Baedekers

One of the set texts that I studied for A-level English Literature was E. M. Forster’s Howards End. I have a distinct memory of the silence that was the response when the class was asked what a Baedeker was. Having recently re-read Howards End, I cannot find such a reference to the eponymous guidebooks published by Karl Baedeker and his sons. It may have come up in discussion of the context of the book, an Edwardian ‘state of the nation’ work after the previous two ‘Baedeker’ novels, Where Angels Fear To Tread and A Room With A View, both of which have significant sections set in Italy, an essential part of the education of certain English classes at the time - and both of which mention Baedeker by name.  Although one of the main characters leaves England in Howards End, the action in the novel firmly remains in England. In Where Angels Fear To Tread, Forster creates a fictitious entry for the town of Monteriano in Baedeker’s "Central Italy" (looking at examples online, the Baedekers for Central Italy are titled specifically Central Italy and Rome).

During the summer after my A-levels, I spent most of my time either reading or drawing. Early summer had been hot and sunny, but July turned rainy, and, having studied Howards End, I read all of Forster's other novels, a couple of them in a day, and his short stories (other readings were Conrad's short stories in their hardback Everyman editions, and a large volume of Edgar Allan Poe). In Howards End, published in 1910, Forster's perspective on Germany feeds into a history for the Schlegels: their father left the Germany he loved through seeing it becoming distorted as a result of Bismarck's unification: "It was his hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge".

Looking at Baedekers from the period before the First World War, when Forster wrote all his novels except A Passage To India, among the books' notable approaches is the way that they are laid out: they are written in routes. Prior to air travel fundamentally changing an appreciation of physical space, travel could not escape contiguity: the only way to reach a destination was by moving through the landscape from one's point of origin. Therefore, a guidebook to one particular place - even though this might be the destination -  made less sense in a world confined to surface travel in a linear fashion. Travellers would naturally have an interest in negotiating the spaces and modes of transport in between, and before faster trains, reaching cities in the continent from England would entail several days' duration, so places to stay at nodal points along these linear routes were also of interest. Thus, tracing the routes in Baedeker's The Rhine and Northern Germany (1870), my journey to Wuppertal encompasses:

[Route] 1. From Brussels to Cologne.

By Express in 6 1/2 hrs.; fares 27 fr. 75, 20 fr. 50 c. Custom-house formalities at Cologne (or at Aix-la-Chapelle , if the traveller proceeds no farther). Finest views between Louvain and Liège to the right. District between Liège and Aix-la-Chapelle replete with interest. 

[Then Route 42 from Cologne to Düsseldorf.] 

[Route] 47. From Düsseldorf to Cassel.

Express in 8 3/4, ordinary trains in 13 hrs.; fares 7 Thlr. 25, 5 Thlr. 18, 3 Thlr. 25 Sgr. District as far as Dortmund and beyond Paderborn picturesque and industrial; structure of the line itself an object of interest. From the convent of Gerresheim (first stat[ion]., fine church of the 12th cent.), Archbishop Gebhard of Cologne abducted the beautiful Countess Agnes of Mansfeld. After passing Erkrath (hydropathic estab.), the train ascends to Hochdahl (large iron-foundry of Eintracht), 494 ft. higher than Düsseldorf.

[...]

Vohwinkel (see above) is a junction of the Prince William line (Steele-Vohwinkel), principally used for the coal traffic.

From Vohwinkel to Steele in 1/4 hr.; fares 27, 20, 13 Sgr. —
Beyond stat[ion]. Aprath the line crrosses the watershed between the Wupper and the Ruhr, and then follows the valley of the Deile. Stat[ion]. Neriges, a resort of pilgrims, with an old chateau; stat[ion]. Langenberg possesses several thriving silk factories. At stat[ion]. Kupferdreh the Ruhrthal is suddenly entered, presenting a striking and picturesque contrast to the narrow sinuosities of the Deilethal. Numerous coal-mines are passed. Where the train crosses the Ruhr, a pleasing glimpse of the valley is obtained. 

[...]

At Sonnborn the train suddenly enters the valley of the Wupper, traverses it, then skirts the hill-side, commanding a view of Elberfeld below.

Elberfeld [...], pop. 65,321 (12,000 Rom. Cath.), and the adjoining town of Barmen [...], with 64,945 inhab., together form a series of streets nearly 6m. in length, intersected by the road, railway, and the Wupper, which is the principal source of the industry of this district. With the exception of some English towns, there is probably no spot in the world so densely populated. Its principal manufactures are cotton, silk, ribbon, and turkey-red dyed goods. Some of the churches and public edifices are handsome, but, like the towns themselves, of very modern date.

Elberfeld and Barmen, already physically joined at this date, would become Wuppertal ("Wupper-Valley") in a referendum of 1930. I haven't calculated how long the whole journey would have taken, but in 1870, Brussels to Cologne - by express - took six and a half hours. My train was 1 hour and 47 minutes. Wuppertal's principal 'manufacture' is now pharmaceuticals: the giant Bayer factory spreads the distance of a few stops of the Schwebebahn.

Forster's characters embody differing perspectives on the ubiquitous Baedeker. In Where Angels Fear To Tread it is seen as an essential source of information, as it is also seen by Lucy in A Room With A View: “Taking up Baedeker's Handbook to Northern Italy, she committed to memory the most important dates of Florentine History. For she was determined to enjoy herself on the morrow”; meanwhile Eleanor Lavish, the novelist, is dismissive: "I hope we shall soon emancipate you from Baedeker. He does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy—he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation." and:

"Lucy, who wanted to see Santa Croce, suggested, as a possible solution, that they should ask the way there. 'Oh, but that is the word of a craven! And no, you are not, not, NOT to look at your Baedeker. Give it to me; I shan't let you carry it. We will simply drift.'"

E. M. Forster, A Room with a View

Eleanor Lavish, who, by drifting, in this scene effects another meeting between Lucy and the Emersons, is a Situationist avant le lettre.

Cologne to Wuppertal

Eastward bound trains leaving Cologne cross the Hohenzollern bridge over the Rhine. Either side of the railway bridge are two pedestrian walkways. On the southern one, the metal grills over the railings which separate the footpath from the railway tracks are covered in padlocks, so much so that the metal grills can no longer be seen - it appears a solid wall of padlocks (on the other side of the bridge for some reason, the padlocks are many fewer). In Tales From The Fast Trains: Europe at 186 MPH, Tom Chesshyre describes it as:

"an extraordinary fence covered in thousands of locked padlocks, running alongside a footpath. [Their Cologne guide says:] 'It was a craze that began two years ago. Nobody knows why. People lock a padlock and throw the key in the water, so that love will last - like the lock.'"

The book came out in 2011, and this phenomenon, not elaborated upon, apparently dates back to a century ago, in Serbia in the First World War. However, it has gathered incredible popularity in less than a decade, thanks, it seems, to an Italian book and film of 2006 and 2007. It's something I've observed in continental Europe in recent years, in Paris, where it brought down a parapet of the Pont Des Arts bridge, in St Petersburg, in Hamburg, and now in Stockholm. Here I saw a few locks on the fence around the view point at Monteliusvägen. As the tradition dictates, the lovers affix the padlock, then throw the key into the water: from Monteliusvägen, one would need a superhuman throw to land the key in the Riddarfjärden. Perhaps the keys just dropped onto cars on Torkel Knutssonsgatan.

As described in the 1870 Baedeker The Rhine and Northern Germany, the train arrives 'suddenly' into the Wupper valley. On the left hand side of the train at Varresbeck, the Schwebebahn is seen. This caused some interest among other passengers - on both sides of the train - looking out of the windows to see, and for much of the remaining distance, the train runs parallel to the Schwebebahn to Wuppertal Hauptbahnhof.

Wuppertal was, in the 19th century, a populous and built up area. It was limited by its geography: the Wupper valley is narrow with steep sides, which controlled the expansion of the towns along its length which make it up; other nearby conurbations in the Rhine-Ruhr area were better able to expand, especially in industrial capacity. The unique Schwebebahn ('floating' or 'hovering railway') was opened in 1901. The system was designed by Eugen Langen to sell to Berlin. For much of its length it is suspended above the Wupper river itself: in an already built up area, finding the space to construct a light rail system would have been difficult, as the geology would also make tunnelling for an underground metro prohibitively expensive. The Schwebebahn makes use of the open space over the river, and then departs from the river's course at the western end from Sonnborner Strasse to Vohwinkel.

From one end at Oberbarmen, to Vohwinkel, the journey takes about half an hour, and the trains are regular, when I was in Wuppertal on Sunday, trains appeared every 6-8 minutes and were well used by local people and tourists alike - there were a number of other people, mostly men, taking photographs of, and on the train. As it travels between 8-12 metres above the river and the streets, it provides good views of the town. The section I mostly travelled on, from the main station to the end at Vohwinkel, passes alongside the vast Bayer complex, which runs for the length of the Schwebebahn for three stations - at places on both sides of the river - where aspirin was first synthesised.

Taking to the Schwebebahn for the first time, one is struck by the narrowness of the train, and how it moves. As it comes to a stop, especially after coming around a bend, the train rocks from side to side. There is a notice warning passengers about this, in German only. The trains comprise two carriages, joined in a flexible fashion as are many contemporary light trains. Inside there is room for two transverse seats in rows in the main sections of the carriages with an aisle along one side. The aisle gives out onto the doors, which are on one side of the train only: station platforms are always on the right of the direction of travel, and the trains travel around a loop at the end of the line to return in the reverse direction. In Alice In The Cities, one does not quite get a sense of the narrowness of the carriages. As the trains always travel in the same directions, there is only a drivers' cab at the front: at the back of the train, there are three seats in a row underneath the rear window. As with the front of the Docklands Light Railway trains in London, these seats are very popular - especially with children.

Border Crossings

"Indeed, nothing makes us more sensible of the immense relapse into which the world fell after the First World War than the restrictions on man's freedom of movement and the diminution of his civil rights. Before 1914 the earth had belonged to all. People went where they wished and stayed as long as they pleased. There were no permits, no visas, and it always gives me pleasure to astonish the young by telling them that before 1914 I traveled from Europe to India and to America without passport and without ever having seen one."

Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday, 1942

"Today I'm so old that I'm almost blind. When I first opened my eyes to the light, in 1915, all the countries of Europe were busy slaughtering each other. And each of those countries felt justice was on its side. […] Now that my eyes have almost completely dimmed, I see, by that last light, that the countries of Europe are embracing each other and forgetting their borders. That whole turnaround took place within the space of my almost ninety years. I still find that unbelievable. But I also know how difficult it has been."

Vittorio Foa, quoted in In Europe: Travels through the twentieth century, Geert Mak, 2004

Having travelled from London to Brussels, to Cologne, through Germany to Denmark and finally Sweden these past few days, I needed only to show my passport to leave London. A year and a half ago, travelling to St Petersburg, the passport and a visa were required to enter Russia, which we did by train from Helsinki. All countries in between are now part of the Schengen Area, where internal border controls have disappeared; a consequence of this disappearance is the relative strengthening of external borders. Our bags were x-rayed leaving Russia, but not when boarding the train at Helsinki Central station. Crossing the border separating Finland and Russia by train occurs between the towns of Vainikkala and Vyborg. Customs and passport officials from both countries get on the train and examine the passengers' travel documents at their seats, while the train moves - slowly - from one stop to the next in the 'customs surveillance zone'. A man with a Norwegian passport at our table pronounced it "very John Le Carré", though in truth it was a relatively simple set of checks, and no bags were opened (leaving Russia I was asked how much Russian currency I had; bags were only opened at the controls when getting back onto the Eurostar at Brussels). The border itself appears to be a no-man's land in the birch forest: the trees are cleared along the line of the border, there are wire fences running alongside the track itself, and there was a guard with an automatic weapon standing by his vehicle on a dirt track.

However, as a citizen of the United Kingdom, a passport is still necessary in the Schengen Area thanks to the UK's opt out of the agreement, and the lack of identity cards: when visiting the Moderna Museet in the three hours between the ferry from Helsinki and the train to Copenhagen, not wanting to change any currency to Swedish Kronor, we did not have change for the lockers. Asking at the desk, I was told that they would provide a 5-kronor coin for the lockers on security of my ID card: there was a moment's perplexity when I handed over my passport instead. Despite Stefan Zweig's assertions above, about travel before the First World War, passports were still of use, if not strictly necessary, in the same fashion as they are today when the holder does not have an identity card:

“In Northern Germany, as well as in France, Belgium, and Holland, passports are unnecessary. Those, however, who contemplate an extension of their tour to the Austrian dominions cannot cross the frontier without one of these documents, which must moreover have the visa of the Austrian ambassador at London, or other European capital. It should also be borne in mind that a passport may frequently be necessary to prove the identity of the traveller, procure admission to collections, obtain delivery of registered letters etc., in countries where the possession of such credentials is in other respects unnecessary.”

The Rhine and Northern Germany, Karl Baedeker, 1870

Nevertheless, as a UK national outside of the Schengen Area, travel by the Eurostar - and by ferry - is still less of an ordeal than travelling by plane. When boarding, there is none of the sense of entering a zone of exception that one gets at airports, although the security is still stringent; travelling to Denmark on the now discontinued Harwich-Esbjerg ferry, leaving the UK and entering the Schengen Area was even easier - there was no requirement to be there half an hour before boarding such as there is with the Eurostar, and the London to Harwich train used to arrive just minutes before the ferry sailed. This last fact felt not to be trusted at the time: however, taking the previous scheduled train - a whole hour earlier - there was then precious little to do in the tiny ferry terminal, quite unlike a modern airport, where all the enforced waiting time seems primarily to be diverted to consumption.

The opening of Wim Wenders' Lisbon Story, from 1994 is a condensed road movie in itself, travelling from Dusseldorf in Germany, to Lisbon, Portugal, a celebration of the new Europe of the Schengen Agreement. Lisbon Story begins with a montage of a postcard from the title city arriving, then becoming buried amongst a subsequent accumulation of post (including a newspaper with a byline ‘Ciao Federico’ announcing the death of Fellini - which echoes the end of Alice In The Cities, where a newspaper Philip is reading announces the death of the director John Ford; incidentally Lisbon Story has a cameo role for Manoel de Oliveira, the Portuguese film director who began his career in the silent era and whose death has just been announced). The post is addressed to 'Philip Winter', and the postcard is retrieved from the pile, by a hand, all that is seen of Philip at this point. The postcard is turned so that the viewer can read it:

“Mensch! Winter! I need your help! I cannot continue. M.O.S.! S.O.S.! Come to Lisbon with all your stuff A.S.A.P. Big hug, Fritz” [A stamp on the card reads:] “No Fon/No Fax/Write"

As this is read out, as a voice-over, the scene then shifts to a view through the windscreen of a moving car - the phantom ride again. As the credits appear, the voice-over combines with a radio soundtrack of various snatches of music and speech, in a series of quick, hard cuts all with the same view framed by the windscreen as the car travels from Germany to Paris, and then through France to Spain. The weather changes, and the monotony of  motorway driving is broken up by a couple of views from the car, apparently arriving at a hotel, then cutting to its onward journey. The audio montage of radio and music acts as an overture: there are snippets of the group Madredeus, who will feature later in the film, but as well as looking forwards, this rapid switching of music also looks back to Wim Wenders' road movies of the 1970s, as it features the German group Can, who provided the music for Alice In The Cities. What begins apparently as a stream of consciousness voice-over, is revealed, as it continues, as a spoken monologue by Philip to himself as he drives:

Europe has no borders.
The barriers have been lifted and anyone can cross over.
Can't I show my passport to anyone?
Please, let me open the boot!
You're not going to believe what I've got in here!
Testing, one, two, three, one, two.
I haven't travelled such a long distance by car in a long time.
I realise that Europe is becoming a single nation...
The languages change, the music changes, the news is different, but...
The landscape speaks the same language
and tells stories of an old continent filled with war and peace.
It's nice to drive without thinking about anything,
passing here and there through stories and the ghost of history.
Here, I feel at home.
This is my homeland! [The voiceover has been in German up to this point; this last sentence is repeated in French, Spanish, English, Portuguese. The voiceover continues by repeating the phrases in Portuguese from a tape.]
I'm looking for a book to study Portuguese.
What kind of book?
Big or small?
Small. [Here we see Philip Winter for the first time, five minutes into the film, driving the car in a reverse angle shot through the windscreen.]
But you already speak Portuguese.
I don't speak well, I'm a foreigner.
Are you English?
No, I'm French...
[Philip says:] No, I'm German.
But I live in Portugal.
Lesson No. 1.
I'll never learn this...
[A sign with 'Portugal 40km' is seen in long shot from outside the car.]
Again.
Lesson No.1. In the bookshop.
Good morning.

The tape continues after Philip gets a flat tyre, and once the car pulls in to the side of the road, when he gets out, we see for that he has a leg in a cast and is using a crutch. This helps to provide something of a slapstick tone, when Philip knocks the spare tyre, which he had just placed on the parapet of the bridge where he has stopped, into the river below. Having repaired the flat tyre, he arrives at partly demolished customs building on the Portuguese border with his engine overheating. There is no one around: the building is empty and the phone does not work. Philip flags down a coach, waving his crutch in the middle of the road, and we see him topping up the car's radiator with bottles of soft drink. The car soon breaks down once more, and we then see Philip on the back of a donkey cart with piles of his belongings, including the license plate, 'F-PW-94'.

Brussels to Cologne

The last time I was in Cologne, it was for less than an hour to change trains, boarding the City Night Line sleeper service to Copenhagen. On Saturday, I had most of the afternoon. With a few hours to spare before catching the train to Wuppertal, one thing I wanted to seek out in Cologne was Ernst Barlach's Der Schwebende. A literal translation is 'The Hovering' (as the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal is the hovering or floating train) but it's generally known as the Hovering Angel or simply Barlach's Angel; I had seen the Güstrow version of this sculpture in the recent British Museum exhibition Germany: Memories of a Nation. In Neil MacGregor's book to accompany the exhibition he details the remarkable survival of the Hovering Angel. Barlach's work was included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition and the original sculpture was destroyed. However, a cast had been hidden, but at the end of the war it could not be returned to Güstrow Cathedral, now in what would become East Germany. The surviving bronze cast was installed in the Antonite Church in Cologne. As a sign of cross-border friendship a new cast was made from the second Hovering Angel to be placed back in Güstrow Cathedral. This was the sculpture displayed in the British Museum. Barlach's experiences in the First World War made him a pacifist, but Der Schwebende is ambiguous as a memorial in terms of a position on the war itself, Barlach intended it to be approached by the viewer with "recollection and inner reflection". It represents muted grief with the features, appropriately, of Käthe Kollwitz, who lost a son at the start of the conflict. This lack of positioning made the sculpture suspect for the Nazis, beyond stylistic considerations: totalitarian regimes cannot stand ambiguity, as it allows for open interpretations. In Güstrow, the sculpture is suspended above the old font; in the Antonite Church Der Schwebende hangs above a slab which simply reads: 1914 - 1918/1933 - 1945.

Erasures

"A map is the most exciting thing in the world for me; when I see a map, I immediately feel restless, especially when it's of a country or a city where I've never been. I look at all the names and I want to know the things they refer to, the cities of a country, the streets of a city. When I look at a map, it turns into an allegory for the whole of life. The only thing that makes it bearable is to try to mark out a route, and follow it through the city or country. Stories do just that: they become your roads in a strange land, where but for them, you might go to thousands of places without ever arriving anywhere."

 'Impossible Stories', Wim Wenders, in The Logic of Images

In The American Friend, some shots of Jonathan Zimmerman's framing workshop show it to have a street sign on the wall above the placard "Gemülde/Rahmen". This can just be read as 'Kleiner Pinnas'. An online search found no street by this name in Hamburg. However, other shots in the film show the strreet which this joins, with the name 'Lange Strasse'. One feature of my research before leaving London was the availability of viewing maps online - and in some cases, using Google Street View when available, which it was in Wuppertal, but not Gelsenkirchen. On Google Maps, Lange Strasse is shown running parallel to a street named Pinnasberg, before turning to join it. There is an unnamed path - in grey - connecting the two before this turning. On Open Street Map this is shown as a footpath that cuts behind the houses from Lange Strasse to Pinnasberg. The street name where the framing workshop is clearly a diminutive derivative of Pinnasberg.

This part of Hamburg, St Pauli, has been transformed in the years since the film. The whole riverside and dock area has been subject to massive investment, and between St Pauli and the old centre of Hamburg is the huge Hafencity development, where islands of old warehouses have been replaced by modern offices and a new concert hall. Some of this investment has been spread along the dockside to St Pauli. In the film, shots of  the Zimmermans' apartment, and the shop, show large areas of open, undeveloped land, often functioning as car parks. There is some preparation of the foundations for a block in Lange Strasse, a detail in the background, showing the beginning of the process of filling in these gaps. Arriving in St Pauli, the building used in the film for the apartment is easy to find, on the bend of St Pauli Fischmarkt, despite being blocked on Street View (something I have found to be common in my searches for the various locations in German cities). However, the blurred panels appeared to be the right shape and size, and the satellite imagery looked as though, from the roof, it might be the same building, which it was. Since the film, all the vacant plots around the apartment building have been filled with new blocks, and there has been a new dock wall built separating the road from the dockside; in the film, the ground in front of the apartment leads uninterrupted onto the dockside.This wall has presumably been built for flood defence purposes, and there are road signs referring to flooding in the area. The road in front of the apartment is far busier than it is shown in the film. The buildings opposite the apartment with the graffiti are gone, and the view from the Zimmermans' apartment no longer has the sense of open space as it is shown to have in the film.

Shots of Kleiner Pinnas in the film show it sloping away from the dockside, a straight perspective view used to good effect when lit from behind with the low winter sun shining on the cobbles. Finding Lange Strasse located just a couple of blocks behind St Pauli Fischmarkt (in the film there is no sense how close these are), I discovered why Kleiner Pinnas has disappeared from the map. As best shown on Open Street Map, where once this small road connected Pinnasberg and Lange Strasse, the space behind this two rows of apartment blocks is now a communal garden with a footpath, not straight, but with a serpentine route from street to street and the incline has been changed, steeper at one end, more level in the middle, behind the houses. There is a children's play area and what appear to be mature trees, though these must be less than forty years old, making it a little difficult to picture it as it looks in the film. At the Lange Strasse end, there is a sunken garage and its ramp fills most of the width of where the street once was, with the footpath running up one side. However, although the street sign for Kleiner Pinnas has gone, and with it an erasing of the identity of this small thoroughfare, the building it was on, Jonathan's framing shop, is still there. It is now a beauty parlour of some kind.

After Jonathan's apartment and workshop, the other Hamburg locations of The American Friend are all easy to find, both in virtual terms and in Hamburg itself. The St Pauli Elbtunnel which Johnathan runs through to and from his doctor still functions as a crossing for the Elbe. I descended into it after six in the evening when the lifts which take the cars from street level to the tunnel stop running. The Dom funfair, shown in a brief scene, takes place at Christmas and Easter; it was just opening when I arrived - the lights of the distinctive sign above the gate came on while I was taking photographs. What doesn't show in the film, as the scene takes place after dark, is the giant bulk of the Heiligengeistfeld Flakturm, which dominates views of the funfair.

Finally, I took a long walk to see Ripley's villa on Elbchauseestrasse. From the balcony above the portico, this has commanding views over the Elbe, back towards the docks. This, the Säulenvilla, is in itself considered something of a local landmark, having an entry - and picture - on one of the information panels that feature around Hamburg. The description reads:

1817 von dem Baumeister Axel Bundsen fur den Hamburger-Russland-Kauffman und Reeder Wilhelm Brandt erichtes Landhaus, einer Villa auf der Krim nachempfunden.

The American Friend isn't mentioned.