carriageway we had just left. It ran alongside the Landwehrkanal, all the way up to the Neue Nationalgalerie.

After a few minutes walking my colleagues and I came to a street branching off to our right called Hiroshimastraße. Like so many of Berlin’s streets, this one has suffered an identity crisis over the years, in the process making it something of a political barometer. During the Imperial and Weimar epochs it was known as Hohenzollernstraße, and then during the Third Reich and Cold War era, it went by the name of Graf Spree Straße. It was not a particularly long street, and we could easily see its far end, just a couple of hundred yards away ahead of us, where it connected with the southern edges of the Tiergarten.

UAE Embassy and North Rhine and Westfalen offices, Hiroshimastraße, Berlin. February 2005.

What particularly fascinated us about Hiroshimastraße though, was the peculiar variety of buildings arranged down each of its sides. Immediately to our right stood the Friedrich-Ebert Archive, a modest and yet quite impressive new construction, dominated by large windows and a tasteful purple brickwork, much in vogue in the newer buildings around the city. A little further down on our left, we saw the preposterous embassy of the United Arab Emirates, a gaudy new construction which, I reflected, looked like the sort of creation Disney might come up with if they ever got into the embassy-building business. Alongside this stood the administrative offices of the North Rhine and Westfalen region of Germany, a vast transparent box, behind the glass walls of which we could discern an intricate framework of wooden gothic arches.

Former Greek Embassy, Hiroshimastraße, Berlin. February 2005.

Directly opposite this tasteful and extremely clever façade, on the right-hand side of the road, stood a pre-war building, a four-storey boarded-up ruin, whose cracked and derelict surfaces were partially obscured by overgrown flora and metal fencing. The sight of this wreck, sitting alongside the polished modern products of post-reunification Berlin, hit us like a shock. The contrast between the old and the new was further exacerbated by the fact that the pre-war ruin was flanked on both sides by overgrown open ground, upon which it appeared that someone had made a half-hearted attempt at horticultural maintenance.

Former Greek Embassy, Hiroshimastraße, Berlin. February 2005.

These open areas permitted us to look down the full length of the building, which was far deeper than it was wide. Along each side I saw exposed interior walls, still bearing the marks of the rooms, fireplaces and stairwells that once existed there: the shadows of spaces and lives long gone.

I learnt later on that this building had been erected around 1912, in the neo-classical manner which was popular amongst the stately mansions and villas scattered across Berlin’s West End at this time. During the Weimar and Nazi period, it had been home to the Greek embassy. My natural assumption on first encountering the ruin—that it had been bombed during the Second World War and left neglected ever since—turned out to be mistaken. Surprisingly enough, it appeared that the embassy had escaped the Second World War largely unscathed, only to be gutted by fire as recently as 1988. When I last visited Hiroshimastraße, as I often do when I am in need of a sense of perspective on my complicated relationship with Berlin, the façade of the former embassy was hidden behind a scaffolding frame which, in typical Berlin fashion, was covered by a huge canvas depicting the building as it had once been—and as it will be once more when its renovation is complete.

But to return to that first visit to Hiroshimastraße, and the shock I received upon encountering this intriguing juxtaposition of old and new. In many respects, the streetscape of Hiroshimastraße on that day stood as a microcosm of the whole of Berlin: a collision of past, present and future, whose impact creates ruptures in the urban fabric which, when peeled back, are capable of revealing complex layers of history. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Hiroshimastraße acts as a reminder that immutability is illusory. Even great cities, when they appear at their most durable, are nothing more than shifting sands. What makes them great, enduring, amaranthine is, ultimately, their transient, fugitive qualities.

Ironically enough, though this small portion of what was once called Potsdamer Strasse is now known as Alte Potsdamer Strasse (having been superseded by a new Potsdamer Strasse to the north), there is practically nothing in its present-day state that recalls its prewar existence. For starters, the new street singularly fails in its prewar task of reaching the southern city district Schönberg. Instead, the Marlene-Dietrich-Platz sprawls languorously in its way, a post-reunification obstacle that has effectively reduced this formerly bustling street to an impotent cul-de-sac. The Alte Potsdamer Strasse is lined on both sides with modern buildings, the single exception being the renovated Weinhaus Huth, which survived both the bombs of World War Two and the subsequent partitioning of the city. When the Wall cut a zigzagging path of destruction through Potsdamer Platz in the 1960s, practically every structure in its vicinity was razed to the ground. The Weinhaus Huth escaped this fate, and for years its empty shell stood isolated in a Cold War wasteland, is if in some sort of architectural quarantine. When the Wall finally came down, and the capitalists moved back in, the German government carved up and sold off the land surrounding Potsdamer Platz to the highest bidders. Today the Huth sits nestled almost lost amongst the modern buildings that make up the Daimler quarter of Potsdamer Platz. Opposite rises the brick façade of the Daimler-Benz headquarters (at the time of my visit swathed in plastic sheets and scaffolding, like a poor Christo imitation) and alongside, the glass-panelled entrance to the upper galleries of the Potsdamer shopping arcade, one particularly successful import of North American culture. Most of the new Potsdamer Strasse is filled with restaurants and cafés, the more upmarket of which cater for the area’s businesspeople, who descend upon them during lunchtime and after working hours, while the more familiar corporate food chains are popular amongst the legions of tourists that throng here. Enclosed by high-rise buildings on either side, and lined with rows of trees on each side of the road, Alte Potsdamer Strasse has a sort of interior feel about it, which attempts a sense of intimacy which ends up feeling odd and uncanny. Clearly the planners and architects tried to bring some semblance of human character to the street, with its trees and café bars and restaurants which spill out onto the pavements. And yet the overall impression is one of discomfort and alienation. This has a lot to do with the fact that, because it sits half-buried by the surrounding high-rise blocks, the street sits in perpetual shade, and is prone to a particularly boisterous circulation of air. But the street is also shot through with an inescapable sense of soullessness. Then there are the ubiquitous brand names scattered about—Starbucks, McDonald’s, Maredo—which are complimented by the architectural artifice of their surroundings. Plastic panels, dry risers and air-conditioning outlets are everywhere, making the street feel simply like a sine qua non for its buildings’ internal functions. Then there are the listless crowds that pass along the street, mostly comprised of tourists seeking happy meals and pints of coffee-sugar solution, or distraction in one of the area’s theatres and cinemas. All of which makes the new Alte Potsdamer Strasse feels like one of Marc Auge’s non-places, imbued with all the ambience of a supermarket or airport departure lounge. One cannot feel at home here; eating, drinking, sightseeing, and the mere passing of time watching people pass by, are reduced to vulgar activites. There is nothing special to see or do, besides buy oneself the same drink or meal, see the same film or show as one might do in any other large town or city in the western hemisphere.

The sense of alienation reaches a climax in Marlene-Dietrich-Platz. Given that this space is a public square, it seems absurd that there is not a single public bench to be found here. The more resourceful urbanite like myself normally seeks out surfaces to perch themselves on: low walls adjoining raised flower beds are a favourite, or steps of a sufficient pitch. But nothing beats retreating to a nearby café, pulling up a seat outside, in order to contemplate the surroundings while sipping coffee. Frustratingly, none of these activities are possible here. The architects of Marlene-Dietrich-Platz designed this space in such a way as to eliminate practically all possibility of sitting down. Even meandering distractedly is hazardous, thanks to the undulating landscape of shallow steps, almost imperceptible gradients and water features. And if one wanted to retreat to a café, then there is not a great deal of choice, bar a branch of McDonald’s.

The buildings surrounding the square are equally uninspiring. Dominating one flank is the Theater am Potsdamer Platz—apparently Germany’s largest—which is all glass façade and sloped angular canopies. The theatre specialises in the best-known global blockbusting shows and musicals, such as Cats, Mamma Mia, Dirty Dancing. And though the promise of such spectacular entertainments are not daunting the coach loads of tourists streaming in and out of the building, I find the theatre entrance imposing rather than welcoming. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, which compels me to step inside.

Instead, I sit discontentedly outside the McDonald’s opposite, sipping coffee from a paper cup, acutely aware of the fact that while the weather today is warm and sunny, the spot I am currently sitting in enjoys its own cool and breezy microclimate. I watch the tourists shuffle in and out of the theatre, wondering how long they are staying in Berlin, and what other attractions they have on their itineraries. Madame Tussauds probably. It occurs to me that Marlene-Dietrich-Platz has been named rather aptly. Like Marlene herself in 1930, though this square is physically situated in Berlin, its spirit is several thousand miles away in Hollywood. There is further irony in the fact that this square, which thwarts the new Alte Potsdamer Strasse in reaching its prewar destination Schöneberg, should be named after the suburb’s most famous resident. Normally I’d prefer a quiet pedestrian square over a busy street of traffic, but on this occasion, as I polish off the dregs of my coffee, I try to conjure up the scene in front of me, as it existed a century ago. I visualise a hive of activity, with hansom cabs, omnibuses, motorcars and wagons vying for road space, while pedestrians take their chances amongst the chaos. Ornate multi-storeyed façades, groaning under the weight of their balconies, balustrades and advertising signs, totter over the activity at street level. Then I strain my ears to imagine the din of primitive combustion engines, clip-clopping horses and the shouts of the hawking street traders.

Abruptly, a cold gust of wind drags me back to the present. I make a hasty exist from Marlene-Dietrich-Platz, in search of some warm summer sunshine.

© Mark Hobbs 2010

Paddingtion Station, early morning, December 2002.

A balmy Sunday night in late June finds me drifting, slightly drunk, through those quiet London backstreets which lie between the northern edges of Hyde Park and Praed Street. My destination: Paddington Station. The darkness and tranquility surrounding me fails to penetrate my frazzled senses. Spots dance in front of my eyes, my ears ring incessantly, and my thoughts are laboured, thanks to lengthy exposure to the sun, numerous cold beers, intensely loud live music, and the company of good friends, all of which I had indulged in earlier that afternoon in Hyde Park. I am on my way to the station to catch a train, the Night Riviera Sleeper which, all things being well, will deposit me upon the station platform in distant Truro, three hundred miles away, at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. The Night Riviera Sleeper. A romantic name, conjuring up images from the golden age of train travel. Of scenes from Agatha Christie novels, Kitty Lasswade’s nocturnal journey in Virginia Woolf’s The Years, and of the innumerable thwarted murder attempts in confined sleeper compartments made on James Bond’s life—and the inevitable, subsequent sexual conquests that followed.

My own reason for taking the Sleeper service is chiefly based on romantic whim. It is certainly not a practical decision. I for one do not have a cabin booked, intending instead to slum it in standard class. It would, truth be told, be much more practical to make the journey in daylight hours—and cheaper. No, my reasons are romantic. I vainly want to recapture something of the heyday of train travel, when running trains was not simply about making profits. Curiosity thus compels me to take the Night Riviera, but there is also a sense of moral duty involved. This Sleeper service, which runs each night during the week between London and Penzance, is an ailing, loss-making amenity, over which the corporate cost-cutting axe hovers menacingly. The residents and businesses of Cornwall are campaigning hard against the closure of their nocturnal link to the capital, arguing for the role it plays towards the county’s commercial status at a national level.

So, here I am at London Paddington at a quarter past eleven at night, slightly the worse for wear, but in plenty of time to catch the 23:45. Entering the station from the main entrance, I catch my breath at the sheer majesty of the interior space. In front of me, Brunel’s vast iron and glass roof soars and sweeps effortlessly over the tracks, receding backwards into the far distance. Up until a few years ago, a vast and unsightly departures board blocked this view, but now this immense interior space can be fully appreciated once more. Tonight, I practically have the station to myself; the shops and bars are shut, and—with the exception of the Heathrow Express—there are no other trains besides the Sleeper scheduled to depart until the morning. I make my way onto the platform alongside which my transport, the Tintagel Castle stands. It strikes me as absurd that high-speed trains can be named after such immovable objects as ancient stone castles. Though I have a standard seat booked, I am confident that the £10 first-class upgrade offer will be available. I make enquiries with the train manager, who is roaming the platform looking rather lost and in need of some passengers to attend to. ‘No problems’ he says. Result.

Once onboard, I make my way to the restaurant car and purchase a miniature bottle of red wine. Classy. I’m hoping that this final tipple of the evening will improve my chances of getting some sleep tonight. I settle into my first-class seat in an otherwise empty coach, and reflect upon the journey I am about to make—a jaunt I have made countless times before, but never at night. The sequence of stations between Exeter St Davids and Penzance is etched into my memory, like the days of the week, or the names of all the actors (in chronological order) who have played Doctor Who. The sensation is strange, this notion of a journey I am so familiar with, suddenly becoming foreign, almost otherworldly. How many times have I got lost visiting places in the dark, that I could find my way to during daylight hours with my eyes closed? It is akin to the tacit understanding we have that our public spaces—streets, offices, cafés and so on—are not wholly known to us and that, in what most people might call ‘antisocial’ hours, cleaners, shift workers, vagrants, drunks—occupy the world which we assume to be ours. The discomfiture these thoughts provoke is exacerbated by the unwelcome intrusion of another passenger into my—my—carriage. A businessman on his mobile phone, telling someone—who? his wife, a colleague?—that he is on the ‘red eye.’ Moments later, more passengers invade what I had optimistically hoped might be my own personal carriage. This time, two travellers with backpacks, speaking in a foreign, possibly Spanish language. Now I am riled. I fight back the urge to jump up and investigate prospects in the next coach, reluctant to impel my inert body into any sudden physical movement which might diminish my chance of getting some sleep.

Finally, the train rolls effortlessly away from the station; there is no whistle, no rushing and clambering of last-minute passengers, no pip-piping of closing train doors. The Tintagel Castle slips out of Paddington Station as if it had been caught being somewhere it shouldn’t be, sloping off quietly under scorn. As the train picks up speed, the platform lights and sidings are quickly replaced by an inky landscape that slides invisibly by. The gentle swaying to and fro of the carriage, combined with the soft rhythmic click-clacking of the wheels on the rails, is conducive to dozing. After two hours of drifting in and out of a slumbering unconsciousness, I am brought swiftly back to my senses by the jolt of the train lurching to a standstill. I look out the window: Taunton. Here, according to the timetable, the train will sit idle for some ninety minutes. The sudden lack of motion and acute silence has brought me back from the brink of sleepiness, and I find myself wide-eyed and alert, staring out at  railway sidings illuminated by an orange sodium gloom. The next hour and a half drags interminably. Unable to sleep, I make a half-hearted attempt at reading, but to no avail. To make matters worse, my fellow travellers are irking me once more, this time not with their noise, but with their utter sleeping silence. All I can do is vacantly stare into space, unable to sleep or think. Finally, as the first signs of morning light emerge in the eastern sky, the train silently, smoothly, resumes its westward odyssey.

As it gets lighter, the hours and stations slip by more quickly. Exeter, Newton Abbott, Totnes, Plymouth,… It is daylight now, a quarter past six in the morning. Sunlight has entirely extinguished any further possibilities of sleep, so I spend the remaining hour and a half of my journey looking out upon the startling and diverse Cornish landscape that greets me on the other side of Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge. The Tintagel Castle glides over ancient stone viaducts spanning snaking quaggy tributaries of the Tamar, complete with fishing boats, quays and quaint houses. More viaducts have us soaring above steep valleys covered with pine trees, at the bottom of which lie industrial units and storage depots. On the left-hand side of the track, before we reach St Austell, a golf course sweeps by, squeezed between the railway line and the edges of the cliffs of the south Cornwall coast, beyond which the English Channel radiates under the morning sun, the deepest shade of azure blue. At Par, we pull up amongst the functional architecture and quays which serve the mines of Cornwall’s china-clay industry.

Finally, just after seven o’clock, the Sleeper pulls into Truro. I disembark feeling dreadfully tired, stiff limbed and slightly hungover. I am also acutely aware that I am still in yesterday’s clothes. I rub the stubble on my chin, and contemplate the shave and shower which will be my first actions when I arrive back home. But first I must catch the branch line service to Falmouth, whose carriages happily await me and my fellow ‘red eye’ passengers on the opposite platform. On this last leg of my journey, I reflect upon my Sleeper experience. Despite being unwashed, dehydrated and weary, I am happy that I took the Night Riviera. On one hand, I have satisfied my curiosity and done my bit for Cornwall’s campaign to Save the Sleeper. On the other, as the sun rises into a cloudless sky above vibrant green hills, I know that a perfect summer’s day lies ahead, and that there’s no better place in the world to spend it than here.

Falmouth. July 2006.

Happily enough, the Save the Sleeper campaign was not in vain and, four years later, and the Night Riviera continues to run between London Paddington and Penzance.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/4715193.stm
http://www.christianwolmar.co.uk/2005/12/rail-528-save-the-sleeper-campaign/

©  Mark Hobbs 2010.

St. Margaret's Church, Polmadie, Glasgow. May 2008.

The inner-city Glaswegian neighbourhood of Oatlands is situated on the city’s southside, immediately east of the Gorbals. I first ventured into this part of town one late spring day, on one of those rare occasions when Glasgow’s weather was fine and warm, and I desperately needed a break from my desk. The decision to walk to Oatlands was entirely arbitrary. Not really knowing the neighbourhoods around Govanhill that well, I scanned my A-Z for possible signs of inspiration. To the east of my current position lay an industrial landscape, represented on my map by an array of cartographic hieroglyphs. Orderly arrangements of geometric shapes indicated factories and power plants, and anonymous blank spaces denoted railway sidings. Exploring an industrial estate was all very well, but it hardly seemed an appropriate activity for such unaccustomed favourable weather as this. Studying my map, I spied a single colourful jewel, an emerald of green, amid this landscape likely to be dominated by concrete greys and depot browns: Richmond Park. Here was my target, an oasis of parkland in an otherwise industrial landscape.

From my front door I head onto Calder Street, before turning into Polmadie Road. Very quickly the surroundings change, from the residential red sandstone tenements that prevail in Govanhill, to a combination of equally Victorian, red brick commercial buildings and rather uninspiring, modern flat-packed industrial units. As the map had indicated, there are few signs of residential land use along this road. But as I turn a corner, I come across a fascinating turn-of-the-century church, which punctuates an otherwise mundane streetscape. It is a charming and diminutive Victorian creation, built from red sandstone, and adjoined to which is presumably the former rectory. I say former, because all of the church and rectory windows are boarded up, and their entrances blockaded by metal railings. Right now, there is little more I can deduce from looking at the church itself, but one thing becomes clear: at some point in the past, there must have been a community here. What, I wonder, happened to this area’s churchgoers?

As I press forwards, it becomes clear that St. Margaret’s is not the only evidence of this area’s former community. On both sides of the road, the decline of this neighbourhood, and efforts to rebuild and renew it, become increasingly apparent. I begin to build an incomplete picture of a densely populated neighbourhood, whose inhabitants resided in traditional stone tenements, amongst a landscape of industrial works. The reasons for the area’s rapid decline are not immediately obvious, but one suspects that it is the usual story of postwar decline: a dramatic drop in manufacturing output and subsequent economic failure, coupled with poor housing conditions which prompted council intervention in the form of regeneration, rehousing in modern blocks, and systematic demolition of old housing stock. One can extrapolate the narrative further: a failure of those postwar attempts at regeneration, prompting further waves of relocation and demolition.

Tenement housing, Oatlands, Glasgow. May 2008.

A little further down the road, I find evidence that corroborates some my speculative impressions. Now, on either side of the road are vast and empty tracts of wasteland. Beyond the open space to my right, stand long rows of three-storey stone tenement buildings—not Victorian, possibly interwar—which stand empty. The windows of these housing blocks are boarded-up in a manner which reminds me of a Rachel Whiteread installation. On the open ground in front of the tenements, giant dumper trucks career past, carrying full loads of landfill from one place to another. On the opposite side of the road to my left, standing opposite the condemned blocks, a new housing development is being erected. Several identical blocks stand one behind the other, each one at a different stage of construction, creating a sort of slideshow illustrating modern building methods. These new blocks are steel-framed, multi-coloured boxes of grey and cream, with not a slab of Scottish sandstone in sight. Alongside, oversized billboards proclaim the impending availability of two-, three- and four-bedroomed flats and penthouse suites in these exclusive and luxury developments. Looking from the old and condemned, to the new and exalted, I find myself inexorably depressed.

New housing, Oatlands, Glasgow. May 2008.

A little further along the road, adjoining the new developments, is Richmond Park itself. I descend down a dozen or so steps, and find myself amongst the lush greenery of late May. The path ahead of me runs along the south bank of the Clyde, and as I walk onwards, I easily forget the renovation frenzy going on behind me. This would be a most tranquil setting if it weren’t for the fact that it strikes me as the kind of place that one might expect to encounter Glasgow’s drug users and Buckfast drinkers after dark. Glasgow Green is, after all, only a short walk away via a footbridge across the Clyde. But there is no one around for now, so I walk on further, underneath the burgeoning canopies of trees and moist spring flora. Very soon, the dense woodland opens up into an area of sunlit parkland, at the centre of which lies an ornamental lake. A community of swans slide gracefully and silently across its water. The discovery of the lake acts as a jolt to my senses. It is almost absurd that such a site of popular recreation should stand amongst a seemingly depopulated and deserted landscape. But the park is further evidence of this area’s history. It is in essence a typical Victorian-era green space, and must have once stood at the heart of a bustling working-class community. One can imagine the labouring classes promenading in the park each Sunday, dressed in their best clothes, unconsciously mirroring the activities of the city’s better-off inhabitants, who themselves would have been strolling in the Botanical Gardens and Kelvingrove Park in the west end. But today, despite the clement weather, there is hardly anyone else here except myself. Again, the question runs through my mind: what happened to the people that lived here?

According to Glasgow City Council, the Oatlands regeneration project began in 2005, and promises a mixture of both social and private housing, new community facilities, and the regeneration of Richmond Park. Less enticing perhaps, is the effect which the extension of the M74 motorway will have when it runs through the area.

As I check my watch and turn to head back home, I cannot help but wonder what happened to the residents of Oatlands when the tenements were evacuated for demolition. I also wonder for whom the area’s new flats are intended. The new housing developments in Oatlands will inevitably produce a clean and attractive environment capable of enticing a new generation of urban dwellers, thanks to their proximity to Richmond Park and the Clyde. But what of the rupture created in such wholesale programmes of clearance and redevelopment? Where do a community’s residents go; what happens to their collective memory and identity, their sense of history and belonging. They will be irrevocably lost, replaced by a new urban landscape that has no connection to the past, and in which feelings of collectivity and community belonging have to be rebuilt from scratch. In the end, the only allusion to the bygone days of this area will be Richmond Park itself.

This essay was originally posted in 2008, and has since been modified and updated.

© Mark Hobbs 2010.

Glasgow City Council’s pages on the Oatlands regeneration scheme:
http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/Business/Planning_Development/Oatlands/History/

The M74 extension/completion:
http://www.transportscotland.gov.uk/projects/m74-completion

Footage taken of the derelict tenements in Oatlands, prior to their demolition:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYpbqWrNS5w

Buildings at risk register for Scotland:
http://www.buildingsatrisk.org.uk

The British gallery-goer, having been treated to several exhibitions in recent years dealing with Bauhaus luminaries and Bauhaus modernism (Moholy-Nagy, Josef Albers, Kandinsky at Tate Modern, the V&A’s Modernism exhibition), might be forgiven for questioning the value in travelling to see the new Bauhaus : A Conceptual Model exhibition at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin.

The exhibition celebrates the ninetieth anniversary of the opening of the Bauhaus design school in Weimar, and claims to be the largest showcase of the Bauhaus to date. It brings together over 900 objects, distributed through eighteen rooms, that trace the history of the school from Weimar, through to Dessau, and its final demise in Berlin in 1933.

The Berlin exhibition has avoided privileging the most renowned Bauhaus masters, affording plenty of space to lesser-known figures at the school, and of course its students. For example, a speculator model of Johannes Itten’s Turm des Feuers (Tower of Fire)—a cross between Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International and Bruno Taut’s crystalline architecture—stands out in the first room, alongside more familiar skyscraper designs by Mies van der Rohe and Gropius’s Faguswerk factory building.

Staircase mural, Kunsthochschule, Weimar. July 2009.

The evolving theoretical principles that underlined the Bauhaus approach to design, emerge clearly in the thematic treatment of each room, as well as in the transition from one room to another. For example, room two (entitled Impulses from Art) offers a wide variety of painted works and sculptures by Bauhaus tutors, demonstrating their preoccupation with formal experimentation. Following immediately on in the next room (A new Education), is a range of student work produced during the Bauhaus preliminary year of study, which clearly underlines the close working relationship enjoyed between students and their tutors in their explorations of form, colour, line and material.

Some of the rooms work better than others. The Documents and Experiments room, which focuses on photography at the Bauhaus, strikingly contrasts the differences between the informal photographic experiments carried out throughout the life of the school by the likes of Moholy-Nagy and Otto Umbehr, with the austere, Neue Sachlichkeit style of photography produced under tutor Walter Peterhans, in the first of the formal photographic workshops at the school in 1929. By contrast the room entitled, Expanding the Spectrum, displays a range of student work produced in Klee and Kandinsky’s painting classes from 1926, and offers up a mixed bag of works, breaking the hitherto logical progression of the exhibition and adding little to the exhibition’s overall narrative.

Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space-Modulator is also featured in the exhibition. But while the curators of the Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers review at Tate Modern in 2006 chose to reproduce faithfully the Modulator’s monochromatic light and shadow effects, the curators in the Berlin exhibition have enclosed the Modulator in a box-shaped room with semi-translucent walls, upon which fall an array of shadows of soft blue, pink and yellow hues. The effect is impressive as the Modulator rotates—it is just a shame it only does so for two minutes in every quarter of an hour.

In the final two rooms of the exhibition dealing with Mies van der Rohe’s directorship, the mood dramatically changes. The light and airy feel of the previous displays give way to blacked-out rooms, metallic surfaces, and mirror-lined walls. Ironically, this curatorial attempt to reflect Mies’ austere, functionalist approach backfires as the information panels becomes practically illegible with their reflective surfaces. The sombre setting is retained in the last room, which documents the final year of the Bauhaus in Berlin. One particularly poignant photograph shows a Nazi flag hanging from one of the windows of Gropius’s Dessau school building.

The only figures who can be said to dominate the exhibition are the three Bauhaus directors—Walter Gropuis, Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—each of whom had in their own mind a vision of which direction the Bauhaus should take. But it is their ideas—reflected in the thematic shifts that occur throughout the exhibition’s displays—which prevail over their individual projects. As one moves throughout the exhibition rooms, the growing preoccupation with functionality, rationality and repetition, slowly begins to emerge in the objects on display. Expressionistic experiments with shape, colour and form give way to simplified Neue Sachlichkeit architectural detail and a new sense of austerity.

If there was one major criticism to be made, it would be that the underlying social and economic circumstances that guided the Bauhaus’s evolving principles are not emphasised enough. However, the sheer variety of work on display is unlikely to disappoint those who decide to make the trip to Berlin.

A well-illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition, available in both German and English. The exhibition is due to travel to the Museum of Modern Art, New York in Autumn 2009.

Mark Hobbs. August 2009.