Because in the end, all travel is about memory. Mine, yours, our families’, everyone’s –
distant memories, recent, for all time. Take, for example, the short train trip from Berlin, the
arrival at Oranienburg, the station with the McDonald’s (or was it a Burger King?). The walk
across town, and I stopped and asked a man on his bike:
‘We’re lost. We’re looking for Sachsenhausen.’
He stared at me, my wife, my kids, like we were alien invaders, trespassers in his small German town. He pointed, we continued along the icy river with its willow trees and fat swans, all so ordinary. I stopped to read the sign that said the buildings across the bridge had been SS barracks. No sign of it now, just a Lidl with bunches of daffodils, the smell of currywurst, a road crew digging up cobblestones, looking at us like something was all our fault.
We made it to the camp, waited in line in the office as a tour group filed in, fitted their
headphones, put on their orange beanies. The books in English, German and French
explaining Himmler’s first, pre-franchised concentration camp, not so much for the Jews as
the Berlin intellectuals and communists and gays, a few Seventh-day Adventists, perhaps.
Like somehow, if we read about it, it’d make sense.
Along a cobbled road, past trees and unmown grass and tall weeds that should’ve
been cleared. Even here, wouldn’t you? Clear the weeds. The smell of something dead, the
wet ground, the bulbs, the pea and ham soup from the SS barracks across the road, the sound
of singing, an accordion, dogs barking, although it was just silence. A memorial garden with
more explanations, life stories, dates to allow you to say, oh well, I understand now, that was
when Bradman was still playing for Australia, the Olympics, the Depression, I get it now. But
even then, the sense of the stories and the memories had gone the way of the people, the strands of barbed wire blowing in the wind, the Bessa brick towers, like it all could all start again.
In through the gates with their grimly ironic Arbeit Macht Frei. And looking across where the
camp had been – the outlines of once-were-huts filled in with gravel and the shouts, still, to
get in line, to watch this troublemaker (‘Watch!’), beaten for insubordination.
We started at Station Z, the execution pits and crematorium. Irony, again, because
there was nothing after Z. Looking across a field, a scattering of snow, a few cars in a park,
modern houses built close the edge of the camp. Someone was bringing in their washing.
This seemed strange – to think you’d ever get your clothes dry in a place like this. The same
yard with trimmed lawns, bare-limbed trees, like nothing had ever happened here. A kid’s
ball, a bike, a TV flickering inside the house. The death pit, as we stood imagining, as we
always do when we travel because, now, we’re forced to imagine these people and their
killers and their uniforms with the top buttons unfastened and someone’s (did he stand here,
in this spot?) last thoughts of Opa, how he’d sit and stroke his beard and call for me to sit on
his knee and sing some song about ... what was it?
The photographer Diane Arbus once said, ‘The farther afield you go, the more you are
going home.’ The feeling, when you arrive somewhere new, that you’ve been there before.
Like a stylus being lowered into the grooves of an old 78. The birdcalls and muttered
comments and whatever it was Freud meant by unheimlich, uncanny, the gap between the
familiar and recognisable.
Heading back to Berlin in a snowstorm, everything so strange, but known to me. Was it a film I’d seen? A book I’d read? Or something else? Is this why we travel? We Australians, in our one-size-fits-all suburbs, busy with our prefabricated lives purged of history and memory and colour and smell, and even suffering. Do we long to see what made us, or at least our ancestors? Is it that life without context is no life at all?
In Berlin, the streets and parks and gardens were frozen, the Reichstag lit up, wet flags trying their best to flutter in the wind, the jackboot-black sky, the tree trunks painted white, the unremitting geometry of the streets and buildings of the government district, the pavements all blue ice and plastic forks and fag ends, and it was all so ordinary. Under the Brandenberg Gate, towering above parades and marches and riots and the Uber guy with his box of pizzas, seemingly oblivious to everything.
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Stephen Orr is an Adelaide-based writer of novels, short stories and essays. His work explores the dynamics of families in particularly Australian landscapes. His latest novel, Shining Like the Sun, concerns one man's efforts to hold a dying mallee town together.
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