Postcards 1

From London to St Petersburg, 2013

Panoramania

Just before our first year college trip to Paris, in November/December 1994, the normal Monday morning lecture was put aside. Reading my diary from Monday 28th November 1994, I described it as:

"We didn't have a lecture as such, rather Stephen Johnstone talked us through some slides, giving general advice about the trip, telling us what to avoid [I seem to remember advice not to go anywhere near Pigalle], how to look less like a British tourist than we inevitably will, but mainly went through the gamut of exhibitions that, all of which we are supposed to find time to see. Of course, Robert Radford had to prompt him to mention his (Stephen's) [with Graham Ellard] own piece in an exhibition in the Pompidou Centre." [I did go to see this piece, though only mentioned the fact that I did without passing comment.]

I recall Stephen Johnstone talking about the need to go up tall things - both the Eiffel Tower, of course, and the Pompidou Centre, then still relatively new - to make sense of the topography a new city, a distinctly self-conscious experience of urban modernity. This has become conflated with the panorama in my memory, a different 19th century phenomenon. There was a book titled Panoramania!, by Ralph Hyde, which came out in 1988 - did Stephen Johnstone show a slide of the cover image, which feels familiar enough to be a genuine memory, during the lecture?

The first panorama to be exhibited in Germany was Robert Barker’s Panorama of London from 1792, shown in Hamburg in 1799 in a specially built octagonal wooden structure in the New Market. This panorama, a first major success for Barker, was a 360-degree view of the city, and was first exhibited in London. Four years later a panorama of Hamburg appeared in Hamburg itself, followed by a second in 1806: “Now our city, too has finally “arrived” and may see its own walls reproduced, thanks to the skill and three-year effort of an artist from Milan by the name of Taragniola” - The Nordische Miscellen, quoted in Stephen Oetterman, The Panorama; this panorama was not apparently very popular, and four years later the same artist produced a new version displayed at the rotunda at the Reeperbahn (which has originally been showing a panorama of Vienna). The building on the Reeperbahn was destroyed by French troops in 1814. Altona, now entirely subsumed by the city of Hamburg, had its own panorama by Jess Bundsen between 1818-1823.

Historically, the panorama was a new, immersive form of pre-cinematic visual entertainment. With many travelling panoramas being able to bring far cities near, or battle scenes, it is a notable feature that most often a panorama of a particular city would be exhibited in that city itself. This suggests that the viewers of these panoramas were most impressed by the spectacle of the technology, especially when these panoramas featured views that for most of their public would have been easily accessible - such as the panorama of London made from the top of St Paul's Cathedral. However, there were still many notable panoramas showing distant locations or battles to an interested public. In The View From The Train, Patrick Keiller writes about the beguiling aspects of the city and street webcams that began to appear in the early days of the spread of the internet, and their possibilities of fracturing space, a concern of Keiller's, and also their often unmediated qualities. In the age of Google Street View, these static, low resolution, low refresh-rate cameras feel like an odd, nearly forgotten niche survival from early net idealism. Nevertheless, before leaving London, I did view a number of sites featuring these municipal cameras, just to get an idea of weather conditions in Hamburg and Stockholm. Street View itself is much more instrumental in its design, but as previously written about, a number of places in German cities were either not covered by it, or blocked, blurred out. One wonders whether this may in part be due to memories of regimes with deep surveillance programs.

Ignoring Stephen Johnstone's advice, I didn't visit the Eiffel Tower until the third time I was in Paris. What is perhaps interesting about the Eiffel Tower is that its only function was as a huge viewing platform from which to gain a novel perspective on the city, much like the earlier panoramas. Originally temporary, it soon had an extra use when the new technology of radio appeared a few years later. Radio masts became a discrete architecture phenomenon of the early twentieth century, with notable examples in Berlin and Moscow. However, it was the development of microwave technology which provided the last great impetus for building tall structures in many cities around the world which were often open to the public for the purpose of viewing the city.

A couple of days ago, I visited the Kaknästornet in Stockholm. I had seen this from a distance when previously in Stockholm, on taking the ferry to Helsinki. The Kaknästornet makes no concessions to anything architectural other than pure utility. It was part of the 1960s glut of so-called TV towers, which were for telecommunications in general, but for the particular technological phase of microwave transmissions, that, unlike radio, need line-of-sight; this was just before satellite transmission began to supplement this role. These TV towers often became emblems of civic - or ideological - pride, such as the Fernsehturm in East Berlin, or the Post Office Tower in London, a symbol of the 'white heat' of technology. Now their aspirational qualities often have a kitsch, tacky edge to them, if indeed the towers are still open to the public, with sky-bars and revolving restaurants, which feel to represent the genuine, commonly held belief in the notion of 'progress'.

Copenhagen to Stockholm

From Copenhagen to Stockholm the journey is a little over five hours by direct SJ X2000 tilting train. Rather than buy the ticket as a separate stage, I had actually bought a ticket from Hamburg to Stockholm. Booking with DB allows one to select a stop over of a number of hours for no extra cost - in this case twenty-four. As this journey would entail changing trains at Copenhagen anyway, by stopping overnight in Copenhagen I broke what would have been a rather long day on trains (around ten hours) by staying overnight. The Copenhagen to Stockholm train crosses the Öresund link - the bridge and the Drogden tunnel leading to it. Perhaps this is the future of the Puttgarden to Rodby route - almost but not entirely seamless crossing of borders. Between Copenhagen Airport Kastrup and Malmö, Swedish customs officers board the train. Having taken this route three times now, the customs officers only seem to ask passengers to indicate which bags are theirs. The SJ X2000 trains are generally very comfortable, ideal for a five hour journey (by contrast, the Eurostar trains are now looking a bit tired after twenty years), with free wireless internet, a good buffet car, with free refills on hot drinks. The only aspect that consistently seems to let the trains down are the toilets, which become quite messy and smelly as the journey time progresses: boarding the train at Copenhagen, it had already come from Fredericia a couple of hours away. It strikes me that the train does not contain enough toilets for the amount of passengers or the length of the journey.

One Hundred Years

Passing through north-western Europe on the Eurostar from London to Brussels, the train crosses the front line of 1915 a short distance east of Armentières. At school thirty years ago we were taught the song Mademoiselle from Armentières for a play about the First World War, possibly for the then seventieth anniversary of the conflict. For contemporary sensibilities, the lyrics - of which there are a few variants - would perhaps now be considered risque for ten-year-olds.

In May 2001 I travelled from London to Paris by train for the first time, and then on to Luxembourg. The train from Paris left on a late Spring afternoon, travelling east as the evening approached. At the time I thought about the fact that somewhere on this route the train would be passing through the sites of the First World War. It's a commonplace observation to make much of how the internet has changed lives in the developed world; once aspect of which has changed definitively is travel. In 2001 I went to the Air France/Rail France offices in Piccadilly to book my train tickets to Luxembourg, something not then possible online. Although I probably could have obtained detailed information on the stations that I passed through, and the route the train took, it was sufficient that I could get to Luxembourg in an afternoon. The long train stopped and divided at Metz. The time taken for this operation meant that I took a little more interest in the station than some of the others that we had passed through. The station had very long platform and imposing architecture which suggested it was of great importance. Only later did I discover that Metz was a station on the Kanonenbahn - the 'Cannons Railway', a strategic military route across Germany to France including areas annexed after the Franco-Prussian war, anticipating the next conflict. Now, thanks to online archives, it is possible to see trench maps from the First World War, and overlay these with the current rail routes (which are often the same lines as a hundred years ago) to see where front lines would have been.

Although the First World War was studied at both primary and secondary school I attended, there were no trips to see the battlefields and cemeteries of Northern France and Flanders. These school trips are seemingly rather more common now: my brother, sixteen years my junior, did do so, for example. After the cessation of hostilities, while the landscape of north-western Europe was still devastated, the first tours began:

"In 1919, only months after the end of the First World War, the first tourist guides to the battle fields were published. Both the French railway companies and Michelin, the motor-touring company, produced guidebooks full of maps and photographs of key landmarks. Strangely however, these publications refer to the same 'sights' as normal tourist guidebooks-churches, chateaux and town halls- albeit with the repeated caveats 'all that remains of...' or 'ruins of...'

Conflict Time Photography, eds. Simon Baker and Shoair Mavlian

At the time, the proximity of the war to the urban populations of Paris and London, and the scale of industrial destruction created a perfect spectacle. For non-combatants, any understanding of the nature of the conflict could perhaps only be realised by seeing the battlefields themselves. The Austrian writer Karl Kraus satirised these trips by mimicking the language of one actual prospectus in his Promotional Trips to Hell: the particular object of his satire is 'Battlefield Round Trips by Automobile organised by the Basel News':

"You leave from Basel on the evening express in second class carriages.
You are picked up at the Metz railway station and taken to the hotel by car.
You stay overnight in a luxury hotel - service and gratuities included.
You enjoy an ample breakfast.
You leave Metz in a comfortable automobile and are taken through the battlefield area of 1870-81
You are taken on a guided tour of the very interesting blockhouse at Etain [...]
You ride through destroyed villages to the fortress area of Vaux with its enormous cemeteries containing hundreds of thousands of fallen men.
You view with a guide the subterranean casemates of Fort Vaux.
You visit the Ossuaire (charnel house) of Thiamount, the continual depository of the remains of fallen men.
You get free admission to Fort Douaumont."

Kraus:

"You receive your newspaper in the morning.
You read how comfortable survival has been made for you.
You learn that 1 1/2 millions had to bleed to death in the very place where wine and coffee and everything else are included.
You have the decided advantage over those martyrs and dead men of first-rate accommodation and food in the Ville-Martyrs and at the Raven de la Mort.
You ride to the battlefield in a comfortable automobile, while those men got there in cattle cars.
You hear about all that is offered you by way of compensation for the sufferings of those men and for an experience whose purpose, meaning, and cause you have not been able to discover to this day.
You understand that it was organised so that some day, when nothing is left of the glory but bankruptcy, that there might at least be a battlefield par excellence."

Karl Kraus, Promotional Trips to Hell

Seven years later, Stefan Zweig approached the subject in an essay on Ypres. One assumes that he must have known Kraus' piece of invective, and the tone is occasionally similar:

"For ten marks you have it all: the entire four years of war, the graves, the huge guns, the shelled cloth-hall, with lunch or dinner, all comforts and a nice strong tea, conforming to the information displayed on every placard. Not a shop exists where they don't profit from the dead. They even offer curios made from shell splinters (perhaps these very same shells tore out the entrails of a human being), charming souvenirs of the battlefield,"

Stefan Zwieg, 'Ypres', in Journeys

For Zweig, the commercialisation of the the war seems to be the most troubling aspect, whereas with Kraus, it becomes an object of taste primarily. By the time Zweig wrote 'Ypres', the devastation of the war was already being brought into some kind of order, codified as a series of sacred landscapes, and he writes approvingly of the Menin Gate, the first of the Imperial War Graves Commissions monuments to missing soldiers. In 1919, to mark the first anniversary of the armistice in London, the Cenotaph was first constructed: there was felt the need for a focus for the ceremonial occasion. However this first Cenotaph was made of plywood, as a temporary memorial prior to the current one of stone. In recent years, since around 2000, memorials, mostly for aspects of the Second World War have proliferated in central London, partly to rectify perceived omissions in official remembrance, but, like recent events that have commemorated the outbreak of the First World War, these appear to be symbols whose importance is invested in their symbolic qualities themselves, rather than their referents: it feels the less a particular society believes in anything in common, the more need there is to bring it together for largely empty rhetorical gestures.

Writing seven years after Karl Kraus' Promotional Trips to Hell Stefan Zweig reaches a more generous conclusion in the section of the essay 'Ypres', titled 'Jamboree upon the Dead':

"Nevertheless: it is good that, in some places on this earth, one can still encounter a few horrifying visible traces of the great crime. Ultimately it is something good too when a hundred thousand people, comfortable and carefree, clatter through here annually, and whether they care for it or not, these countless graves, these poisoned woods, these devastated squares still serve as reminders. And all remembering for the most primitive, the most blasé natures, is somehow visual. All that recalls the past in whatever form or intention leads the memory back towards those terrible years that must never be unlearned."

 Stefan Zwieg, 'Ypres', in Journeys

Writing on trains

Although a number of the pieces on this blog were researched and drafted before leaving London, many were written or edited during the five days of travelling around on trains. At hotels, all of which had wireless internet, I was able to post using a Kindle, although its 'experimental browser' meant that these were written in HTML rather than 'compose' mode. The X2 542 train from Copenhagen to Stockholm also had free wireless, and the five-hour journey could be spent working on this blog. The majority of the actual writing was done initially by hand - on whatever came to hand, which meant tickets and schedules and maps.