Memento Mori

Some personal memories of writing about Borderlines in the time of COVID

I have vivid memories of the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. It does not seem very long ago at all in retrospect, even though five years once seemed an eternity. It takes me back to a time when I was researching what became my book Borderlines. I was writing a lot of text, chapter by chapter – the work of shaping it into a book came much later – and travelling extensively around Europe’s borderlands. I could see, in early March 2020, that the travel would soon have to stop and that my life would change and shrink, but when I set out on the last trip before the shutters came down I did not know quite how much life would be affected.

COVID had already gone critical in northern Italy in February 2020 and I did question whether to go ahead with the March research trip before deciding that I would – like most people, I was hopeful of squeezing in a bit more normal life as the skies darkened. I tried to use trains as much as possible on my travels, but this one was planned around some commitments that meant flying was the only way of doing it all. The first stop was Prague, a city I love and a place where some good friends live, but this was a short stay before going on to Ústí nad Labem in industrial north Bohemia. Ústí has a dubious reputation in Czechia, for pollution, unemployment and racism – I had visited it before in transit and hadn’t been impressed – but I was returning to give a talk at the university and I was exposed to the town’s more attractive side. It was the first public appearance for my borders project, and I think I devoted some time to the psychological difference between my island English perspective and the Czech experience in a Europe of shifting and soft borders.

After Ústí it was a bit of a rush to get to Dresden – a train ride along the beautiful Elbe valley through ‘Saxon Switzerland’ – in time for a flight to Basel. This was also a mix of personal and professional. Basel is of obvious interest to anyone writing about borders – it is in Switzerland but its suburbs extend into both France and Germany and its airport is an interzone, where you can choose on arrival whether to land in Swiss or European customs territory. Some friends who lived locally had offered to show me around and part of the attraction was Fasnacht, the city’s annual carnival. It was at this point that COVID’s shadow started to fall. The Basel authorities decided to cancel Fasnacht at the last minute, but some of the city’s children decided to go out into the streets to scatter confetti anyway, and as I left I had a few optimistic little coloured scraps of paper that had drifted into my coat pockets. A year later, there was still a faded blue star there, a memento of a connected Europe to which I belonged but which was still not healed, and from which my country had just amputated itself – Brexit day was only a month earlier.

The next move was a zigzag back to eastern Germany, because I had a meeting in Guben, a town that was divided in 1945 by the new German-Polish border. I had already fallen in love with the mysteries of the province of Lower Silesia, the ‘occult romance’ that makes up a chapter of Borderlines. The precise boundaries of Lower Silesia have changed during the region’s convoluted history. The early modern stopped at the line of the Bobr and Kwiza – by this way of looking at things, there is a small chunk of Saxon Lusatia in present-day Poland. However, after 1815 the Prussian province stretched a little further west, making Görlitz and a finger of land stretching to Hoyerswerda the last remnant of German Silesia – Görlitz hosts the German museum of Silesia. Guben/ Gubin more properly belongs to the region of Lower Lusatia. But it was part of a Silesian duchy centuries ago, so it can be discussed alongside Wroclaw and the darker corners of the Karkonosze. Its allegiance to the uncanny qualifies it as a spiritual part of Silesia as opposed to the brisk and rationalist province of Brandenburg (or its Polish twin Lubusz) in which it now finds itself.

One of the biggest private employers in Guben now is the Plastinarium, the main workshop of the anatomist Gunther Von Hagens. Von Hagens pioneered the method of transforming human and animal bodies into a plastic medium that enables one to see the structure of bones, muscles and organs that make up a living form. Perhaps like Guben, the exhibits are sometimes spliced in two to show the workings. Von Hagens took his exhibitions around the world, although he is now too frail to do so, but since 2006 headquarters has been in Guben, a literal stone’s throw from the Polish border along the river Neisse.

The Plastinarium, Guben

The Plastinarium is itself a transformed entity, housed in a huge former hat factory with 30,000 square metres of floor space. The modern labs and conference rooms sit among dark, echoing industrial spaces. The decision to set up in Guben was a personal one by Gunther Von Hagens – to the consternation of his advisers as they arrived on a dark and stormy night, he saw endless potential in this derelict site by the Neisse. The appeal of Guben was not development aid or infrastructure, or local politics – the council approved the change of use by a majority of only 1. It was only vaguely personal history, in that the Von Hagens family had lived in the former eastern parts of Germany that became Poland in 1945, and Gunther had grown up in the East, spending some time in a prison cell which has now been moved to the exhibition in the Plastinarium. Gunther was traded from east to west as a political prisoner during the Cold War; the business now collects the dead, mostly from the west of Germany, and takes them to the east. The Von Hagens enterprise still spans east and west; the other centre of the business is in the academic environment of Heidelberg. It is an echo of Victor Frankenstein, another controversial scientist who experiments at the edges of life and death: two locations, one in the broad valley of the Rhine looking west and the other on the eastern edge of the German world.

Gunther von Hagens is a showman and a scientist, walking the line between enlightenment rationality and the enjoyable frisson of creepiness that surrounds death. He cultivated a mythos of his own, dressing in dark clothes and wearing a large hat – one of the first exhibits one meets in Guben evokes Gunther’s trademark look. Gunther rather enjoyed ‘the Frankenstein stuff’ as his son and successor Rurik put it when we spoke. Rurik, who has run the enterprise since 2011, is an amiable chief executive, emphasising supplying medical schools with models rather than entertaining the public. Rurik is the classic second-generation entrepreneur; a business school graduate rather than a medic himself, who worked in less unusual industries before taking on the family business.

The Plastinarium was not open primarily to make money from visitors – Guben is too distant from population centres, and the exhibition perhaps too niche for that to be a motivation. Most of the visitors are cyclists stopping off as they ride the Oder-Neisse Weg, the long-distance cycle path along the once-contentious border. The exhibition was opened as a gesture of transparency, to avoid or at least limit the spread of Gothic rumours about the corpse factory in the rambling red-brick warehouses by the river. Working with the dead, as the gravediggers of Frankenstein found, makes for fear and suspicion among the living. The firm had suffered reputational damage from its previous base in China, and moving to a place with a reputation for transparency was part of the attraction of returning the production centre to Germany. The people of Guben were divided on whether they should allow the Plastinarium to come to their town, and there were demonstrations when it first opened although it is now just part of the local landscape, one among five of the larger local employers, with a varying number between 40 and 200 working there and living mostly either in German Guben or Polish Gubin.

I was in two minds myself about it all before I arrived; I had seen the exhibition in London but wondered whether it was just a sort of voyeuristic, eighteenth-century Cabinet of Curiosities, making a spectacle of death. Rurik was keen to assure me that plastination was a bona fide technique, and the vast bulk of the business was with scientific and medical anatomists, but was also well-versed in the arguments about how much can be learned from public exhibition. Since Von Hagens started out, anatomy has become steadily more mainstream, with forensic series like Silent Witness making the ordinary viewer familiar with how the human system works and fails to work. While it feels like a rationalist, Protestant enterprise, headed by a north German, Rurik, there is also something Catholic and southern even in the use of human remains for entertainment and art. Not all that far away from Guben, on the Czech side of the borders, is the ossuary of Sedlec where the bones of the dead are arranged to form coats of arms, chandeliers and fantastical flying creatures.

Coat of arms at the Sedlec ossuary

The production process that Rurik, and two staff members Udo and Nicole showed me, is broken down into clearly-defined stages; plastinating a body is a routine process. A lot of the work is chemical, but some of it is definitely physical and hands-on. During my tour I leaned over, talking to a technician who was calmly de-fleshing a severed human leg, and realised that although my tie had been appropriate for a business meeting, I was probably best off without a dangling strand of fabric around my neck during the factory tour.

The plastination process is paradoxical. The dead are individuals, people who have chosen to leave their bodies to the Plastinarium in their wills; people valued and known by their families whatever the surviving relatives think of the bequest. The Plastinarium picks up the bodies as soon as that is legally permitted, and preserves them in the vaults at Guben until they can be processed. But when they are plastinated, they lose their individuality even as they gain a sort of immortality. There is no way to match an individual donor to a particular plastinated exhibit; distinctions of nationality, race and status are obliterated; death even in this form is a republic in which all citizens are equal. The plastinated – be they are cutaways of muscles, blood vessels, hearts or brains, or even some of Gunther’s stranger artistic works – all look like they belong to the same tribe. German and Pole, European and African – we’re all the same when we die.

But the plastinees are also curiously alive, perhaps a fair exchange for their individuality. Meeting one – and it feels like meeting, as you stand facing them looking into their glassy eyes – makes you think of life rather than death. The hidden wiring is on display, the sinews and tendons that work my fingers as they type, the delicate strands around which my blood circulates, they are aspects of my living body that are represented in the entity before me. I cannot meet a plastinee and maintain the illusion that the ‘me’ writing and thinking is something detached from the machine that ‘I’ drive. I don’t know, I can’t know, anything about the transformed human I am with; but I know that, under my skin, we are siblings.

Although Rurik had been keen to go ahead, I knew that there was a strong chance that my tour of the Guben Plastinarium was my last research visit for a while. There were still a few days between flying back from Berlin to London and the formal start of lockdown, but it already felt a lot riskier than it had when I left; the process of withdrawal had begun.

***

I’m an introvert and didn’t have too bad a time during lockdown. It was quite a mindful period; going for a walk, scarce meetings with other people, cooking from scratch, leaving groceries outside stricken neighbours’ doors all felt as if they were in brighter colours than usual. The empty streets made me conscious of birdsong; I grew fond of a flock of starlings that was camped out in Oakley Square not far from home in Camden Town. We would often see the Post Office Tower (you can tell my age from what I instinctively call the high concrete cylinder in Fitzrovia) with its well-meaning but dystopian messages to stay home and protect the NHS. I made sauerkraut, and part of the core of the raw material became the ‘cabbage ghost’, that looked like a friendly face but aged and withered into a mask of horror during lockdown. I wrote a book about the Doctor Who story The Sun Makers (1977), conscious of the irony that I was being paid SEISS by the tax authorities to write about a satire of the tax system.

‘Stay At Home’ - Post Office Tower, April 2020

Diverting though getting to know my own city better, and late 1970s nostalgia, proved to be, I was still keen to get back on the trail of Europe’s borders. Travel restrictions were lifted, intermittently, over the summer and I took advantage. I rode a night bus from Marseille to Milan and visited the border enclave of Campione d’Italia, a tiny fragment of Italy surrounded by Switzerland. I went on to Venice, where I had the privilege of seeing the city when visitor numbers were down by two thirds. I saw the plague doctor masks in the souvenir shops in the city that gave us the word quarantine, and thought of the public health notices and the scent of antibacterial spray in Der Tod in Venedig.

I first tested positive for COVID in October 2020. The text message pinged through as I was sitting on a bench in Islington chatting to a socially-distanced friend; it was startling for me and her both. I hastily took a few steps back and then walked home through the back streets avoiding people. This first encounter was not too bad – like a cold accompanied by a curious sort of headache that felt as if the wiring in my brain was running at too high a voltage – but I was poleaxed by my second dose around Christmas time. That headache was back, and worse, and I was in bed for the best part of a month. I was still feeling shaky for a lot of the first half of 2021 and after that I noticed that things hadn’t quite got back to normal with my stamina, concentration and memory. I would get tetchy and sleepy in the afternoons to a degree that could not be completely explained by turning 50. A couple of years later an MRI scan showed that I had an exotic neurovascular condition called DAVF (Dural Arteriovenous Fistula), a spidery network of connections that should not be there taking blood from my artery straight to a vein. It’s unknowable whether this was caused by COVID or coincidental, but I do think about that weird headache. The DAVF and surgery overshadowed the publication of my book, rather as if I were still in some sort of personalised lockdown in June 2024.

The Plastinarium didn’t end up in the final text of Borderlines, but it’s still one of the research trips that I remember best. It felt oddly appropriate at that time to be surrounded by the dead, reminded of the corporeal reality of the body. Some of the exhibits bore the marks of diseases that had killed their previous owners, such as dark blotches of cancer tissue on a brain, or the shrivelled lungs into which last breaths had been laboriously gasped. The chaos wrought by COVID on the networks that make up human bodies was accompanied by the atrophy of the networks that make up a modern economy and society. Neither I, nor my book, were quite the same again.