Mousehold Heath, on the site of St. William's Chapel, looking up
This is a true story.
A woman has a dream
concerning a fish.
She is standing in the
middle of the road with her father – who happens to be a priest of high renown
– and the fish is lying at her feet.
The fish is of a type
which is known in these parts as a luce; it has twelve fins on each side, and
each fin is red, as if dabbed with blood.
How did the fish get
there?
How can it live in so
dry a spot?
Her father tells her
to take up the fish and hold it to her bosom.
She cradles the fish
in her arms, rocking it to and fro, and as she strokes its head, it begins to
move and grow larger and larger at an alarming rate.
It grows so fast and
so large that she can no longer hold it, and it slips out of her grasp. But
instead of flopping to the ground, it suddenly grows wings, takes to the air,
and flies away.
It circles above the
pair before passing through the clouds and disappearing from view.
Mousehold Heath
This is the meaning of the dream.
The woman is pregnant.
She will give birth to
a son who shall attain to highest honour in the earth, and after being raised
above the clouds shall be exalted exceedingly in Heaven.
When the son is twelve
years old he shall be raised to this pitch of glory.
Mousehold Heath
This is a noteworthy fact.
It was laid down by
the Jews in ancient times that every year they must sacrifice a Christian in
some part of the world to their most high God, in scorn and contempt for
Christ, and use the blood of the victim in their vile rituals.
This is because it is
due to Christ’s death that they have been shut out from their own country and
are in exile as slaves in foreign lands.
And so it is that every year, at Narbonne in Spain, where the Jews are held in
high regard, lots are cast in order to determine the country where the
sacrifice will take place.
In the capital city of
that country, another lot is drawn to determine the town or city, and it just
so happens that at this particular time the lot has fallen on the Jews of
Norwich, and all the synagogues in England have signified, by letter or
message, their consent that the killing should take place here.
Mousehold Heath - a boundary stone of St. William's Chapel
We are at the shrine
of Saint William, with people of various ailments.
Many people visit the
shrine, and all manner of wondrous events and miracles have occurred.
The sight of a blind
woman has been restored;
the tongue of a mute
boy has been loosened;
scores of barren women
have conceived;
the lame and the
crippled have thrown away their crutches;
and a man whose nose
was bitten off by a mad dog has overnight grown a new one.
These are all true
stories.
After the invasion of Britain in the
spring of 1941, the German army swept away all before it, ruthlessly punishing
any act of insurgency, and rounding up and executing all those it considered to
be “a threat to the democratic process…”
Within days, the King
and his family were fleeing to the Bahamas – heading, ironically, to
the very place where his brother had been in exile after his abdication.
Edward and Mrs.
Simpson returned back to London
in triumph, where they were greeted by ecstatic crowds…
On August 24th,
two days after the Coronation, the Fuhrer made a speech in Norwich from the balcony of the City Hall –
now a run-down and dilapidated hotel – where he was flanked by Dr. Goebbels,
the head of the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Education, and Heinrich
Himmler, the Reichsfuhrer-SS, who was also responsible for the Ministry of
Ancestral Inheritance.
Hitler announced to
the crowd that an archaeological survey carried out by Himmler’s ministry in
woodland to the north of the city had uncovered the skeleton of an adolescent
boy which dated back to mediaeval times. There could be no possible doubt that
these bones were those of the boy-saint William, whose cruel murder by the Jews
eight hundred years before had “first opened the eyes of the world to the evil
intent that was inherent in all Jewish hearts”.
It had been necessary
to cleanse the stain of Judaism from the
face of the earth – a project which, the Fuhrer was pleased to say, was now
nearing completion.
To mark this momentous
achievement in human history, the shrine of the saint – long since ruined and
overgrown – was to be re-built and re-dedicated to “the most glorious
accomplishment of the Third Reich…”
*
Scene Two - Berlin
pages from the Hooded Crow sketchbook
Reichstag Hooded Crow (charcoal & chalk on paper 70cm x 50cm)
Monday 21 February – Berlin
The city belongs to hooded crows; they squabble and
bicker in their small murders on the pavements and roadsides, light on the
walls and ledges of the buildings, then at dusk roost in the branches of the
lime trees in Unter den Linden. They’re sinister and comical at the same time,
a schizophrenic avatar for a schizophrenic city.
We arrived here at lunchtime after travelling through
the night from Norwich.
I managed to switch off on the bus down to Stanstead, and although I only had
about twenty minutes doze, it saw me through until we arrived at the apartment.
It’s on the seventh floor of an old East German block of flats, just over the
road from the Adlon Hotel and the British Embassy – there are concrete road
blocks and armed guards at either end of the street – and judging from the
guidebook, only a couple of minutes walk from Hitler’s bunker.
The apartment is huge – the total area is almost the
same as our house – and it’s decorated in a very minimalist fashion, with
everything from the beds and wardrobes down to the last spoon coming from Ikea.
This probably explains why the sofa is so bloody uncomfortable.
We went to bed - which was uncomfortable too - for a
couple of hours this afternoon (we’d both been more-or-less awake for nearly
thirty hours). After we got up and freshened up, we headed for the local supermarket
to pick up some provisions, and making our way back to the apartment, we were
serenaded by a raucous chorus of crows, who were settling down for the evening.
I knocked up a reasonably palatable chilli, washed down by a reasonably palatable
German red, and then we went out for a stroll by the Brandenburg Gate and
Reichstag.
The streets were deserted, apart from the ever-present
ghosts that haunt the city. We looked up at one of the windows of the Adlon,
and saw Michael Jackson, pale-skinned and pert-nosed, standing on the balcony,
dangling his baby over the edge;
and further down the street, we bumped into Diane
Mitford and Oswald Mosley, walking arm-in-arm towards Goebbels’ bunker, just
round the corner from our apartment, where they were about to be married in the
presence of the great man himself, and with the Fuhrer’s blessing.
Meanwhile, a Russian soldier was rushing from doorway
to doorway down Wilhelmstrasse, dodging a hail of bullets, and East German
guards were erecting barriers of razor-wire and wood all around the western
city.
And somewhere off in the distance, there was the sound
of jackboots marching and glass smashing, and carried on the breeze was the
smell of books burning. And as we reached the corner of the street where were
staying, we tried to figure out whether the glow on the horizon was the
streetlights, or the searchlights, or the Chancellery on fire.
Tuesday 22 February – Berlin
Sometimes it feels as though the city is one huge film
set, and everyone who lives here or comes to visit here are really only extras
in some imaginary film, with an imaginary soundtrack playing inside their
heads.
The track listing for the imaginary soundtrack playing
in my head at the minute is as follows:
Lisa Minnelli singing Cabaret
Most of David Bowie’s Low and Heroes albums
Beethoven’s second Piano Concerto, and his late string
quartets
The Passenger by Iggy Pop
A piece of klezmer music I don’t know the title of,
and can’t remember who it’s by
Berliner Requiem, and other bits and pieces by Brecht
and Weill.
We left the apartment this morning and got as far as
the corner of Wilhelmstrasse before S decided that she really did need her thermals
after all, and dashed back to put them on. While she was gone, I thought I’d do
a quick sketch of the guards and security barriers outside the British Embassy.
I’d been drawing away for a couple of minutes when a couple of Polizei strode
over to ask what I was up to, and could they have a look, please. As I handed
the sketchbook over, S returned, looking aghast. The Polizei explained to us,
in clipped English, that they’d been observing me for a while, and they needed
to check us out. We could be terrorists, after all, drawing up plans to carry
out an attack on the Embassy. Could they see our passports, please? And where
were we staying? And what was our address in England? I didn’t think much of it
– they were only doing their job, after all – but I suddenly remembered that
the previous sketch in the book was one I’d done at the RSPB reserve in
Minsmere, where I’d spent a lot of time getting the details right of the
neighbouring nuclear power station. I was praying to God they’d just flick
through the book quickly, and not assume I was (literally) drawing up a list of
targets. Thankfully, they were more interested in a nude study I’d done of S,
and comparing that against the photograph in her passport.
After a while they seemed satisfied that neither of us
posed a threat to either country’s national security, they handed us back our
passports, and bade us a good day.
S stormed off, muttering something under her breath
about our next holiday being in Guantanamo
Bay.
Wednesday 23 February – Berlin
History disappears; on the site of Hitler’s Bunker is
a landscaped car park. One end of his Chancellery is marked by a kindergarten,
and a little further along, a Chinese take-away. Potsdamerplatz is a huge leisure
and retail complex. The entire city is a building site, and there are dog turds
everywhere.
S is a big Christopher Isherwood fan. We walked to his
apartment in Nollundorfstrasse – number 17 – and as she was posing by the door
while I took her photo (whilst trying to avoid the dog turds), she struck up a
conversation with a man carrying a fridge on a sack-barrow, who was in the
process of moving into Isherwood’s flat. She told him she was a big Isherwood
fan, and he replied that he was too, and that’s why he and his wife wanted to
move there. It transpired that he was an actor, and had appeared in the stage
version of Cabaret. S told him that it was one of her favourite films, but
she’d never seen the stage show. Did she know it was on in Berlin at the minute? In a little theatre
bar not far from here. She really ought to go.
We went to a bar and had a beer and a bite to eat,
before catching the U-bahn across town to the new Jewish Museum. It’s an
impressive building, based on an exploding Star of David, but it has to be
said, it’s not much of a museum. There’s an awful lot about the contribution of
German Jewry to mankind, but strangely enough, no mention of Charlie Marx. The
main exhibition was too full of gimmicks and other interactive flim-flam, but
some of the more artistically challenging pieces relating to the Holocaust were
literally awesome, and moving, and thought-provoking.
We had hoped to make it back to the Brandenburg Gates
for six o’clock, where there was to be an anti- Bush demonstration (he’s in Germany at the
minute), but we spent longer than we really needed – and wanted – in the
Museum. By the time we arrived back at our apartment, we were cold, wet and
hungry, and in for the night.
As I write this, I’m looking out of the window, and it’s
snowing.
Thursday 24 February – Berlin
Certain places seem to have an almost magnetic
attraction for wickedness. The area between Niederkirchnerstrasse and
Wilhelmstrasse has seen decades of cruelty and abuse carried out in the name of
the state, dating back to the rise of the Nazis to the fall of Communism.
There’s an open-air exhibition here which details this inhumanity in an
informal and simple way, and tells how the courts of law were manipulated by
the government to make sure that offenders were given the sentence it was
deemed they deserved.
Berlin
seems to be quite up front about how it remembers the past; there’s no escaping
from what happened, and it’s only by confronting the memories that they can
shine a light into the shadows of their history. Maybe the act of remembering
helps them to forget, and to construct a collective theatre of amnesia to block
out the mental traumas of Nazi-ism, and then Communism. Sometimes it goes over
the top; locations of evil are turned into heritage visitor attractions, and
there’s money to be made from other people’s misery. Checkpoint Charlie leaves
a nasty taste in the mouth, and the motives behind some of the more ad-hoc
memorials seem dubious to say the least. However, one of the most awe-inspiring
and thought-provoking things we’ve seen so far has got to be the Memorial to
the Murdered Jews of Europe, which is still under construction just around the
corner from our apartment. It’s an overwhelming monument for an overwhelming
crime.
This evening we went to see Cabaret. It was in a
theatre-bar about ten minutes walk from Zoo station. The tickets were
incredibly expensive – 55 euros each – and we got in only because S haggled
over the price of a pair of returns, so we actually ended up paying less than
half-price. The only problem was, we had to sit with the group who had returned
them, and who were well out of pocket. I could sense the vibe of grumpiness emanating
from the person next to me, but what the heck – it wasn’t our problem.
It was a brilliant show – dialogue in German, songs in
English, and the plot quite radically altered in places.
Afterwards, we had a brief and rather unpleasant
stroll around the seventh circle of hell that is Zoo Station.
Oraniensburgerstrasse Hooded Crow (charcoal & chalk on paper 70cm x 50m)
Friday 25 February – Berlin
A walk around the area north of Friederichstrasse
station. We picked up a few 78 rpms, most of which appear to be marching songs
of the Hitler Youth, although we’ll not know for sure ‘til we get back to
Blighty. We had a bite to eat in a very nice bar just round the corner from
Brecht’s theatre, than spent the afternoon wandering around aimlessly, taking
detours off the beaten track, and not paying too much attention to guidebook or
map. We found ourselves in Oraniensburgerstrasse, past the permanently- guarded
New Synagogue, and the echoes of breaking glass, and always under the
ever-watchful eye of the Television Tower, which dominates the skyline with an
elegant ugliness. At the end of the street is an artists’ collective. If Hitler
had been a better artist, would history have taken a different course?
And in the fading light, we came to an empty Jewish cemetery
that contained only one gravestone – that of Moses Mendelssohn, the
Enlightenment philosopher and grandfather of the composer Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartoldy.
There were no birds singing in the trees.
All things were quite silent.
*
Scene Three - Mousehold Heath
Friday 26 March – Mousehold Heath
Easter’s early this year, and today doesn’t seem like
Good Friday. It feels more like winter than spring, and the naked trees are
still scratching their stark leafless outlines against the sullen sky. Today is
also the feast day of Saint William of Norwich,
who was supposedly murdered by Jews, and his body buried right here, on the
edge of the Heath. It was the first case of Blood Libel ever recorded, where a
race or bloodline is deemed responsible for a particular crime, and it was the
spark that lit the flame that burned across Europe
for hundreds of years, and is still smouldering away now.
And it all started here, in Norwich.
This being Saint William’s feast day, it seems a good
time and a good place to utter a few words for the dead – all the millions of
dead as a result of the wicked crimes of anti-semitism and xenophobia. I’ve
printed the Kaddish – the Jewish prayer for the dead – on some sugar paper, and
tied them with twine to the branches of the trees that grow on the site of
Saint William’s Chapel. Now the whole place is covered with these
prayer-leaves, and some of the people who are walking their dogs are looking at
them and reading them, and in doing so, unwittingly saying a prayer for the
dead.
Once something is spoken, it can’t be un-said.
And in a few days time, after the rain, these
sugar-paper prayers will have broken down and crumbled away, and nothing will
remain, except a memory.
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