The Berlin Holocaust Memorial Tour

The rain finally eased off last night and permitted me to take a tour of the Holocaust Memorial also known as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. I had called earlier in the day and was confronted with a sizeable queue snaking up to the information centre that seemed to be shuffling painfully slowly through the rain. When I learnt that the audio tour awaiting me at the end of this soggy rainbow did not even cover the memorial itself, only the underground centre, I rather more quickly shuffled off. The foundation that runs the memorial does, however, also have a short audio tour of the site, and additionally, audio tours of the nearby gay and lesbian and gypsy memorials too, all of which can be found online. When the rain stopped and with one of these recordings downloaded onto my phone, I set out into the night.

The audio guide is narrated by a British man in a rather matter of fact tone without any of the Schindler's List treatment. By that I mean it did not make an emotional or sentimental play upon the listener, but allowed the site and the facts to speak for themselves. 

The recording made no effort to navigate the listener around the space, indeed it was not really necessary to listen to the recording on site, it was a short audio recording about the memorial that could just as easily be listened to remotely. I walked though the dark passages between the concrete slabs and, every now and again, came upon a feature such as this stairway leading down to the underground centre.

I learnt about the site's history and the memorial's construction and not much else. I would have liked something more but I understand that the site is meant to function as an artwork in its own right and, therefore, speak for itself. I also noticed that I was not alone: there were people jumping along the tops of the columns and others playing hide and seek, one the cat and the other the mouse darting in and out of them. It really is a very particular sort of physical space that does lend itself to these games.

As I walked around listening to the rationale for the memorial's construction, I started thinking about the differences between people's perceptions of it and how these must be somewhat dependent on their relationship to the history. German school groups will probably experience this place in one way while American pensioners will most likely have an entirely different take on it. I saw a Jewish group with a Yiddish speaking guide making their way around a related site (Topography of Terror) and later saw a group of three, young Korean women getting a tour of it with a German guide and a German-English translator. While people will have their personal responses, I have to guess these larger distinctions will also frame the experience very distinctly.

The memorial and information centre is open free of charge to the visitor and is clearly run for political and educational purposes. This is in contrast to the rather trashy Checkpoint Charlie attractions which are simpler businesses making a profit by playing on the cold war / Berlin wall history. While the atmosphere and nature of the operations is very different, the tourists visiting these two sites are often the exact same people: souvenir shops and restaurants line the monument and I saw a good few people taking selfies on it. The tourist floats through everything collecting fun and interesting experiences and processing them within the context of their trip. They will rarely treat the monument with the same seriousness that its creators might have ascribed to it, but there is no way of getting around this. It is better that it exists than it doesn't and the memorial foundation does give educational tours to groups to help fix the meaning more firmly. These educational tours need to be pre-booked and, like a typical tourist, I did not do this so have no idea what they are like. This game of ascribing meaning is fluid, another sort of game of cat and mouse, and I suspect this is a site that will age in an interesting way.

Book Review: The Dark Tourist by Dom Joly

So far on this blog reviews been confined to reviews of tours I have actually taken. There's plenty of writing about tours too, however, and I thought it might be worthwhile to introduce some book reviews here and there to liven things up. So first up is The Dark Tourist by Dom Joly which I have just finished reading. It is a 2010 publication that would probably be best described as off-beat travel writing with author Joly relating trips of his to Iran, North Korea, USA, Lebanon, Cambodia and Ukraine. Some of these trips were to 'dark tourism' destinations such as the Killing Fields of Cambodia, Dealey Plaza in Dallas the site of JFK's assassination or Chernobyl the location of the world's worst nuclear reactor disaster. As well as these he also visits a number of untypical tourist destinations like the ski slopes of Iran and the propagandistic museums of North Korea. As such the book does not hold together through a clearly defined idea of dark tourism but rather through the quality of his observation and style of writing. There are some great episodes and unlikely encounters but there is also quite a lot of more conventional travel writing that is simply suggesting to the reader that there is much to be seen in untypical tourist destinations. 

I was vaguely aware of Joly through his TV appearances and I found his writing to be considerably more reflective than the comedy output I associate with him. It occupies a hip intelligent space as interested in foreign affairs as in the unwitting comedy of his North Korean guides and odd-ball tour group. Where the book took a very different turn was in the final chapter on Lebanon, the birthplace and childhood home of Joly. In this chapter his writing takes a more overtly personal turn and appears to be an attempt to understand his past and in doing so give a broader sense of why dark tourism might hold the appeal it does to him. I felt that this chapter belonged to a different book as it did not so much extend and deepen the rest of the book as take it in a new direction. It is as if he does not try so hard to be entertaining here and instead has a quite different relationship to the country and his experiences. As such it felt somewhat unfinished and I shouldn't be surprised if he develops some of the themes touched upon there further, at a later date. Overall the book is a mostly entertaining read that neither insults nor greatly stretches the intelligence and which has significant appeal to those who already have a bit of the dark tourist inside of them.

An Alternative Jack The Ripper Tour: conspiracies and comedy

After taking a Jack the Ripper Tour last week and seeing just how many there were pounding the streets of the East End, I decided that I really had to take at least one more in order to be able to make some sort of comparison between them. That's how I ended up taking the Ripping Yarns Jack the Ripper Tour.

The starting point of the tour was Tower Hill tube station. This is a little more central than Whitechapel and properly on the tourist map of the city. I don't know whether we started here because if it is easier to get tourists to come here or because our guide was a Beefeater, who work and live in the Tower of London, pictured behind. In any case, I had heard that the less serious even sensationalistic tours are more likely to be found starting at Tower Hill and I was looking forward to something trashy. Once our guide started addressing us, however, I realised that this was not one of the B-list tours but was something altogether more respectable. Ever so slightly disappointed (no cheap laughs tonight!) I settled into the tour that I was actually being given and listened with interest as our guide Barney started warming up the group and introducing the tour and the story of Jack the Ripper. 

The tour took us through unfamiliar streets that were not obviously part of the Jack the Ripper story, but the locations were used to tell us about what East London was like in the 1880s and about the lives of the ripper's victims, all of whom were working as prostitutes. It flowed naturally enough and we finally joined the now familiar route stopping at the first site that the previous tour had also stopped at. We would shadow a similar route to theirs through much of the tour, making slight alterations, but essentially visiting the same locations. I had to ask whether this uniformity of route is due to the locations themselves and how the streets are laid out (one murder site is omitted as it is too far off route) or whether it is as much due to the way the narrative is told. I guess this is something that guides have spent considerable time thinking through and you would probably need to depart from the chronological telling of the murders in order to make a significantly different route.

Our guide was a gifted storyteller and natural joker who had been giving this tour for some four years so he knew his script inside out. Maybe because of that, and in order to keep it fresh, he also allowed himself to talk about funny things that he had seen and heard recently whilst being a guide. He knew the details of Ripper story well so we remained on that thread but he found ways to personalise it and see the funny side of it at every turn. He spoke quickly and with a choice turn of phrase and I wondered if foreigners whose English was not good would be able to follow him. He did explain some phrases from time and his energy was itself infectious, so I suspect it would all work out fine for most visitors. 

Once again there were the A4 laminated pictures distributed around our group showing the victims, locations and so on. He used fewer than the previous tour, however, and carried the story more through his patter, which was more than able to paint the scene. The pictures that we did see were generally less clearly printed and certainly a good deal less gory than the tour of the other night. He made far less of a point of trying to shock us with gruesome images and viewing them was very much an optional thing for the curious.

I heard that there had been an American woman who had taken one of the competing tours and had written an article complaining about them. I had a look for this online but was unable to find it as there is such a deluge of information and reviews about the various tours on offer. I also had to reflect that there will be some people who will inevitably find such a tour in bad taste, but I have the impression that they will probably be a minority. The group I was amongst seemed like a petty normal bunch of people and not a blood thirsty mob of sickos, much indeed like the previous tour group who were on the other Jack the Ripper tour I took. What is probably a more interesting question to ask is, how is it that this story has become popular and acceptable to be interested in. 

Whilst each tour is working with the same basic story and historical records, which will be more or less familiar to the guide, the tour will have a distinct focus and point of view that sets it apart from the others. So where my previous tour was historical in tone, even historical to the point of being about 'Ripper Studies' this tour focused upon the identity of the killer. In this sense it took the police force's point of view which made perfect sense given our guide was an ex-serviceman. The way this take on the story was delivered was very present and convivial and this brought it out of the detective story frame as there was no urgency or suspense to it and took us much more into the tourist frame of reference.

Just as on the other evening, the small Spanish group were out and once and again they managed to arrive first at this vantage point. Whilst the attitude between the guides and different groups seemed more or less harmonious, when a small group took the best spot while a large groups had to settle for a second best location, it did't sit so well with the crowd. It is all public space, however, and nobody has more or less right to it so the best thing was to do as our guide did and just get on with it from the other side of the road.

Much was made of the this message that was purportedly left by Jack the Ripper. He suggested it can be interpreted as relating to the freemasons.

When we came to Mitre Square we saw not one but two other Jack the Ripper groups. The group behind ours was on the murder site of 'Ripper Corner' while the second group had to content themselves with the building site and we parked ourselves by the offices. This gave me the idea that it would be rather amusing to sit in Mitre Square one evening and watch the various groups come and go. I might just do that and count them.

We were near the end of our tour which was to take a total of two hours and twenty minutes. I was fine with this duration but I did hear some people in our groups talking to one another about getting cold and tired by this point. The extra leg of the journey that comes from starting at Tower Hill certainly adds to the duration and makes this longer than the average Ripper tour. I imagine if the weather was poor that would compound this. Fortunately it was merely dry and cool which I'll happily settle for.

The prime suspect was revealed at the end of our tour and a plot involving the royal family imagined. This was the point where the tour went beyond the realm of the historical and into conjecture, which we were perfectly happy to accept as the Ripper story, being so far away in time and encountered via Hollywood, belongs more or less to the realm of fiction, even if it is based around real events.

The tour concluded with collecting £8 from each of the twenty people who were on the tour. This was done on the basis that there was no need to pay if you were not satisfied. Everyone paid and we made our way back to Tower Hill and into the night.