We spent a few days in Lübeck in the run-up to Christmas. It's a place I used to visit occasionally when I lived in Hamburg, and have been back there a couple of times since. On this visit, showing my partner (and baby) around, I remembered how a visit a couple of years ago - and especially the Marienkirche - had helped to break a fallow period in the writing of Scattering Eva (the poem).

On that occasion, after looking around the various churches and their exhibitions about rebuilding after the 1942 Palm Sunday Bombing Raid, the fallen bells (click on the thumbnail for a selection of photos from Flickr) in the Marienkirche and the partly-restored statuary had me drafting a poem fairly rapidly. I imagined it as a single poem, but it was quickly absorbed into the longer piece - not quite a centrepiece, but some sort of turn-point, as if describing a reflective day-trip away from Hamburg, where the main action of the longer poem is set.

I have been interested in the cautious but growing debate in Germany in recent years about the balance of perpetrator and victim, complicity and resistance during the Second World War. Having exercised self-critique for so long - and so thoroughly - Germans are talking about other aspects of their experience of the period and testing out different ways of discussing and portraying events (the film Downfall is an example - earlier productions such as Heimat also touched on this; and there are historians re-examining Dresden, as well as the idea that Hitler's final act of intended annihilation was against 'his own' people. These discussions create more controversy in Germany, perhaps, than outside it).

There is a small memorial stone in Lübeck to the Lübeck Church-Martyrs (I can't find any decent English sites - there is a German Wikipedia entry here). The stone is in German and English. It commemorates the arrest and execution of three Catholic churchmen and one Evangelical pastor - ostensibly for breaking the wireless laws and undermining morale. They had been active in exchanging information and ideas on the progress and morality of the war with other churches and individuals and had formed some sort of an anti-war movement. Interestingly, the Palm Sunday 1942 destruction of Lübeck - and their churches - had given their thinking a powerful and somewhat primitive religious impetus (of the 'sign from God' type).

What intrigued me in particular, though, was a phrase in the translation, in which the 'justice' meted out by the Nazis on the Churchmen (they were tried and guillotined in Hamburg in 1943) is described in the German as 'wild' and in the English as 'arbitrary'. 'Arbitrary' doesn't seem to carry the force of the idea to an English reader - perhaps it does to a German; and yet we also have the idea of 'wild justice' (as in Revenge Tragedy), which is something else entirely - something comprehensible. It is one of those odd moebius strips which translation sometimes produces.

So, I think, 'there's a poem in that'. But I don't want to write poems on those themes - not for a while, perhaps never again. And so this long entry which begins with What I Did On My Holidays ends with a whimper. Oh, except for the original poem mentioned above:

Lübeck

Palm Sunday, Lübeck. Christ has taken
Jerusalem, the burghers settle at oak tables.
Europe capers through its Todestanz.

This night, a little Gehenna will be tipped,
a little late, down the white throats
of Petri, Maria, Michel. The bells will fall

to lie soft-buckled in pits of shattered tiles.
Here's the soot-stained Christ of the Limbless,
of the Torso, and the Helpless Hand. Here's Mary,

clutching a stone book, the clasps blown off.
Whatever word it held will never drift
from the gutted roofs.

*

In the breakfast-room
the ladies are complaining of little sleep.

The men who melted in the East
watch from mantlepieces.
Broad shoulders. Level gazes.

They jostle there like gables
in a town of bankrupt merchants.

*

Pastor Bärbel, between organ phrases,
modulates Iraq. She drips a little Goethe,
Freud, the marginalia of a mediaevalist:

Let there be no stone for the German dead.
No carved name for a finger to trace.
The dead lie together in the far homeland.
Once something has bloomed, it can never end.

Naja.