Paul Scraton – Writer-in-Residence at BWA Wrocław

Why am I here? My time in Wrocław has been spent exploring the city, its history and its culture, and meeting people from the art and literary scenes. And I am here to start work on a storytelling project, an audio essay provisionally titled THE FIELDS about the former sewage irrigation farms on the edge of the city. Through these unique spaces, I hope to explore the wider themes of landscape and place, and the stories to be found there. Stories of the past, of the present and of what the future may hold.

Stories are important. And when it comes to my own writing, the thing I am constantly asking myself is this: what stories do we choose to tell? In 2019 I became a German citizen, which means I now have two passports in the draw of my desk, have legal recognition of the two sides to my identity that have developed through half a life lived in the north of England and the other half in Berlin, and two – oftentimes problematic – histories for which I must share the responsibility.

But what does it mean to be responsible for the history of a place? For the stories written before I was even born? I received my German citizenship in an office on a warm autumn day, and the woman who welcomed me into my new legal identity was at pains to point out both the rights and the responsibilities that would come with the status. It was a moment that managed to be both momentous and somewhat humdrum (the room smelled like every school classroom, council office or university corridor that I have ever experienced) and it took place overlooking a square named for a woman called Mathilde Jacob.

Mathilde Jacob was a translator, editor and typist, perhaps best known for being a friend and correspondent of Rosa Luxemburg. It was to Jacob that Luxemburg wrote during her imprisonment here in this city, then known as Breslau, and it was Jacob who identified the body after Luxemburg was murdered, two months after her release, by right-wing paramilitaries in Berlin.

But the story that came to me as I became (half) German, and which would become the basis for an essay I would write to reflect on this moment, was her deportation in June 1942. Jacob lived in a house by the Spree river. Today, there is a school on the site where the house containing her apartment once stood, and on the pavement is a small brass cobblestone. It is one of the Stolpersteine, the stumbling stones, which have been placed outside of the former residences of people taken away and murdered in the Holocaust.

HERE LIVED

MATHILDE JACOB

BORN 1873

DEPORTED 27.7.1942

THERESIENSTADT

DIED 14.4.1943

What was my responsibility to this story? How should I tell it? I decided to take a walk, from the brass cobblestone marking where Jacob lived, through the city streets to Große Hamburger Straße, where many of the Jews of Berlin were interned, and then on to the remains of Anhalter Bahnhof, from where Jacob was deported to Theresienstadt. It was a walk to follow Mathilde Jacob’s final journey through her home city. It was a walk that also took me past so many landmarks of the city’s history, both from before Jacob’s life and after, as I crossed from old West Berlin into the East and then back into the West again. And it was a journey through my own memories of nearly twenty years in the city. Old haunts and street corners. Memories of people and places.

At Anhalter Bahnhof I had reached the end of the journey. I wrote the story of my work. Shared it. It isn’t much. But it seemed like the only true response to the responsibility of the moment. More succinctly, W.G. Sebald made the point – about his own work – that, ‘I’ve always felt I had to know what happened in detail, and try to understand why it should have been so…’

If we are to know and to understand, we need the stories.

As part of my residency here in Wrocław I had the privilege to meet Jana Karpienko from the Olga Tokarczuk Foundation. In that meeting we talked about the importance of stories. About how stories can change the world! But if they can make change, they can make change for bad as well as good…

Which brings me back to memory. What is it that we choose to remember? And perhaps, more importantly, what is it that we choose to forget? Germany often gets credit for its process of dealing with its history. Its museums and memorials, monuments to its crimes. But there are some stories that are more told than others. For example, the Berlin Conference, during which Africa was carved up by the European colonial powers, has barely a presence in our city of memory, where there are streets still named for the perpetrators of crimes such as the genocide in what is today Namibia.

It is something I have thought a lot about during my time in Wrocław, not least during my walks and runs through Grabiszyński Park, a beautiful place that contains its own stories and hidden histories beneath and among the trees. It is here that I came across the Monument to Common Memory, erected in 2008 and dedicated, as the inscription states in both Polish and German, to “the former residents of our city buried in cemeteries that no longer exist.”

This monument is storytelling. Just like the plaques on the buildings in the city centre, or even simply in the bricks of the old pump station on the edge of the sewage irrigation fields. During my visits to the different exhibitions of the BWA galleries I saw storytelling in all manner of forms, which in turn gave me inspiration for my writing. Today we get our stories in so many ways. In books and films, but also podcasts and social media posts. The stories are important. But as we talked about with Jana, it matters which stories we are telling.

It makes me think about another writer, the wonderful Daša Drndić who explored the topic of history, memory and our responsibility to the stories of the past in her Croatian-language novels. But we live in dangerous times. War, rising nationalism, the refugee crisis and crimes on our borders, and the overwhelming prospect of climate collapse. Where does memory fit into all this?

Drndić wrote: ‘Without memory, we are easy prey to manipulation. We lose identity.’

There is a famous Brecht poem about the concept of art in moments such as these.

In dark times / Will there be singing? / Yes, there will be singing / Of the dark times.

Sometimes, when I look at the world around us and I think about the power (or not) of visual art, of literature, of music or film or any of these creative endeavours, I can feel a little hopeless. And then I try to tell myself that it is in times like these, in the dark moments, that we need the power of storytelling more than ever. To bear witness. To expose truth. To remember. To prevent the possibility of forgetting.

In the 1920s, Käthe Kollwitz created striking and starkly beautiful artwork born out of the grief of losing her son to the trenches and the battlefields of World War I. A few weeks ago, walking through the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, I saw that someone had hung a print of one of Kollwitz’s posters above the door on a corner building. 

Nie wieder Krieg!

No more war!

The saddest part of seeing it is that, in this time and place, I am not sure which war the person who printed it and had it hung was referencing. But I guess it doesn’t matter. The power of Kollwitz’s artwork and its message remains sadly relevant and no less affecting, a hundred years or so after its creation. 

In thinking about how we create, how we write, and how we tell stories, it is in the power of those who have gone before that I take solace. In the words of Sebald or Drndić. In the journalism of Joseph Roth or the drawings, sculptures and woodcuts of Käthe Kollwitz. The British poet Ruth Padel once wrote that ‘No poem ever stopped a tank. But,’ she added, ‘by putting vivid words, memorably together, in ways that resonate more loudly the deeper you go, poetry can address huge issues very powerfully.’

I’ll finish with something I wrote a few years ago, for a Norwegian journal under the title Against Forgetting. These last lines of the essay came back to me during my explorations of Wrocław, your beautiful city, and I wanted to share them with you:

‘The stories we choose to tell will help us shape what comes next. There is a famous line from Hegel that tells us we learn from history that we do not learn from history. It need not be the case. Yet we need to keep telling the right stories, the truthful stories. Even when there is no-one left to remember it is within our power, those who remain, not to forget.’

Thank you so much to the BWA, to Culture Moves Europe, and everyone who has made this residency in Wrocław possible. 

Paul’s residency is funded by the European Union and the Goethe-Institut. This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.