Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (49 page)

Fascist bureaucrats dissolve into the facilitators of the new Germany, establishing connections with property developers and city councillors. Spy fiction made much of this. ‘Why don’t you get in touch with Olympia Stadion?’ says a character in Len Deighton’s
Berlin Game.
Alec Guinness, who crafted an owl-like serenity, combined with taking off his spectacles in extreme slow motion, into an illusion of Zen omniscience, revived his career by embodying the spy’s spy: George Smiley. The fat man in the tight cardigan. Bowler hat and rolled umbrella. Chelsea house and flighty wife. Appearing in tactfully filmed versions of the John le Carré novels, Guinness helped sell the notion of television as superior travelogue: Paris, Hamburg, Berne. Metaphysical doubt was expressed through infinitely extended sequences where he decanted himself from a car.

In an earlier pass at this territory, Sir Alec had a cameo in
The Quiller Memorandum
, which was scripted by Harold Pinter. He shows off the Olympic Stadium to a young American played by George Segal. ‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ he says, before explaining that the new generation of Nazis are harder to recognize, they don’t wear uniforms. ‘The scene, brief and played deadpan,’ wrote Christopher Hilton, ‘contained something unavailable anywhere else, a sense of proximity to what had been.’ Nobody does deadpan, that almost imperceptible tightening of the lips, the flutter of the eyelashes, better than Guinness.

Security is courteous. The operatives are not the desperate, edge-of-legality, non-persons who endure long hours of tedium, loudly visible in fluorescent tabards and hard hats, around the blue fences of Stratford and Hackney. They are polite but firm; linguists, diplomats of refusal. I produce a card. They are respectful of cards, even though the magazine means nothing to them. The name on the card is followed by one of those impressive German pile-ups:
Redaktionsleitung.
I’m invited to walk around to the Accreditation Centre.

The Olympic Park is one day away from the opening of the World Games and there is no hysteria. The perimeter reeks, hotly, moistly, of large animals. ‘A zoo?’ Anna asks. ‘Horses,’ I reply. Remembering the popular racecourse. The past, like it or not, is something you can still smell.

The Accreditation Centre has its own, very human, stink. The armpit of the operation. Straggling queues of men, and a few women, in search of laminated badges. The aspect that disturbs the clerks about my request is that I have no interest in attending the Games. I’m happy to blink at the miracle of Usain Bolt and his tele-scopic limbs on television, for 9.58 seconds, before getting on with my life. All I ask is to be allowed to witness the interior of the stadium. With a business card from an unknown, but potentially prestigious magazine, my request must be treated seriously. A higher official is summoned. It takes him a moment to adjust to the fact that an intellectual, with the title
Redaktionsleitung
, doesn’t actually speak German.

‘Herr … Doktor … I’m afraid it’s impossible.’ He bows. He shakes my hand. ‘A question of security. Police and so forth. At any other time, you understand … ’

The solution is to take a lift to the summit of the Bell Tower, Glockenturm am Olympiastadion. It’s too heavy a set at the end of the day: the massive steps, the dungeon-like grilles, the shadow patterns on the cobbles. The British demolished the Bell Tower and the Langemarck Hall in 1947, one year before the austerity Olympics were staged in London. What we were entering, to take our places in the queue for the lift, was yet another tactful facsimile. Werner March, purged, de-Nazified, reconstructed the whole package, between 1960 and 1963, with the expertise of one of Fritz Lang’s architects of illusion. The Bell Tower, remade, was a real fake with a psychic displacement equal to that of the fatal towers in Henry Hathaway’s
Niagara
(those maddening saccharine chimes) and Hitchcock’s
Vertigo.
The Langemarck Hall with its black death-cult shields, its ritual pillars, was difficult to absorb. A difficulty further emphasized by loops of sinister newsreel footage playing in the empty crypt below.

At the summit, having climbed past the original 1936 bell, we gazed down at the stadium, and the city beyond it. The blameless swathe of the Maifeld couldn’t be purged of its former purpose, the strutting uniformed figures who had ridden in their open cars along the route we walked. I pointed out the Fernsehturm, the TV tower, on the distant horizon. It is a rare achievement to find an expedition so graphically mapped. ‘Only he who cannot forget has no free mind,’ said the exiled architect Erich Mendelsohn.

The Olympic Park extended into hills covered with dense woodland, red roofs, white blocks, the domes of astronomical observatories. Smoke slanted from the chimneys of an energy plant on the banks of the Havel. We were back with the vision obscured by the wing of the descending aeroplane at Tegel, but now some of the shapes in the spread of the landscape have acquired meaning. After the Olympic showpiece in 1936, this park leant itself to demonstrations, to military exercises. The stadium was a convenient space for rounding up those who fell foul of the state. In these woods, boy soldiers in the final insanity of the Third Reich were executed for desertion or cowardice.

Spandau, at the north-west edge of the park, is where Hitler’s architect of ruins, Albert Speer, paced the prison yard for so many years. This dark-side apologist, who managed to smuggle out 20,000 scribbled sheets of warped testimony, is another proof that the critic Lotte Eisner was right when she said, ‘Lang anticipated everything.’ Words pouring from a caged superman, half-lunatic, half-sage: this is an accurate transcription of
Das Testament des Dr Mabuse
, a film made by Fritz Lang in 1933. And then suppressed by the Nazis. Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays a criminal mastermind, incarcerated in an asylum, controlling the city by telepathy, hypnotism and the production of endless pages of deranged script – which the authorities and their tame experts struggle to interpret.

At a time when the Situationists were honing their provocations in Paris, Speer had already embarked on the ultimate psychogeographical exercise. As with my disorientation in the Sony Center, in attempting to describe a straight line, Hitler’s confidant marched in circles, following the shape of the noose he had so narrowly avoided. Round and round and round. He was flown to Spandau Prison in July 1947 and he remained there until October 1966: walking, walking, walking. He made meticulous calculations, he measured his stride and mapped the distance achieved on his self-inflicted treadmill against real-world geography.

His first excursion carried him from Spandau to Heidelberg. Every hamlet along the way was visualized. He saw more clearly than Werner Herzog on his trudge towards the Rhine. Clenched within the confines of his skull, the Munich film-maker barely notices the details of the external world: ‘The tattered fog even thicker, chasing across my path.’ Herzog wonders if static figures in the frosted window of a café beside the road are corpses. Speer is omnipotent, he catalogues everything. He is the invisible spectre waiting to cross the autobahn.

Muscles honed, destination achieved, the long-distance architect took on the world. Trenching the dust of the prison yard in summer, kicking aside the fallen leaves, leaving footprints in the snow, Speer pushed on in the direction attempted by Céline and imagined by Francis Stuart, across northern Germany, into Russia and Siberia. Fording the frozen Bering Straits, he limped down the west coast of America, towards the proper destination for surrealists and psychogeographers: Mexico. By now he was one of the last two inmates in this madhouse-prison. When they let him go, turning him loose into a twilight of self-justifying interviews, he was thirty-five kilometres south of Guadalajara. Starting there, I brooded, it should be possible to reverse the trek of this mental traveller, all those miles and years, back to Berlin. The demolished prison would then rise from the dirt and Speer’s small plot of ground, the wilderness corner of the yard he called his ‘Garden of Eden’, would flower again. Revealing this escapee from the cabinet of Dr Caligari as another premature ecologist.

On the last morning of our Berlin visit, we decided to adopt the excursionist mood of
Menschen am Sonntag
, by taking the S-Bahn to the end of the line, to Potsdam. Here was the Filmpark Babelsberg, a Disneyfied reminder of the great days of Fritz Lang and the Ufa Studios, when Leytonstone’s Alfred Hitchcock served his apprenticeship and witnessed the making of
Metropolis.
In Potsdam you could take your choice of palaces, museums and memorials to the conference at which post-war Europe was carved up by the victors. Mindful of Herzog, we were not tourists. We were pilgrims searching for a final structure to complete my triangulation: Fernsehturm, Bell Tower, Einstein Tower.

We were soon among green places, botanical gardens, quiet suburbs, glimpses of white sails on water. A Chinese man stood beside me, so that his young daughter could take a seat. I remembered Christopher Isherwood’s excursion to a villa at Wannsee. His host, the manager of a great Jewish department store in Berlin, describes his summer residence as an English ‘country cottage’. But it is nothing of the kind: ‘tame baroque, elegant and rather colourless’. The sort of villa acquired, at Am Grossen Wannsee 56–58, for the notorious conference convened by Reinhard Heydrich to fix the mundane technicalities of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. The subject of Chris Petit’s novel
The Human Pool
.

Touts come at you hard as you step from the train, offering bus trips and riverboat excursions. When I confess that my sole interest today is Erich Mendelsohn’s Einsteinturm, they are happy to provide me with a map. Potsdam, from the station on, is a magical topography in which visionary architecture meets astrophysics in a forgotten crease of history. A place smelling of pine-resin and good coffee.

The railway station, for some reason, is occupied by lizard-headed extraterrestrials, crouching Neanderthals, zipped apes and dinosaurs modelled in hard plastic. SMASH FASCISM! Walls at the bottom of the hill have been painted with cartoons of pylons in an electrical storm. The red-purple skies of nuclear catastrophe. We are on the right track.

Through banks of golden sunflowers and well-kept houses, we turn into Telegrafenberg, a science park open to visitors. A woman, descending briskly, asks where we have come from. ‘The station.’ ‘By which bus?’ ‘We walked.’ ‘You
walked
, right from the station?’ She is astonished and a little alarmed. It is unmannerly, she implies, to pass up the opportunity of experiencing the efficiency of public transport available in the capital of Brandenburg.

An occasional gardener is glimpsed, at a distance: this park is a silent world. One building, fronted with picnic tables, is the Polar Institute. The Institute of Astrophysics has a sympathetic connection with
Frau im Mond
, the film Fritz Lang made for Ufa from a script (based on her own novel) by his wife, Thea von Harbou. The surface of the moon was created in Babelsberg by importing truckloads of sand from the Baltic. The warp of space–time relativity is much in evidence. Equations laid out in Lang’s speculative movie form the basis for Wernher von Braun’s V-1 and V-2 calculations. East London is flattened by rockets rushed into production to publicize Lang’s last silent film. Professor Hermann Oberth, who advised the monocled director on
Frau im Mond
, was frequently quoted by Von Braun, at the period when he was responsible for research and development at Peenemünde. He liked Oberth’s proposal for a spacecraft carrying a mirror, with a diameter of many kilometres, capable of concentrating the sun’s rays to control terrestrial weather and manipulate hot spots.

The migrant dunes with which the texture of Lang’s moon was constructed came from beaches near the secure site where Von Braun and his associates were adapting fantasies of interplanetary travel into a technology for turning London into a lunar desert of craters and rubble. Petit told me that when the Russians arrived in Potsdam, they occupied the Babelsberg studios, dressing themselves in costumes from a Napoleonic epic and driving their cattle through the palaces and plywood cities. Terrified Potsdam inhabitants, primed by propaganda from Goebbels, were ready to believe anything, even Cossacks with shaggy ponies and camels. They accepted the latest invaders as a regiment of Frenchmen from 1815, returned from their battlefield graves to avenge the deeds of the Prussians at Waterloo.

On sandy paths, among the woods of Telegrafenberg, we are the aliens. I’m dressed in the sort of many-pocketed waistcoat associated with Joseph Beuys. To be strolling here, so far from Hackney, is as eccentric as the solitary marches of Samuel Beckett in Tiergarten, or the nocturnal ramblings of Francis Stuart, both of whom espoused a cultural relativism: curving movements through time and space, attempting to bring into focus their point of origin. Ireland is experienced most vividly when furthest away. And Dublin, that fabled walkers’ city, with its crescent bay, is grooved into the memory by pilgrimages through other countries, where equivalents are found for every bar and bench. Phoenix Park into Tiergarten, Ballsbridge into Charlottenburg.

Even the contemporary boom town, spreading up the coast like Los Angeles, a cancer of failed developments and ghost estates, had a defining image for me: young women, early in the morning, smartly presented, clicking down Baggot Street into the Georgian squares with their polished brass plates, carrying trays from which polystyrene coffee beakers depend like udders. As if, in a flash, milkmaids had become women of the city. The grand squares with their trumpeted literary associations were now active in the holy hour of old (when the pubs would shut for a post-lunch lull), with upmarket prostitutes servicing the corporate clones who could not afford to take time away from their laptops. That awkward business briskly dealt with before a late return to Sandycove, Dalkey or Beckett’s Foxrock.

In a Telegrafenberg clearing, we came across a group of abandoned tin huts, so haunting that I had to photograph them. A Viking settlement of upturned boats constructed from overlapping sheets of corrugated iron. A hangar for some experiment worthy of Dr Mabuse. An exercise in mind control. I thought of a report by Francis Stuart. After walking for many miles, struggling to make sense of Berlin, he strains for a metaphor taken from his native Ireland: the iron hut.