Ghosts on the Shore E-Book

Paul Scraton

• Herausgeber: Influx Press
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 418

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Germany's Baltic coast. A place of escape, of carefree summer holidays, of spa towns and health retreats. A place where some of the darkest stories of 20th Century German history played out. Inspired by his wife's collection of family photographs from the 1930s and her memories of growing up on the Baltic coast in the GDR, Paul Scraton set out to travel from Lübeck to the Polish border on the island of Usedom, an area central to the mythology of a nation and bearing the heavy legacy of trauma. Exploring a world of socialist summer camps, Hanseatic trading towns long past their heyday and former fishing villages surrendered to tourism, Ghosts on the Shore unearths the stories, folklore and contradictions of the coast, where politics, history and personal memory merge to create a nuanced portrait of place.

Leseprobe

Ghosts on the Shore

Travels along the German Baltic coast

Paul Scraton

Influx Press, London

Published by Influx Press

5a Wayland Avenue, London, E8 2HP

www.influxpress.com / @InfluxPress

All rights reserved.

© Paul Scraton, 2017

Copyright of the text rests with the author.

The right of Paul Scraton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Influx Press.

First published 2017.eBook conversion by Geethik

ISBN: 978-1-910312-11-7

Editor: Gary Budden

Copy-editor/Proofreader: Momus Editorial

Map: Julia Stone

Cover photograph: Katrin Schönig Design: Austin Burke

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

for Katrin

Contents

I: North (Berlin-Lübeck)

II: Dead German Writers (Lübeck & Travemünde)

III: BarthelsOrThe Decline of a Family, Part One

IV: From the City to the Sea (Heiligendamm)

V: The Boys and Girls of Summer (Kühlungsborn)

VI: Half an Island (Fischland-Darß-Zingst)

VII: Pigtails and Sunflowers (Stralsund & Rostock)

VIII: Eyewitness History TalkOrThe Decline of a Family, Part Two

IX: Down to the River (Greifswald)

X: The Possibilities of Islands (Rügen & Hiddensee)

XI: Falling from the Sky (Usedom)

XII: Above and Beneath the WavesOrThe Decline of a Family, Part Three

XIII: Across the Border (Ahlbeck - Świnoujście)

I

North(Berlin-Lübeck)

Old National Gallery – Heimat – Zinnowitz 1934 – Zentral Omnibusbahnhof Berlin and the contradiction of the coast – Alone on the shore – Service station – Flags on the sand

On a Saturday morning at the beginning of winter I headed out with my daughter from our apartment in the north of Berlin to the city centre. Our destination was the Museum Island, that tribute to ego and royal whim on the banks of the River Spree. The collection of museums was built where once a residential neighbourhood stood, to house the collected art and plundered artefacts of Prussian royalty; a nineteenth-century version of those museum outposts built today on the shores of the Persian Gulf. It remains an unreal place. On that morning, as Lotte and I crossed the stone bridge on to the island, the surrounding streets were quiet. Bewildered tourists killed time as they waited for the city to wake, as the locals slept off the excesses of the night before. We joined a group, recently disgorged from their tour bus, surrounded by the click and whirr of cameras as they captured the bombastic architecture of the museum buildings. This was a place built to impress, and as the museum doors were opened and we were swept inside with the group, the excited chatter fell to a murmur, as if calmed and subdued by the grandeur within.

We climbed the stairs to the very top and then followed a corridor lined with paintings. We did not stop on the way, as we had come for one reason and one room only. In the heart of Berlin we were looking for the Baltic; the German shore captured by the brushstrokes of Casper David Friedrich. He had a room in the museum all to himself, a room filled with his work and yet dominated by the two paintings we had come to see. They had been painted during the same period, between 1808 and 1810, and bought as a pair by the Prussian King, destined to hang together for evermore. And there they were.

Der Mönch am Meer (The Monk by the Sea) on the left. Abtei im Eichwald (The Abbey in the Oakwood) on the right.

In the first picture, a monk stands alone on the cliff top, above an uneasy sea and beneath an ominous sky. In the second, a parade of monks makes its solemn progress through the ruins of the abbey that stands just a few hundred metres from the shore. Both these images reflect something of my fascination with the lands along the Baltic coast, a fascination that had developed over the fifteen years I had been living in Germany. The melancholic beauty of the featureless landscape of the cliff top. The ruins of Eldena, hinting at a deeper story. And, as with the lands themselves, the more I looked at the paintings, the more I discovered.

We spent about half an hour in that room, and while Lotte moved between the many different paintings hanging on the walls, I spent most of my time staring at these two.

Which was your favourite? I asked her, as we descended the stairs, back towards the grey streets that were beginning to wake up to the weekend. She chose a mountain scene – bright, dramatic and heroic – and then skipped ahead. As I followed, I could think only of the monk on the cliff top, and the choppy waters of the Baltic behind.

*

My partner Katrin was born across the river from Museum Island in Berlin, but spent the first eleven years of her life on the Baltic coast. These were also the final eleven years of the German Democratic Republic, that post-war experiment with socialism on German soil, her family moving back to Berlin in the strange eleven-month period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and reunification in the autumn of 1990. Unlike in the West – which had both the North and Baltic Seas – in East Germany the seaside meant the Ostsee, as it stretched between the inner-German border at Priwall, just north of Lübeck, and the Polish border on the island of Usedom. During that first decade of her life, Katrin lived first on the island of Rügen, just a few kilometres from where Friedrich’s monk had stood on the cliff top, and then in the old Hanseatic city of Stralsund. She spent her summers at camp elsewhere on the Baltic coast. And despite the move back to the city of her birth as Germany was transformed, something about the Baltic remained, and remains, close to her heart.

Germans often speak of the idea of Heimat, loosely (but inadequately) translated into English as Homeland. Ultimately, it means the place where you feel at home, for many an almost spiritual sense of belonging – a linking of personality and place – that is rooted in culture, in language, in family and in traditions. It might find expression in a phrase of local dialect or the recipe for a particular dish. It might, today, be rooted in support for a football club or a crime literature series specific to a particular region or city. The primacy of Heimat in German identity has existed for far longer than there has been a German state, and there was something of a resurrection of the idea – expressed in books and films especially – in the years following the Second World War. If the notion of Germany and German-ness had been tarnished, perhaps for ever, by the crimes of the Nazis, and if it was hard to muster up any kind of feeling of belonging for the two new Germanys imposed from the outside, that were being built out of the ruins of war, there was something comforting in the local patriotism that Heimat had to offer.

It is unlikely, and some might say impossible, for an individual to have two places with which you connect in such a way. And yet for Katrin, who sees herself as a Berliner through and through, there is a split when it comes to her Heimat. For all that she is at home in the city, she speaks of a sense of belonging and inner peace whenever she sets foot on a dune path or a sandy cliff top, beneath the big skies that dominate the flat landscape of the Baltic shore, to look out across those waters of her childhood.

For over a decade we had been travelling at least once a year to the coast, travelling north from Berlin to Kühlungsborn and the Fischland-Darß-Zingst peninsula; to the old stomping grounds of Stralsund; the islands of Rügen and Usedom. It was out of these trips that my own fascination with the coast slowly developed, and an idea formed to make a series of journeys to the places of Katrin’s childhood and our shared imagination, to search – like beachcombers prodding pebbles with sticks, hoping to discover amber – for the stories of the shore. From this starting point I plotted a route, giving boundaries and limits to my journey. I would travel between the old inner-German border in the west to the Polish border in the east.

This would be the Baltic of my exploration and imagination, the place where Katrin grew up, in that country that no longer exists.

*

The night before I travelled north for the first time in search of the stories to be found among the sands, the wind shook the windows of our nineteenth-century apartment building as it circled the dark courtyard and whipped across the rooftops. My bag was almost packed but there was one more thing I was considering taking with me. A week earlier, we had been to Katrin’s parents’ apartment, where, as a football match played on the television in the living room, Katrin’s mother pressed a collection of photographs into my hand.

Perhaps they are interesting for you, she said.

I smiled my thanks, and yet I did not look at them there and then. I don’t know why. Perhaps there had been a goal in Mainz, in Freiburg or in Munich. Perhaps Lotte had asked me a question. Perhaps Katrin’s brother had arrived with our nephew. It was only later, as I packed my bag, that I remembered the photographs and dug them out from a cotton shopping bag where they had been left in the hall. I spread them across our kitchen table. Mounted on rough, brown paper, they were of Katrin’s family, including her grandmother as a young girl. Some sheets contained two images. Some three or four. On a few of the sheets the photographs were captioned with neat writing in white pencil, but for the most part the images were left to explain themselves. It was clear that Katrin’s grandmother had put this collection together, that it was her handwriting on the paper, and that she had done it at some point in adulthood, looking back on her own six- or seven-year-old self a couple of decades after the fact. As I flicked through them, I also became conscious of the fact that no one in the photographs was alive any more.

The rough paper sheets were not bound, but one was clearly the front cover of the collection. It showed a handsome woman in a headscarf, dressed in a flowery blouse and calf-length white trousers, walking down a pier or boardwalk. She held hands with two girls, one of whom was also walking hand in hand with a boy. Both mother and son smiled for the camera while the two girls – including Katrin’s grandmother – looked less than impressed. The wind was blowing in from the sea, out of sight behind the camera, pushing their dresses back against their legs and their hair across their faces. Behind the four walking figures the scene on the beach was blurred, the sands filled with shapes, of people and wicker beach chairs. The photograph was in black and white but it was clear that the sun was shining. Outside our apartment, the wind continued to rattle at the windows.

I held the photograph in my hands. It was a nice family portrait, with only one member missing, presumably behind the camera. A summer holiday by the sea, the image was captioned in that neat handwriting that would later, much later, address birthday cards to me. The caption placed the photograph in a specific place, at a specific moment in time:

ZINNOWITZ

1934

AUF DER SEEBRÜCKE

A place. A year. A location. Katrin’s grandmother and her family were walking on the pier at Zinnowitz in the summer of 1934. I gathered the collection of photographs and placed them carefully back into the cotton shopping bag. It was the year that did it. It was more than simply family memory. I put the photographs in my bag, to take with me to the coast.

*

The next morning I arrived at the Zentral Omnibusbahnhof Berlin (ZOB) at around seven. The S-Bahn that took me there had been empty apart from a couple who were headed home as I was heading out, but when I arrived at the bus station it was alive with people. Sports teams heading off for the match. A hen night saving money on hotel rooms, preferring instead to sleep off the excesses on their journey back to the provinces. Students standing on the gum-splattered pavement, their oversized rucksacks at their feet. And then there were those for whom the ZOB was a destination in and of itself, patrolling the waiting room with its bolted-down plastic chairs, smoking cadged cigarettes on the concourse beneath the dirty glass roof, amongst the discarded fag ends and crushed paper cups scattered across the concrete.

I bought a coffee from a machine at the newspaper kiosk and watched as the hen party discussed missing members, their agitation levels rising as the departure time for the Dresden bus approached. A police sign warned of pickpockets, another appealed for witnesses to a crime committed a few nights before. I had never taken a bus from ZOB, and yet as I waited for the Lübeck bus I couldn’t help but think that I had been here before. The smell of diesel fumes, cheap coffee and stale cigarette smoke took me back to Victoria coach station, a few months after September 11, and an overnight journey between Germany and Lancashire. The incessant security warnings. Pickpockets. Abandoned bags. Eternal vigilance. And then another scene, a couple of weeks earlier than that. The Tito-era station in Zagreb, waiting for a bus to Sarajevo. Concrete floors. Fag ends and coffee cups. Security warnings. One place stimulating memories of others. At Sarajevo bus station, when we finally arrived, I bought a chocolate croissant. Without the taste of machine-weak coffee and the hiss of a bus door opening at ZOB almost fifteen years later, I never would have remembered.

This was my first long-distance coach journey since that journey home at Christmas in 2001. All my other travels in Germany had been by train or by car, but recent deregulation of the buses had opened up numerous new routes that now flickered through on the ZOB’s electronic boards, with over ten departures an hour. Darmstadt and Garmisch. Ilmenau and Ulm. Essen and Bottrop. Cheap tickets and free Wi-Fi were pulling cost-conscious travellers away from the train. As my departure time approached the bus arrived at the appointed stop and we climbed aboard. I had about fifteen fellow travellers with me, and as we settled ourselves for the journey I counted in my head all those coach journeys of my childhood and youth, from criss-crossing the former Yugoslavia to those school trips to the dull flatlands of northern France or the fairy-tale riverbanks of the Rhine valley. Belgian service stations and cross-channel ferries. Bus drivers trading their Nancy Sinatra for The Prodigy, under sufferance. Smuggled vodka and orange. Firecrackers and WWII watchtowers. More chocolate croissants.

The destination provoked its own memories. A journey to the coast was an escape from routine and normal life as much today as it ever was. I grew up about twenty-five kilometres from the sea, and not much further from one of England’s great port cities, and yet the Irish Sea did not play a role in my everyday existence. On shopping trips to Southport it always seemed more a theory than anything else; an article of faith that it was somewhere over there, just out of sight beyond the expanse of sandy, muddy flats. In Liverpool we would go down to the Albert Dock, but the Mersey was very much a river, the sea again somewhere else, just out of sight. The coast was, instead, a place of holidays, of long summers on Anglesey or those school trips to France and their crumbling concrete watchtowers. It was package holidays to Tenerife or Corfu. First beers, first kisses and the endless possibilities of big skies and wide-open spaces. There was a potential at the seaside that seemed improbable among the cabbage and potato fields of our West Lancashire hometown. The canal bank was just not the same.

As the bus eased its way out of the ZOB and through the streets of Berlin towards the motorway, I scribbled some notes about nostalgia and the coast. It is not just me. You can find it in Pulp’s dead seaside town, or Springsteen on the Jersey shore. It is old steamer timetables hanging in ice cream shops, postcards of sunsets, or the sexual frustration of caravan parks. When Katrin first took me north to the resorts of the Baltic, I was struck by how much they shared, in architecture and atmosphere, with their English counterparts.

And yet for all the nostalgia, for all that the seaside represents childhood and innocence, carefree days and endless sunshine, the discoveries of adolescence, the coast also has its dark flipside. On Anglesey we used to watch the yellow sea rescue helicopters carry out exercises on the jagged rocks battered by the swell. In the local churchyard stood a memorial stone to the members of a lifeboat team who died in their attempts to save those sinking in a storm offshore. In the north of France, beyond the watchtowers, were the war memorials and the stories of the D-Day landings.

And there is always the sea itself. Massive and powerful, with the potential to sweep you from the rocks, your body never to be found. It swallows ships whole, and doesn’t return everything it takes. It is that contradiction, between the potential tragedy of the sea or the ocean and the carefree innocence of our nostalgic memories, that makes the coast such a fascinating place, and the Baltic is no different. It was another reason why I was on the bus, heading for Lübeck.

*

A couple of years ago, we were staying in a small wooden cabin on the edge of a town on the Baltic island of Usedom. Behind the cabin was a housing estate, a mix of local residences, holiday lets and second homes, but to the front was a dirt track, a beech forest and a path up to the top of the sandy cliffs and a lookout point. I was reading Jan Morris at the time and, one morning, as I ran up through the woods nursing a head rough with the whisky of the night before, a phrase that I had been reading the previous evening continued to echo. The Baltic is, she wrote, the most ominous and eerie of Europe’s waters. A place of wars and frozen expanses, of the movement of armies and invisible submarines. A place fought over and died for. As I reached the lookout point on the cliffs, I gazed down on to a Baltic that was flat and calm, the sun low and weak in a clear sky. A couple of swans paddled between the breakwaters and cormorants dived for fish, sending ripples across the lake-like surface of the sea. In the distance I could see a tanker heading for Poland and a ferry on its way to Sweden. The Baltic that morning was peaceful, serene, and yet I knew what Morris meant.

She wrote those words not because of anything intrinsic in the landscape, but because of what she knew of the history of those waters. It was her own knowledge, of the history of the lands and the sea they surround, that formed the Baltic of her imagination.

We don’t stand alone on the mountain or the shore, Philip Hoare wrote, as he reflected on swimming at the lake in Wannsee in the south of Berlin. It is a place I know well, where villas are set among tall trees; a place of rowing clubs and beer gardens, of Sunday strolls and bike rides to islands populated by strutting peacocks and tales of Prussian royal adultery. It is also the place where, in one of those villas at the end of a leafy lane, leading members of the Nazi bureaucracy planned the Holocaust in technocratic detail before retiring for brandy and cigars in a room with bay windows looking out across the lake. Know this, and your swim in that lake takes on a whole new meaning. The ghosts of Wannsee stood with Hoare on the shore. The ghosts of the Baltic were waiting for me at the end of the autobahn.

*

Twenty kilometres from our destination and the bus driver pulled off the motorway to a service station. The smokers descended into the open air with relief. The rest of us wandered over to the restaurant and the attached shop and attempted not to spend too much money on dry rolls, boiled sausages and bars of chocolate. The driver’s warning echoed across the expanse of tarmac growing damp in the drizzle that had started to fall as soon as we arrived.

No more than fifteen minutes.

Once again I was at that Belgian service station, my teacher’s voice sounding more in hope than in expectation. I pulled out my phone and called Katrin. I wasn’t used to travelling alone. Not any more. My reference points and flashbacks were all over a decade old, if not more. I was out of practice.

*

The bus arrived in Lübeck too early for me to check in to the guest house by the station that I had booked. As the drizzle turned to rain I hurried towards the Lübecker Altstadt, the old city centre, in an attempt to find a pub that might be showing the Liverpool match, or at least somewhere warm and dry to kill a couple of hours. I failed. Lübeck appeared to be shut down, deserted and abandoned as I moved through the streets. I retreated to the guest house, where the owner handed me the keys with no small talk or instruction, other than to watch my head on the beams in my attic room. That evening I ventured out to a Vietnamese restaurant by the station, where I ate alone in an empty room, with only the two waiters for company as the rain battered the windows. My plan for the next morning was to follow the river Trave to the coast and the old inner-German border at Priwall. The weather forecast on my phone told me to expect more of the same. I ordered another beer and drank a toast to the Baltic rain and whichever ghosts were waiting to join me on the shore.

Back at the guest house, I pulled the cotton shopping bag from my rucksack and laid out the photographs on the bed.

Two girls, playing in the sand. The sun casts strong shadows as the flags fly, stiff in the breeze, above the wicker beach chairs. The family are together, sitting on the lip of a giant hole that the children have spent the morning digging. No one looks at the camera when the shutter closes; they focus instead on their own conversations or the dolls the girls are playing with, the exertion of the morning’s activities forgotten. The scene moves now, from the beach to an open-air swimming pool – the family posing at the edge – and then a street scene, the girls dressed neatly in jackets and pigtails, ready for church …

As I passed my fingers over the photographs, moving them towards me to get a better look, one in particular caught my attention. It showed the children in the forest, with a group of friends. The girls were wearing white dresses and the boys lederhosen, held up by braces. The youngest boy could not have been more than four or five, and he carried in his hand a flagpole. With no breeze in the forest the flag, a triangular pennant, hung limply against the pole. But there was something I recognised. The hint of a circle. A pattern in black.

I looked again at the image from the beach, the flags flying proudly in the breeze. There it was. A dark background and a white circle; at its heart, the swastika. Summer, 1934. A year after Hitler came to power. Smiling faces on the beach, the sun high in the sky. Holiday snaps of carefree days and childhood games and the knowledge of what is to come. Jan Morris looking out across the Baltic. Philip Hoare swimming at Wannsee. The contradiction of the coast. The contradiction of this coast.

Gathering together the photographs, I put them back in the bag. The wind that had been knocking at the window had subsided. I looked through the wet glass to the darkness of the winter sky. I thought of the young girl who grew up to be the woman I knew at the end of her life. I remembered the first time I met her, walking through the streets of eastern Berlin, close to the zoo, in late afternoon. I thought of the meals at their apartment and the first time we took Lotte to meet them. I thought of the sunny day when we said goodbye. In those photographs were stories that were now lost to me, to all of us. As I prepared my things for the walk to the border the following morning, I thought of all the questions for that young girl in the photographs and the old woman who held my arm as we crossed the street, all the questions that I never thought to ask.

II

Dead German Writers(Lübeck & Travemünde)

Thomas Mann returns home – Shopping trips across the Trave – Walking to the inner-German border – Off-season holiday camp – The sinking of the Cap Arcona – The Lübecker Altstadt and the Hanseatic League – The sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff – A tale of two brothers – East Prussia and the ‘Lost’ Baltic – Alleyways and crow-stepped gables

In June 1953, the Nobel Prize-winning writer and son of Lübeck, Thomas Mann, returned to his hometown and, from there, made the short trip up the River Trave to Travemünde and the Baltic coast. It was an emotional return after years of exile, and he would write later in a letter to a local newspaper that, the memory of having once more breathed the air of Travemünde, that children’s paradise, ‘sits smiling to my heart’ as the line runs in Hamlet.

He had been away for a long time, not only from the town of his birth, but from his country as well. Like his older brother, the fellow writer Heinrich Mann, Thomas had been in exile since 1933, leaving Germany a few months after Hitler’s rise to power. The visit to Lübeck and Travemünde in 1953 was only his second to Germany since the end of WWII. By then, Heinrich had been dead for four years. He never made it back. Two years later and Thomas would be dead too, but at least he managed to return for one final visit to the place by the sea that was home to some of his happiest memories.

The brightest hours of my youth, he wrote, were those holidays in Travemünde, and when the four weeks, which had seemed a little eternity when they began, were over and we returned to daily life, my breast was torn with tender, self-pitying pangs.

Those summer days in the resort town were spent on the beach or rowing across the river to Priwall, where he and his siblings would comb the sands for amber. Sometimes they would listen to the spa band playing their morning concert in the park, or wave at passing ships. But it was not just that Travemünde was an idyll, in and of itself. What made it so special for Thomas was the contrast of those summer weeks with the rest of his life upstream in Lübeck. For both brothers, Lübeck was a place of stifling conformity and dull conservatism, where the expectation was that they would follow on in the merchant business that had made the Manns one of the town’s most respectable and pre-eminent bourgeois families. It was not to be. From an early age, both Heinrich and his younger brother Thomas were clear that this was a world that they wanted no part of, and were clear in their ambition to escape the confines, both mental and physical, of the old port by the river. In the meantime, the summer weeks in Travemünde would have to do.

*

I reached Travemünde by train, crossing the street from my guest house under grey skies to reach the platforms laid out beneath the high, vaulting station roof. In the summer the platforms would be thronged with people heading for the beach, but today it was just me, a couple of mountain-bikers and a group of elderly hikers leaning on their overlong walking poles. Travemünde was the end of the line and the train was fairly empty when it finally arrived. I climbed aboard and we moved off, making slow progress through the edgelands of the city as we headed towards the coast. Through the grimy window I could make out all the trappings of a true harbour town, from the cranes and the warehouses to the dry docks and the boatyards. For a time the railway hugged the riverbank, passing through a landscape of reeds and inlets, boathouses and rowing clubs. On the one side, grassy wetlands stretched away into the murky distance. From the opposite side of the carriage I could see car showrooms and big box supermarkets, parking spaces and industrial estates. One of the stations was named for a branch of IKEA, the yellows and blues of its looming, windowless walls bright against the dull sky.

The distance between the deadening experience of Thomas Mann’s daily life as a young man in Lübeck and the exhilarating escape of the seaside is less than twenty kilometres downstream, and within half an hour I was stepping down from the train at the harbour station, once again greeted by a fine drizzle. It turned to rain as I walked down to the river, past small hotels and holiday rentals, cottages and a kindergarten. The ferry to Priwall was at the jetty as I crossed the car park and the waiting zone built for summer traffic, following a woman who wheeled her bicycle across the damp concrete in front of me. On board, she rearranged the shopping bags in her front basket and greeted the young man in the high-vis jacket who was there to check the tickets and make sure the cars – of which there were a couple already loaded on – were parked in the right spaces.

She looked around, smiling at one of the drivers through a fogged-up car window. She knew them all at this time of the year, the deckhands and the passengers, when there were not so many tourists making the crossing, taking the boat on that back-and-forth dance of the two ferries that passed each other every ten minutes at the centre of the river. Yes, she knew the passengers and the deckhands, but not the captains. They stayed locked away on the bridge, piloting their boats the short distance across the river to the other side. Back and forth. Back and forth. Was this what they dreamed of when they imagined being a ship’s captain as young men? Was there a hierarchy at the captains’ club – should such a thing exist – whereby the ferry boat captains of the Trave shared a table with the pleasure boat captains of the Berlin or Schwerin lakes, whilst those who took charge of the tankers and the cruise ships, of the ocean-going vessels, sat at the other end of the room, in smug contentment at their superiority?

The rain was falling heavier now. She adjusted her carrier bags once more, on her way back home from the daily shopping trip to Travemünde. She had been making this trip for years, since well before the changes, when Priwall was a peninsula cut off from its hinterland by the fortifications of the inner-German border. The road that now led from the ferry into the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern countryside was back then a dead-end street, closed off by concrete and wire and guarded by shadowy figures in the watchtowers, whose binoculars gave involuntary signals in the summer sun as they flashed unintelligible messages at the West German bathers down on the Priwall beach.

That was a time! How did people live like that? Surrounded, claustrophobic, making their home on a peninsula that was, to all intents and purposes, now an island; Priwall only accessible via those two ferries criss-crossing the Trave. They were the villagers’ connection to shops and school, to work and with the rest of West Germany. She could remember those days well, and although the road into the old East was now open and the concrete and the wire long gone, she still took the ferry across the river to buy her groceries. Some things had changed. There were more cars of course, for now they had somewhere to go other than just the village at Priwall. A whole other country beyond the old border.

All your shopping done?

The deckhand did not check her ticket. She replied with a smile and a nod. To an outsider she looked like every tourist’s middle-class fantasy of a rural village shopper and her basket of produce, purchased from local traders who knew her name, her habits and her tastes. But in reality the basket was filled with bags from Aldi or Lidl, like everyone else. Different supermarkets had their strengths. Lidl for cheese. Aldi for wine. She did still get her bread from the bakery, happier to shop there in the winter than the summer because of the lack of queues. Were there more tourists now, than there had been before? It was hard to say. At this time of year the resort was quiet, visited in the main by those no longer tied to summer holidays, and for whom the number of days they could afford was more important than the weather in which to enjoy them. They could be observed in the morning as they stared through the steamed-up windows of cafes and hotel breakfast rooms, morosely contemplating the choppy waters where the river met the bay as they mournfully stirred a cup of coffee. The sugar had long since dissolved, but still they kept stirring.

As the paper bag which contained her bread rolls changed colour, as it took on water, she turned to her fellow foot passenger and looked him up and down.

Where are you headed today?

On hearing the answer she made a half-hearted attempt to stifle a laugh.

The border! Well, there is not much to see. A lump of rock and a lot of sand.

She shook her head and pushed her bicycle slightly forward, closer to the overhang created by the bridge that offered the foot passengers a modicum of shelter. The rest of her thoughts remained unspoken but could be read in her eyes.

The border! Who comes to Priwall in the rain, in the winter, to look for something that is not even there any more?

*

It was a good question. The ferry arrived at its destination with a bump. She moved forward with her bike even as the ramp was still being lowered and she was the first ashore, weaving between the potholes and the puddles that had gathered on the uneven tarmac before the car drivers started their engines. I let them all off before following across the expanse of the quayside and on to the Mecklenburger Landstraße – the road to the old border – just beyond the ticket office. With my cycling companion out of sight, and the rear lights of the cars retreating along the lane, I was soon alone. In ten minutes there would be another small convoy, marking the arrival of the other ferry, and again ten minutes after that. In the meantime, I had Priwall to myself.

It appeared on first viewing to be a nice enough place. Detached, red-brick houses were set back from the road, giving the cumulative impression that this was a place of neat gardens and net curtains. The smell of woodsmoke drifted up and out from stoves, fed by the woodpiles covered with racing-green tarpaulins down the side of each house. To the left, low dunes separated properties from the beach and protected them from the winds whipping in off the sea. To the right, I could see down to the lagoon that made Priwall a peninsula, an inland sea fringed with reeds and sheltered from the elements.

As I reached the edge of the village I came upon a huge complex of brick buildings – ghostly and abandoned – locked away behind a low wall and a high fence. Climbing up on to the wall, I attempted to get a better look, holding on to the fencing. It had been a Luftwaffe barracks during the war and later, in those years when Priwall had been an island, a hospital. I debated hopping the fence to get a closer look but at that moment a couple of workmen emerged from one of the doors, crossing the overgrown wasteland that had once been the parade ground and later a place for patients to take the sea air, towards a gap in the wall on the other side. I saw now that the main gates were open and a portakabin had been installed on the edge of the site. Next to it stood a row of pink portaloos, resting at slight angles on the uneven ground, and a skip.

At the gate I saw that the old guardhouse by the main entrance was still in use. It housed a small nursery, with a playground fenced off from the rest of the complex to stop small children straying into the wasteland of rubble, weeds and broken glass that surrounded it. A workman passed, carrying a wooden window frame on his way to heave it into the skip. I asked him what they were building but he didn’t know. He was only here to clear the place out. Find what is valuable, what can be recycled. Dump the rest.

Our job is just to make it safe.

He shrugged.

Through cracked windows I could see tags on the brickwork and other evidence of spray paint. Around the corner, close to the perimeter fence, there were the remnants of a bonfire. Stones had been arranged around the edge, with blackened beer bottles piled on ash at the scorched heart of the circle. The small children had their playground. The big kids also had theirs. I walked on.

Not long after leaving the old barracks behind, the pavement ran out. Now I walked the final kilometre to the border along a grassy and muddy verge, hoping that no camper van or car would pass through the deep puddles closest to me. It had stopped raining and the sky had lightened. Close to the border I reached a car park for the colony of holiday cabins squeezed in between the road and the dunes. Beyond the dunes the wind blew gentle waves on the lagoon. I was there. Where East Germany once met West. By the side of the road stood a granite boulder and an information board:

NEVER

AGAIN

DIVIDED

3 FEB 1990

Now the division was marked not by wire fences, watchtowers and armed guards, but by more subtle symbols. The road in the old East was in better condition, the potholed Landstraße I had been walking alongside giving way to smooth tarmac at the exact moment Schleswig-Holstein became Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. In the East a new, neat and separate bike path had been built, running alongside the road until the border, where it too gave way without any real warning to a patch of muddy grass. On infrastructure at least, the old East was in better condition than the old West.

From the memorial stone I followed a sandy path that led between the old border zone – now a strip of overgrown bushes and young trees, behind which lay a neatly-ploughed field – and the holiday cabins I had seen from the road. Most of them were shuttered for the winter, although there were a couple of telltale columns of smoke emerging from chimneys rising up above the rooftops. Past these the path wound its way between some dunes and then dropped down on to the beach. And there I had it: my first view of the Baltic, the Bay of Lübeck, looking moody beneath grey skies, unsettled only by a few small waves breaking with the slightest flash of white.

Down on the sands I looked for some sign of the old border but there was nothing to be found. Unlike on the road, there was no clue as to which part of the beach had once been the German Democratic Republic and which had been the Federal Republic of Germany. Here the reunification of the Priwall peninsula with its hinterland had been seamless, with all traces of division washed away from the sands. I gave up my search and walked instead down to the water’s edge. Turning east to face a coastline of seemingly endless dunes, beaches and sandy cliffs, I was looking from the starting point of my journey towards my eventual destination. The Polish border lay some two hundred and twenty kilometres away as the gull flew, but the meandering nature of the coastline and its islands and peninsulas meant there were some two thousand kilometres of shoreline to explore. At that moment, on the beach, it seemed like more than enough to be getting on with.

*

The journey east began by walking west, back to the Priwall ferry for the short trip across the water to Travemünde. At first I walked the sands, aiming at the tower of the Maritim Hotel that stood on the opposite bank of the river, but after five minutes of slow progress I gave up and followed one of the boardwalked paths through the dunes to the sheltered track behind. Now I was walking through the colony of holiday cabins. They had been built close together, with tiny walkways running down either side between the walls and high fences erected to give some semblance of privacy in these cramped conditions. The track was rough and uneven, and though I walked alone I could see it on a warmer day, filled with strolling couples and bike-riding kids, legs spinning in too low a gear as they moved between their cabin, those of their friends, and the wide expanses of sand beyond the dunes. Outside a kiosk, locked and shuttered for the winter, I paused to pull a water bottle from my bag. I took a sip in the place where the cheap inflatables would be piled, next to the baskets of flyaway footballs and beach toys, a rack of old postcards never bought. I could smell the suntan lotion and the sweating tubs of penny sweets, and could hear the flip-flops slapping against the cool, tiled floor. It was the smell and the sound of a Welsh caravan park, transplanted to the Baltic.

All the businesses in the colony, like the kiosk, were closed for the off season. In the window of the pub a sign thanked us for a great summer and reminded us they would be open again for New Year’s Eve. The fast food Imbiss was taking a break from offering deep-fried sustenance for hot days. The next-door restaurant, where the same sausages and battered fish were served, only substituting china plates for the paper trays, was deserted. A little further along the track I came to the pizzeria, where the plastic chairs and tables had been piled up in the corner of a terrace and had collected wind-blown leaves that also clogged up the decorative fountain. A plaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s David had fallen in a storm and lost an arm. A few metres on, another kiosk. Grille down. Dust sheets on the counter. No ice cream or beers today. No emergency rations of tinned ravioli or condensed milk. No suntan lotion. No penny sweets.

There were some signs of life in the colony. At a garden near the end of the track a couple worked diligently, preparing the ground for the arrival of spring and another long summer.

We’ve been coming here for years.

A turned head, waiting for the nod of confirmation. It came.

Since Johannes was a boy. And now he brings his own kids. How about that? Our grandchildren enjoying this place, just like their father did … Why would you want to go anywhere else? We have everything we need …

I thought of the bicycling lady from the ferry. What did she make of the summer influx of visitors to the peninsula, swelling the population of Priwall by three, four, five times what it was now? Standing room only on the ferry. The smell of barbecues and the tinny beat of weakly amplified MP3s. Dogs had their own beach. Nudists too, where once they had bathed under the watchful eyes of East German border guards.

On a wooded headland I reached the spot where the bay met the mouth of the river, opposite the Maritim Hotel. As so often at the Baltic coast, I was conscious of the absence of salt in the air. According to the Internet you can drink these waters, the saline content of the Baltic Sea being so low that it will not dehydrate you. I decided not to test this theory. Instead I stood and looking out across the water. There was not much to see. Slight waves. A few gulls buffeted by the breeze. A solitary boat.

There was not much to see, but plenty that I knew was there.

*

On 3 May 1945, three days after Hitler blew out his brains in a Berlin bunker, and only twenty-four hours before the German generals signed the unconditional surrender to end the Thousand Year Reich after only twelve, the SS began to load ships in Neustadt Harbour, north of Lübeck. Four ships, including the Cap Arcona, were filled with around 40,000 prisoners from the Neuengamme concentration camp. The plan was to commit one last crime before the curtain fell: to take these ships out to sea – filled as they were with prisoners from over thirty different countries – and scuttle them. An evidence-destroying act of mass murder, to take place in the shallow waters of the Bay of Lübeck.

To RAF pilots, however, these boats looked just like the troop transports they had been targeting for months in the waters north of Germany. And although it is strongly suspected that their commanders knew these boats were filled not with enemy soldiers but with prisoners, the instructions to the pilots were that these were transports of SS officers fleeing to Norway. And so the fleet was attacked from the air.

We used our cannon fire at the chaps in the water, RAF Pilot Allan Wyse of the No. 193 Squadron would later write. We shot them up with 20mm cannons in the water. Horrible thing, but we were told to do it and we did it. That’s war.

Most of the SS officers who had been accompanying the prisoners managed to escape the sinking ships and were rescued by German trawlers. The prisoners themselves were left to their fate. Those who managed to get off the burning ships were shot in the water or, if they made it to land, were executed on the sands by the SS. The RAF bombing raid and what followed resulted in the death of over 4,000 concentration camp survivors, and for over three decades their remains would continue to wash ashore, to rest on beaches all along the Bay of Lübeck and further down the coast.

Standing on the promontory and looked out across the Bay of Lübeck, I tried to put together the idyll of Thomas Mann’s childhood with the desperate horror of the sinking of the Cap Arcona. Did knowing this story change how I saw the Baltic that morning on a Priwall headland? Of course it did. Landscape is neutral. As is the sea. It is what we know that shapes our impressions, shapes our feelings about place. The stories of the beach, of the sand and the dunes, of the towns and the cities. Thomas Mann rowed across this river to search for amber on the beach I had just walked along. When he returned in 1953, over sixty years had passed. Two world wars and the horrors of the Holocaust. As he breathed the sea air once again, lost in his own childhood memories, bodies were still being washed ashore from the Cap Arcona. No wonder he retreated to a more innocent time. I kicked at the sand as a church bell sounded. Half an hour until my train back to Lübeck. For the time being I left the stories on the shore, turned my back on the Baltic, and made my way to the ferry and across the river to catch the train.

*

Back in Lübeck I walked from the station to the old town, an appealing jumble of buildings surrounded by water in the middle of the River Trave. Despite being some twenty-odd kilometres upstream from the sea, Lübeck found its