1.
European cities were once protected by walls. Hamburg is no exception, although the Elbe river, fractured into dozens of channels both natural and manmade, complicated the geography of its fortifications. Many cities in Europe have regal Ring Strasse encircling the urban centers; these Ring Strasse (“Ring Roads”) generally occupy the place where the protective walls once enclosed the town. When the walls were removed as obsolete – no good against modern artillery or aerial bombardment and a corset deforming the city’s growth – then, wide circular avenues, often lined with ornate public buildings, were built in their place. In Hamburg, the walls were semi-circular arcs, anchored on their flanks by the Elbe, and, so, when removed didn’t create circular ring roads. Planten un Blome, an endearing low German phrase for “plants and flowers,” is a park located in the territory where the City’s old walls were once located. Originally, a smaller park was located within the walls and the fortifications commanded a view across open country, cleared so that it could be shelled in the event of a siege encroaching on the city. These areas have now been consolidated into a green, meticulously landscaped system of parks extending in an arc along the transit of the old walls – indeed, the names of these places “Wallanlagen,” “Kleine Wallanlagen”, and “Grosse Walleanlagen”, tracts of parkland divided by boulevards marking erstwhile city gates and access to the urban core, signify their origin – “Wallanlagen” means “Places occupied by the Wall.”
Planten un Blome is the fortification park closest to Dammtor station, the transit hub most proximate to our apartment. The place is notable for an exquisite Japanese tea garden, some ultra-modernist greenhouses cantilevered over a lagoon, and some south-facing terraces landscaped with Mediterranean flora stepping down to a canal spanned by several bridges. Taxis congregate on the edge of the park south of Dammtor station and broad paved paths lead into Planten un Blomen, sidewalks leading between complex heaps of brush and shrubbery. A U-Bahn, Stephansplatz station, opens downward into the underground, the steps accessing the platforms below adjacent to a little concrete block kiosk, a bookstore that displays outdoors used volumes wrapped in plastic against the perpetual mist. Across from Stephansplatz U-Bahn stop, there is a broad, busy boulevard with a multi-story casino, a movie theater advertising the most recent incarnation of The Hunger Games franchise, and a park beside the modernist vault of the opera house named after Gustav Mahler (who once conducted the Hamburg Opera orchestra.) Some monuments to recent wars are next to the boulevard at the edge of Planten un Blome. These are worth examining and I will describe them below.
The entrance into the park at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn entry, a sort of funnel leading into the earth beneath the park, leads directly to an elaborate fantasy of small cliffs and shrubs with flamboyantly red leaves. The red shrubs guide the eye along a streambed, without water now although marked with oval puddles. The streambed is a shallow gulch between heaps of sculpted boulders and filled with small metallic-grey pebbles. At the end of the gulch, a tea house is framed by the brilliant scarlet bushes, a small elegant structure on the other side of a shallow basin also lined with polished-looking stones. You can climb over some threshold boulders and navigate a way between the puddles to the pulpit of rocks that overlooks the teahouse. Everything is compact and, beyond the tea house, you can see people strolling on some of the paths that loop through the garden.
The far northwest side of the park is dominated by a slender tower, a Radisson Blue hotel that has been somehow inserted into the edge of Planten un Blome. At night, the hotel is a column of deep blue neon glowing over the landscape of artificial cliffs like shelves at its base. In Summer, waterfalls dance down these steps chiseled into the hillside above the lagoon, a ribbon of water that looks like one of the City’s many fleet or canals, here cut-off from the river and the larger system of shipping channels into a formation like an ox-box lake. A white greenhouse with slanting glass roof and solar panels hovers over the edge of the deep indentation filled with water and transplanted trees shaggy with vine dip their limp branches into the water; small trails thread through the flowering underbrush, still green despite the short November days where festive-looking berries droop down from the wet branches. The south-facing terraces over the water-course have been planted with Mediterranean vegetation, some cactus and spiky agave punctuating the retaining walls among olive trees and the flower-bed steps that they support. Of course, Germans like taxonomy and many of the plants in the terrace gardens have labels identifying the things growing there. The landscape is convoluted, a wrinkle or fold in space, that creates implausible distances between points that would otherwise be near: it is only a hundred yards to the grey, cathedral-like shed of the Dammtor Station, another hundred yards to the spike of the Radisson Blue, the same distance in the other direction to the yellow-tiled passage descending from the bookstore kiosk at the Stephansplatz U-Bahn stop, but the park is heaped up here between these points, folded onto itself with moist, shadowy seams and ridges like the drapery in a 16th century engraving.
2.
On the edge of Planten un Blome, next to the busy avenue called Gorch-Fock-Wall, a big cube of pale, greyish sandstone sits on the knoll next to the subway entrance. This is a memorial to the dead soldiers of the Great War. A legion of indomitable troops, all of them with shouldered rifles, march across the stone surface carved in deep relief with bulb-shaped helmets and grimly set pointed jaws. The soldiers are cut into the rock in columns, receding into the sandstone, rank after rank of them marching in a pointless procession around the edges of the house-sized block. The marching men seem to uphold the heavy upper part of the square stone block, creating something of effect of a host of carytid-figures bearing the weight of the war on their shoulders and the tips of their carbines. The monument commemorates the 2nd Hanseatic regiment #76, a Hamburg infantry unit that fought in many battles in the First World War. A list of these encounters is inscribed at the base of the stone beneath the blunt, wedge-shaped frieze of the marching men’s boots. On the wall above the carved soldiers, these words appear “Deutschland muss leben / und wenn wir sterben muss” (“Germany must live even though we had to die.”)
Dedicated in 1936, the big grey block of incised sandstone has an impenetrable density. Whatever one might think of its ideology, the frieze of men marching indomitably to their deaths has a monumental dignity. Of course, these sorts of demonstrations of raw, mechanized patriotism are controversial in this county and, from time to time, vandals chisel off noses and fingers and helmets, creating abscesses like smallpox scars in the stone. Nearby, a small, neat tent is nestled between two ivy-overgrown walls that delimit the knoll’s commemorative space on which the altar-like monument is built from the rest of the park. The tent is made of green vinyl, staked down on the lawn, with a little stack of bottles nearby, a bivouac for a homeless man. (Germans recycle; each bottle is worth five cents, and the homeless often support themselves with this subsidy.) A dozen paces from the 76th regiment war memorial, a ribbon of aluminum letters cast between hollow rails twists around a concrete base, forming a contorted inscription suspended in the air. If there were sunlight, the letters on their brackets of metal would cast a complicated skein of shadows against the pavement but the sun can scarcely be remembered at this time of year. This is a monument to German war deserters, here portrayed as fighters against Fascism, and intended as a counterweight to the ponderous block of stone borne by the marching troops. And, not content with this adversary monument, as it were, another anti-war Denkmal stands a little distance away from the pavilion dedicated to the deserters. This memorial to the victims of Fascism is a shattered wall, broken down by the spear-points of a deconstructed swastika that seems to be smashing through the structure like a wrecking ball. The figure of a corpse with flattened face and shoulders, leans against the collapsing wall, an inarticulate mass of suffering cast in bronze with rough surfaces like a mutilated Giacometti. This monument is a mess, a tangle of ugly forms, and hard to decipher, although it is obviously meant to be disturbing. A metal stanchion with an inscription in gold letters says that “Germany commenced a war of aggression and annihilation against its neighbors” – these words identified as a decree of the Reichstag and precisely numbered (and dated) for reference.
The contrast between the clearly expressed heroic intent of the Regimental monument and the adjacent counter-monuments is startling. To succeed, a public memorial must be about something. The monument to the dead soldiers of 76th is ostensibly about heroism and sacrifice; it doesn’t glorify war explicitly and the marching ranks of troops are all dead men, shades walking in files into the underworld. But, nonetheless, the memorial has a point; it articulates a message from the dead, who speak in the words chopped into the top of the altar, a message from the Fallen to the living; it speaks to the obligations the living have to the dead. The nearby monuments to the Third Reich deserters and the victims of fascism are wholly negative – they are about negative qualities: that is, an absence of meaning, the pointlessness of war and sacrifice, the lies that are told in service of disastrous political decisions, depictions of untruths not truths – if these things impose obligations it is hard to say what they are. It’s not so easy to make a memorial to an absence, to negative qualities – to defeat and nothingness. And, so, there’s a sour odor of panic about the counter-memorials. Something has to be said in opposition to the marching martyrs of the 76th Regiment, the legion of men (the huge block of sandstone proclaims) who gave their lives so that Germany would survive. But the only thing that can be said, as witness the confusing welter of ineffectual counter-monuments is: Not this. Look at the memorial to the 76th and, then, reply “Not this.” But, then, what?
3.
The purpose for my trip to Hamburg in November 2023 was to attend concerts presented by the German goth band, the Lord of the Lost. My daughter, Angelica, is, perhaps, the band’s most loyal and obsessively dedicated fan. She is the band’s number one fan in all the world; among all the Lost, she is the most lost. The Lord of the Lost, led by Chris Harms, a native of Hamburg, produced a video in Altona, one of the boroughs of the city. The interior locations featured in this video were shot inside a cathedral-like space identified as the Kultur Kirche otherwise known as the Johannes Evangelical Church. Angelica wanted to visit this place and so we took the S-Bahn to the Holstenstrasse stop, supposedly a three minute “Fussweg” (“walk”) from the Church.
It’s three minutes from the S-Bahn station if you know the way, but, of course, longer if you aren’t familiar with the environs, a middle-class neighborhood with sooty-looking apartment buildings overlooking a web of tree-lined streets intersecting in wet, cramped corners, nothing exactly at right angles with the lanes arrowing off in eccentric directions. At street-level, some businesses glowed faintly like embers at the base of the gloom red-brick structures. In Hamburg, you navigate by church steeples, making your way from one tower to the next, and there were several grim-looking “Turme” here, a bit misleading because nearer steeples can seem larger then the more distant and more lofty towers – generally, you look for the tallest steeple, walk to it, and this will turn out to be your destination, although here there were several intermediate belfries at schools and borough halls to complicate the path.
We found the church after some false turns, a narrow soaring heap of red bricks, “Klinkerbau” as it is called here, stabbed upward into the wet sky. Everything was damp and the trees were laden with fat droplets that would have sparkled in the light if there were any rays available, but it was dark this morning, like the inside of a moist limestone cave. A homeless man had spread his sleeping bag under the pointed gothic threshold to the church, resting tightly against the tall bronze door at the base of huge brick spire. Other doors to the church were locked and Angelica wanted to try the front entrance under the sharply pointed arch overhead, but the figure in the sleeping bag, an enigmatic faceless mummy muffled against the cold prevented her from approaching too closely.
“I’m not going to step over that guy,” Angelica said.
I remarked that if the door were open, the cocoon of the sleeping bag would be inside and not outside on the cold steps. The church looked dark and sinister, with gloomy windows and orifices haunted by pigeons high overhead. According to its website, the Kultur Kirche can be rented for 24 hour stints at the rate of 2500 euros for weekdays and Sunday afternoons. (The charge costs 3000 euros for Friday). Photos show the interior of the church as bright, with mosaics that seem vaguely Byzantine decorating the pillars and Romanesque round vaults inside. The place is heavily scheduled with plays and travel lectures and candle-light rock and roll concerts on every weekend. But it was closed to us. We paced around the red stony heap of the building, trying all doors without success. The church is said to be neo-Gothic in style, designed by a famous Hamburg architect, and built around 1875. Of course, the place was bombed into a roofless, cavernous ruin in 1943 but was rebuilt since it was, then, an important neighborhood parish church. The Johannes Kirche burned again in 1994 and was rebuilt once more. There are Sunday services, but the structure’s main function now is to host cultural events, film screenings and concerts and poetry slams. A performance of several symphonies by Beethoven was scheduled for the upcoming weekend. I told Angelica that if she wanted to see the inside, we could come back in a couple days and attend the concert. She wasn’t interested.
The church occupies an irregularly shaped parcel of land, a wedge-shaped plaza with some small hedges, an old tree behind an iron fence with pointed posts, and a strange spectral apparition, a column concealed in drooping wet tarpaulin, a sort of pale ghost under the flanks of the big church. The apparition was a war memorial, here to the Hamburg 31st Infantry, another division that fought with distinction in the First World War. This memorial, apparently, was so toxic that it had to be hidden under a marble-colored drizzle of heavy canvas shrouds. Chain-link fences were wrapped around the disgraced monument and, here and there, the tarp draperies were in disarray. We could see some concentric plinths stacked atop one another like lilypads, then, the bare toes of sculptured warriors, upright figures with their heads concealed by the shrouds, apparently “Roland Figures”, that is, knights holding huge swords between their feet, upholding the Right with stone blades embedded at their tips in the pedestal and rising up to the chiseled, muscular sternums of the statues. Some kind of obelisk to which the tarps were tacked formed the back rest for the Roland Figures of which there seemed to be three, although the whole shape of the monument and its exact characteristics remained unclear, hidden by heavy veils of canvas.
(Photographs of the monument show some words cut into the round pad-shaped plinths stacked like an elaborate wedding cake at the base of a “Klinker”- brick pillar. The Roland Figures, apparently nude, stand on the three sides of the column forming an equilateral triangle – the figures are impassive, with breasts and shoulders heavily muscled like weightlifters or a bodybuilder such Arnold Schwartzenegger. They are either asleep or comatose with bland, mask-like faces and hooded eyes. None of this was clear when Angelica and I saw the monument, swathed as it was in a heavy, sculptural drapery of wet canvas.)
The Church website notes with disapproval that the monument to the 31st Infantry regiment was a site for frequent observances by army veterans until the mid-seventies when the soldiers of the Great War became, more or less, extinct. After the demise of the last of the regimental members, the memorial was simply an embarrassment, an alarming pile of red bricks built in a discredited style to commemorate events thought to have been toxic in their own right. In 1994, students at a local vocational school designed a counter-memorial, three large acrylic transparencies corresponding to the three admonitory knights with their shield-like swords. The transparencies are displayed on the lawn about twenty feet from the pillar of red brick. On these transparent sheets of acrylic, there are printed in frosted outline, concentration camp victims or, perhaps, dying prisoners of war or people suffering the effects of famine. The victims are bald with gaunt skeletal faces and bulging eyes in deep, dark eye-sockets. The colossal figures seem to crouch or knead their hands together as if to implore mercy or squat with bony knees tilted up to mimic the high spear-point of the church steeple and the lower prominence of the brick obelisk. The images are powerful and apotropaic, but, also, bear an unfortunate allusion. Contrived before Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the figures pre-date Gollum, crouching in his cold pool in the film, catching frogs for his dinner and mourning the loss of his “precious”. But the movie, seen by just about everyone, now makes visitors beholding the counter-memorial think of Gollum first and Auschwitz second or, even, third. A naive viewer might ask why the people in this neighborhood have elected to erect three huge images of the grotesque and tormented Gollum under the spire of their church.
4.
Returning from dinner in the teeming Sterneschanze district, we exited the train at one end of Dammtor platform, took the nearby escalator into the station, and, then, advanced into a tunnel suffused with blue light. The light was intense, not exactly festive, but bright enough to instill the tunnel walls with a neon-blue azure. Where were we? The tunnel was a place we had never been, although we had marched through this railroad station a dozen times or more.
Outside the tunnel, the trees and the brows of the grassy hills were all bathed in a deep blue glow. We were standing under the monolith of the Radisson Blue Hotel and its beacon lights had colored the entire landscape – the ornamental gardens, the wet trees, the rain emerging from the black sky and lying at our feet in luminous sky-colored puddles.
It was remarkable to find that a single wrong turn, that emerging from the familiar Dammtor station on its unfamiliar west side yielded this strange and magical landscape.
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