Sachsenhausen

Well, it's been a while since I've posted. That's partly because I've been trying to get out from under the stack of papers that needed grading, and it's partly because I've been meaning to say something about my visit to the former KZ camp at Sachsenhausen north of Berlin, and it's a difficult thing to get 'right'. Anyway, I think it's time to try...

Right from the start, I want to make it clear that, although it was our discussion of ghost towns that made me think of this, I'm definitely not conflating the concentration camps with any of the places we have been talking about, whether Rodney, Kayaköy, or elsewhere. The KZ camps are the physical relics of a very particular history and I don't in any way want to dilute that specificity.

What made me think of Sachsenhausen is only this - it is a place to which many people now go in the expectation that it will somehow put them in touch with a history that needs remembering. But my own experience of going to both Sachsenhausen and Dachau is one of running into the *gap* between the present and the past. Walking around the spaces that those camps once occupied, I found myself wondering how I 'should' be feeling, what this experience 'ought to' be communicating to me, what constitutes the 'right' way to react in a place of this kind. And, at the same time, I found myself suspicious of the emotions that did creep up on me there on the grounds that they might be 'too easy', self-indulgent rather than compassionate, not commensurate with the gravity of what had actually happened in that place. In other words, rather than experiencing some kind of powerful connection with history, the experience for me was of a kind of deep-seated uncertainty about my own emotional responses, about the possibility of every really understanding the past, and about the potential vanity of my attempt at 'remembering'.

I don't know if this is a common experience or not. I'm writing about it because it is relevant to those questions we've raised about whether a history is inscribed in a place and, if so, how. I'm not sceptical about that possibility - in fact, I'm sure there is something to it - but my own experience of going to places that are saturated with history is that I don't tune in on a kind of pure emotional wavelength but actually spend most of the time feeling conflicted, inadequate, and uncertain how to feel, think, or behave.

I'm not sure how to finish this post. I think it's right to go to these places - I'm not sceptical about making that journey at all. But I'm always puzzled when people talk about how moving they found it because, to me, the experience, while very powerful at one level, isn't what I would normally describe as 'moving'. That's a term I use for watching dance or listening to a speech at someone's leaving party. Walking round Sachsenhausen is powerfully disorienting - almost a kind of reproach - rather than 'moving' in the way I usually use that word.

Hope this makes sense. Will post more if I can work it out in my mind...

pagan places

I've been thinking about the christianization of pagan places and feeling a bit frustrated by my lack of knowledge. There are some examples (like Knowlton and Rudston) where a church has been built in a place that obviously had some kind of significance already. But there are also places that are *thought* of in this way but where the history is difficult to prove and, indeed, disputed. For example, there are quite a lot of 'holy wells' in Britain which are dedicated to one or other saint. There's a commonly held belief that these were 'stolen' by early Christians and were originally pagan sites. But some historians have suggested that this is a myth propagated by different people for different purposes. This includes the neo-pagan movement, so - in an odd way - it may actually be that it is paganism that is appropriating Christian sites rather than the other way round. I gather that the historian, Ronald Hutton, has written about this kind of thing, so I'll see if I can get hold of his book on the pagan religions of Britain.

churches and pagan sites

I enjoyed your post here! With regard to your question about churches built on pagan sites, two examples spring to mind: Knowlton Church in Dorset (which was built inside a neolithic henge) and Rudston Church in Yorkshire (which has a monlith in the graveyard). You can see pictures here and here. (In both cases, you need to scroll down a fair way to see the full range of photos.) Those are just well-known examples - I expect there are lots of others. I'm not 100% sure who to ask...

gates to nowhere

These two gate posts stand on the eastern bank of the Derwent Reservoir and whatever building they originally guarded is no longer there. (I think it might have been the vicarage but I'm not certain.) Steve described them as 'gates to nowhere'.

ghost thoughts #1

I've been thinking a lot about ghost towns and, in particular, trying to think about them as a category. It's definitely interesting - and important from a historical point of view - to understand each one's story. But it's also interesting to think about what these very diverse places have in common and how the trope of the abandoned community works on us. To that end, I'll try and post a few of the thoughts I've been having. They're not original (and may turn out not to be that interesting) but I'd like to put them into writing. So, here is thought #1:

GHOST TOWNS RELATE TO OTHER SETTLEMENTS

Reading about Derwent and Ashopton, it struck me that - to understand the history of the communities - you also have to think about the histories of urban centres like Sheffield, Nottingham, Leicester, and Derby. The villages of the Derwent Valley were sacrificed to these rapidly expanding cities and the two histories are plotted into each other inextricably.

And this led me back to Minnesota because, when I think about Mallard, I often find myself thinking about Bemidji too. The beginnings of the two towns were not so different, I think, but Bemidji thrived and Mallard died - it is as if Mallard were Bemidji's ailing twin. And, with reference to voices, this reminds me of the reading I did at the Historical Society library in Bemidji, particularly Harold Hagg's book, The Mississippi Headwaters Region: Scenes from the Past (published in 1986). Hagg writes very interestingly about the role of local newspapers in the history of these communities:

Editors were more than newsmen. They were town boosters and prophets of progress. They touted their towns' prospects in the most flowery language they could command. [...] The newspapers kept Headwaters readers informed about the small doings of their neigbors and other local happenings. The syndicated pages provided recreational reading and developed new interests when books and magazines were not readily at hand. The advertisements served the business interests. The newspaper was the voice of the town, an organ of promotion and publicity and a force for developing a sense of community. (Page 100.)

This appeals to me because it brings out the sense of competition among towns and the way in which communities vied for recognition and the economic benefits that, for example, the coming of the railway could bring.

And, in Turkey, Kayaköy/Λεβισσι presumably had a relationship with the Turkish settlements that surrounded it and one wonders what the nature of that relationship was.

My point is really just this: because there is something so compelling about ghost towns, it is easy to focus on them as special places, distinct from everything around them. But - actually - their 'ghostliness' is a function of their position in a network of power. They are the weak points - the regions of low pressure - in an overall pattern of forces.

visit to derwent

The weather today has been pretty good, so Steve and I took a trip out to the Ladybower Reservoir to visit the place where Derwent once was. This is rather a dull photo of the lake but the point of it is that, before the area was flooded, the village would have been right in the middle of this picture:

I took this photo of an information board. It provides a really good visualistion of where the buildings stood and how they relate to the present shore line:

And here is another information board, this time with a map showing the layout of the village and, again, the position of the present shore line. That photo I mentioned of the church tower rising out of the water is reproduced at the bottom right of the map:

war

There is one contextual aspect of the drowning of Derwent that Bill Bevan doesn't mention in the passage I quoted yesterday - the fact that it happened in war time. In his book, Silent Valley, the local historian, Vic Hallam, quotes from the last sermon preached in the church at Derwent, and the quotation makes an interesting connection between the experience of war and the destruction of the village:

The last service held in Derwent Church was on 17th March 1943, and was attended by the Bishop of Derby and members of the Water Board. In his final address to the congregation the Bishop said, 'We build churches with the idea that they will endure for ever, but we know in our heart that our buildings will not endure, for we have seen so much destruction during the war that we no longer have the illusion of permanence of the work of human hands.'

There is something quite strange about this parallel, I think. To compare the abandonment of the village to an act of war is quite a provocative thing to do, given that the building of the dam was supposed to be a work of progress. Perhaps I'm over-interpreting...

Derwent and Ashopton

Today I went to Sheffield's local studies library to see if they had anything on the flooding of the Derwent Valley and the 'drowned' villages of Derwent and Ashopton. They had some interesting photographs, including an extraordinary one of the tower of Derwent Church rising out of the waters of the reservoir, but I can't reproduce those on the blog. Here, instead, is an excerpt from Bill Bevan's book, The Upper Derwent: 10,000 Years in a Peak District Valley, published in 2004. I think it captures the social meanings of the inundation very well.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the largest impact on the Upper Derwent landscape was about to begin and it [...] would be finished within fifty years. By the time it was complete someone born into the family occuping Bridge-End Farm in 1900 was living in a new terrace house just north of Bamford. By then their farmhouse was demolished, fields and carefully maintained dry-stone walls were lost, Derwent Hall was a pile of rubble and the dead who had been buried in Derwent churchyard since the 1870s were settling into the graveyard at Bamford. The heart of the community had moved en masse.

The reason for this was the need for water in the growing cities and towns of South Yorkshire and the East Midlands. Three Acts of Parliament were passed between 1899 and 1904 enabling Sheffield, Derby, Nottingham and Leicester to improve their water supplies by flooding the valleys. Town planners in northern England looked to the valleys of the Pennines and other uplands as potential reservoirs. This flooding of the valleys necessitated the removal of much of the existing dispersed farming population and associated patterns of land-use while leaving the grouse moors relativly undisturbed. For a temporary period, a new society was implanted into the area comprising the navvy dam builders themselves who were housed in the purpose-built village of Birchinlee, also known as Tin Town. By the time the reservoirs were finished the valley landscape was transformed under large bodies of water which covered farms, fields, Derwent Village and Ashopton. For anyone living in the valleys at this time, the impact must have been incredible. (page 142)

I think this evokes the context well: the growth of the industrial cities creating a demand for water, the relocation of a whole rural population (including the dead from the churchyard), the untouched grouse moors (shooting being the sport of the upper classes), and the arrival of the navvies - the stigmatised population of itinerant workers who built this country's industrial infrastructure.

ghost towns/sirens

On the one hand, this may be obvious, and, on the other, it may not be useful, but I just thought I'd post something about the fact that there is a connection between the thread on ghost towns and the thread on sirens. That connection lies in the fact that, on a number of occasions, the Septuagint presents ruined cities and destroyed communities as the haunts of sirens. This happens in Isaiah 13, 21-22, where the city is Babylon (see here), Isaiah 34, 13, where it is Edom (see here), Jeremiah 51, 39, where the reference is to the Chaldeans, again in Babylon (see here), and Micah 1, 8, where it is to Samaria (see here). So the ghost towns and the sirens potentially form one larger complex of imagery. (I ran into Hugh in the cafe the other day and mentioned these Biblical passages to him - he had some ideas about them and we said we'd get together for a chat about it soon. We haven't done that yet, so I must remember to drop him a line...)

abandoned communities

I've just found a website on abandoned communities in Britain. It's really worth a look!

http://www.abandonedcommunities.co.uk/

drowned villages

I was thinking about ghost towns and suddenly became curious as to whether there are any places in Britain that fall into that category. There aren't really any large-scale examples here but there are quite a lot of abandoned villages, among them settlements that were drowned as a result of the construction of reservoirs. As it happens, there are examples very near to Sheffield. When the Ladybower Reservoir was built in the late 30s and early 40s, the villages of Derwent and Ashopton were evacuated and flooded. (The wikipedia entry for the former is here and the latter here - they are actually quite helpful.) Apparently, the buildings of Derwent occasionally become visible when the water-level is low but Ashopton never reappears out of the water. It occurs to me that, if you were interested in doing something site-specific over here, an event at the site of the drowned village might be quite exciting. I thought I'd illustrate this post with an image of the overflow at Ladybower - it looks rather dramatic, I think.

Kayaköy

A couple of images of Kayaköy from the air, both from Google Earth. The houses appear as white rectangles because the walls still stand while the roofs have long gone:

memory and nature

Once again, I really enjoyed your post (and also the comments it's attracted on your blog and on facebook). I'm keen to write about it this morning but, because it's a complex subject and it's only just opening up, I don't have a worked-out argument to express. I'm just going to jot down a few thoughts...

(1) There is certainly a tension between the haecitas of nature and the fact that natural organisms can also represent traces of historical events. It's true that the wisteria is simultaneously 'a flowering vine blooming out of the ground in the spring' and the trace of a certain kind of history.

(2) In a way the distinction is between recognising the wisteria as a symbol of a particular history and rigorously refusing to make it into a symbol, thus insisting upon its haecitas in the here and now. This idea of nature-as-symbol and nature-without-symbolism is interesting to me. There might be good reasons to want to see the wisteria in both ways.

(3) I have a feeling that this is one of those things where one can move between two perceptions of the same thing, both being possible but each always excluding the other. In this, it's like a Necker Cube:



Each of the box shapes in this image can be seen as either protruding from or intruding into the page. But, although you can see them in both ways, you can't see both at the same time.

(4) The impulse simply to be in the here-and-now is an important one - part of the reason that Buddhism has achieved some purchase in the west - but the impulse to look for the traces of history also seems important to me. Isn't it rather chilling to think that the here-and-now will simply cover up the past? Weren't we quite pleased when we found that the Minnesota Historical Society had put up signs to commemorate what was done to the Ojibwe at Great Sandy Lake and so trouble the sense that the lake is just a gloriously beautiful natural vista? (Although, actually, it occurs to me that, if one is standing there enjoying the 'beauty' of the lake, one might not be able to claim that one is simply being - 'enjoying the view' is a culturally constructed activity, I think.) This is why I like the image of the Necker Cube - wisteria is both presence-in-the-world and historical trace but maybe it can't be both to us at the same time.

(5) I love the fact that you've posted about Eudora Welty in this connection and I agree that she is absolutely fascinating. But, having tried to work out what I feel about this, I'm not sure that I fully understand her sense that places somehow retain their history quite apart from the functioning of human memory. I don't think my intitial response to a place - or at least to a place that seems 'natural' - involves a kind of intuitive discovery of its history but more the kind of aesetheticised here-and-now response that I've talked about in relation to Great Sandy Lake. Moving to the other view of the Necker cube - the view of the place as somewhere where history happened - involves some kind of mental work, some kind of learning - and then, once that's achieved, it can be difficult to go back to the other way of seeing it. Actually, I'm not quite sure about that last point - it's all too easy to slip back into an aestheticised way of seeing it but very difficult to experience it in that rather more unattached way as simply 'there'. (Also, I may not have understood Welty's ideas very well...)

(6) All this leads me to think about my focus on language and voices. The names of plants are quite clearly historical clues and so my interest in language perhaps conditions me to understand nature historically. But, again, it occurs to me that there is something very powerful to be done in thinking about the distinction between the named and the un-named. Would it be possible to detach the wisteria from its name once its name is known to you? I'm really struck by your allusion to Romeo and Juliet here. I'm also thinking about the way I felt as I kayaked through the woods immediately below Vekin's Dam and realised that I couldn't attach names to any of the plants around me.

(7) This is just coincidence really, but - as it happens - the Necker Cube appears in the designs of the mosaics at Pompeii:



Both images in this post come from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/NeckerCube.html

Seven 'thoughts' on memory and nature :o) I don't if any of it makes much sense but that's what's in my mind right now...

wisteria and pine trees

I love your new post and it seems to me that there is a lot to think about here. For a start, you've reminded me of conversations we had in Minnesota about the way in which nature recolonises places long after the humans are gone, but - often - a nature changed by the passage of a human population. In the case of Rodney, the agent of nature's recolonisation is an introduced species, wisteria, and in the case of northern Minnesota (including the area round Mallard) it's the secondary growth, which is actually quite different from the primary growth that was there before. (Despite all the forests, Minnesota does not look as it did before the loggers passed through.) So our sense that nature entirely erases the traces of human habitation (and trauma) isn't quite right: if you can read 'nature's book', you can see those traces still in the way nature is changed by the 'passing through' of human populations. When nature reclaims a ghost town, it is itself changed.

I'm aways interested in how language, speech, and voices are connected with experiences of this kind and I think there is a lot of potential for thinking about that here. The plant we call wisteria must have changed its name many times as it passed from Asia into Europe and on into North America. I wonder what wisteria is called in Chinese? And does it appear in Chinese poetry? [...] Actually, I've just tried to answer my last question by doing a quick online search. And this took me to the website of James Cahill, Professor Emeritus in the History of Art at Berkeley. There he has a handout relating to a seminar on 'Poetic Painting in China'. It's a bit hard to interpret - more like a series of notes than a connected text - but it includes this:

Distant Mts. 4: "Scholars Gazing At Waterfall," 1630. Couplet (p. 37): "Pines and rocks are proper to old age; / Wisteria vines do not count the years."

I think there's something rather striking about that couplet, not least in the way it mentions both pines (the flora to be found around Mallard) and wisteria (the plant that is reclaiming Rodney), connecting both with the passing of time. It seems that, in English, the plant is named after a person, although there seems to be some doubt about which person. Having searched online, I've found that a lot of people say it was Caspar Wister (1761-1818), a physician and anatomist from Philadelphia.

As I happens, I've already assembled some material on the naming of plants in Minnesota. While I was kayaking, I was chastened a little by my total inability to recognise or name the plants that surrounded me. So, when we went to the Forest History Center near Grand Rapids, I was excited to see a big board in the exhibition space with the names of lots of the trees that you find in the area. I jotted them down in my notebook and, when I came back to Sheffield, did some research on some that seemed particularly interesting to me. I won't download a lot of information about them now - I'll save it for future postings - but a few that really caught my imagination were:

Jack Pine (Pinus banksiana)
American Basswood (Tilia americana)
Tamarack (Larix laricina)
Northern White Cedar (Thuja occidentalis)

What do you think about collecting a series of 'botanical fragments' relating to the plants that surround our ghost towns? (By 'fragments' I mean fragments of text, of course.) Kayaköy is certainly being recolonised by plant life, all of which presumably has both Greek and Turkish names. Obviously Pompeii wasn't slowly reclaimed by nature - it was buried quickly in volcanic ash. But it occurs to me that the mosaics and paintings of Pompeii include images of plants and I wonder if they are just local ones or if they represent the resources of the empire? Anyway, just a thought - I'll post some more on this later.

Kayaköy

I think I told you that back in September I visited the ghost town of Kayaköy in southern Turkey. It was once a Greek Christian community - its Greek name was Levissi - but it was completely abandoned during the 'population exchanges' of the 1920s. Well, I was looking at your photos on flickr and I was particuarly struck by this one, from another ghost town, Terlingua TX:



And that got me thinking about Mallard and ghost towns in general. So, I decided it was time to post some pictures of Kayaköy. Here they are!