“Once I left the country of my childhood, I realised those differences were everywhere: in the shape of the street furniture and the painted lines by the side of the road, the strength and colour of the light cast by the streetlamps or the sound of the ambulance sirens as they bounced between buildings.“
“I had this notion, based on reading too many books, wanting to live in the world of those books rather than the one we had and it was a foolish notion I think, but what I wanted was to be with all the freaks and weirdos to be part of that community who have opted out of normal society.”
A Dream of White Horses by Paul Scraton, a Berlin-based British writer, is a deeply mediative and philosophically rich novel with theme of exile and the quest for a sense of home at its centre. The book also explores themes of memory, the foundations of friendship in the contemporary world, the complexity of European multilayered identity, the trauma of being separated from one’s roots, and displacement caused by the political events and shifting borders.
This novel is also a moving meditation on the modern notion of friendship with people you hardly ever see face to face. Ben only met Pascal twice in the fifteen years between their time sharing a flat in Leeds and their lives in Germany. Each meeting lasted only a few hours: once in Rotterdam and once in Landeck, Austria. But thanks to pictures, messages, emails, and posts they exchanged over the years, it never felt as though they missed anything or were ever truly apart. Time did not create distance between them.
Paul Scraton’s writing is beautiful, evocative, dreamlike, and full of sensitivity and nostalgia.
The story follows Ben, an English immigrant living in Berlin, who travels from London to a small, unnamed Baltic island in Germany. During his train journey across Europe, Ben listens to voice notes recorded for him by his friend Pascal. Each message corresponds to a photograph of a hotel room where Pascal stayed at various points in his adult life. These photos document moments of waiting and lingering. Hotel rooms, “disconnected from the world outside”, became, to a certain extent, a substitute for the home Pascal was always searching for.
Through these voice notes, we learn about Pascal’s family history: his parents Clara and Alexander’s immigration to England from communist East Germany (GDR, German Democratic Republic, which existed between 1949 and 1990) in the early 1980s when Pascal was eight years old; the impact of changing European borders between Germany and Poland; the connection to two different Germanies, GDR and FRG (Federal Republic of Germany); the return to Germany after thirty-five years in exile; reconnecting with his roots in Berlin, the city of his birth; and his quest for belonging and home.
It is important to note that leaving the GDR in 1980 meant a one-way ticket out of your country and the inability to see your family again. This was the case for Pascal’s family, who were forced to leave for political reasons. After moving to England, Pascal never saw his grandfather again. His grandfather and mother died within a year of each other without ever witnessing the fall of the brutal communist regimes in Eastern Europe.
Pascal’s voice-notes are not only a journey through memory but also across a variety of personal geographies that Pascal created over the course of his life.
He always lived out of a suitcase, always alone, and every place he visited was merely temporary. He was constantly moving, unable to stay in one place because he was searching “for a place to stop,” for a sense of permanence.
“You don’t carry with you a relationship to place, a sense of belonging, in your blood. And you can’t replace it with the book reading and a tourist trail journey through these sites of supposed collective morning. “
In his recordings for Ben, Pascal reflects on exile and return, on comings and goings, on the stories of families and the stories of places. At what point do we say we are going home when we visit our parents? When do we become visitors to the country of our birth? Following his mother’s death and his own transition into adulthood, Pascal becomes increasingly interested in his family history. As a photographer, he meets other immigrants and their families who have moved from one place to another. In the late 1990s he travels to the Balkans, visiting Sarajevo and Zagreb at a time when the traces of the war of the 1990s were still visible:
“There was no poetry in these ruins. No romantic aesthetic. Just a story of trauma and misery and all-too-recent loss.”
Pascal is acutely aware of the romanticisation that the immigrant experience is often subjected to, one that frequently overlooks the trauma and suffering that accompany it.
In search of his home, Pascal decides to return to Germany “to discover, and photograph, the places of [his] family and the stories [he]’d been told.” He embarks on a journey to find his own Germany, his own connection to the country of his birth. Before reaching Germany, he first visits Verdun in France, then Ostend in Belgium, and Świnoujście in Poland, all places connected to his family history and therefore essential to his own sense of belonging and his search for a permanent place to rest.
Verdun was on his itinerary because of his maternal grandfather’s stories. This was a place of the 1916 battle where hundreds of thousands (800 000) of young German and French men died including his grandfather’s older brother who fought and fell in that battle at the age of nineteen. Over the course of sixty years Pascal’s grandfather visited Verdun many times to be close to his fallen brother. Years later Pascal also visited Verdun to feel closer to his grandfather knowing how important that place was to him, like a place of pilgrimage. Pascal reflects deeply about the meaning of Verdun for his family and what it means to live for the people who never had the chance to live their lives and fulfil their dreams. Before leaving for England, Pascal promised his grandfather that he would remember Verdun and his great-uncle, whom he never met, even after his grandfather was gone.
Next on his list is Ostend in Belgium, where his grandfather moved in 1936 before later settling in England. He returned to Germany only after the Second World War. Ostend offered refuge to his grandfather as it did to many Germans opposing the Nazis at a time when “just a few hours away people were being removed from their homes and placed in camps.”
From Ostend, Pascal travels to Świnoujście in Poland, where his grandfather was born and grew up speaking both Polish and German, with family on both sides of the ethnic divide. Pascal visits his great-grandparents’ graves and reflects on the impact of shifting borders in that region and how those changes affected his family throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. This is what happens “when men sit at meeting tables with maps and draw borders (…). Someone decides (…) with a stroke of the pen, that this is now Russia, this is now Poland, and this is now Germany, and then millions are forced to scramble, to find their place in the new order.”
Finally, Pascal reaches Germany, where he meditates on his relationship with Berlin. Although he was born there, he does not consider himself a Berliner. He knows he has to confront the places of his childhood, the places tied to his parents and their life in Berlin before and after his birth. But his grandfather’s hometown is now in Poland, and the country he was born in, East Germany, no longer exists. The Germanies he once knew, East and West, are gone. During his stay, Pascal tries to immerse himself entirely in the German culture: he reads newspapers, history books, watches old films, visits museums, and seeks out memorials. Yet after thirty-five years in exile, these efforts are not enough to make him feel at home in the country of his birth.
“The Berlin I had come to know on my visits to the city was to my mind a completely different place than the one we left behind in 1980. In my imagination Berlin was two cities still. (…).”
Throughout his journey he explores the notion of cultural heritage and asks whether, despite being removed from his culture at the age of eight, there is still something inherently German within him.
“Would I feel the embrace of the German forest? (…) Would I look at myself differently after weeks and months living once again in my mother’s tongue?”
“When we studied the Second World War at school in Southport, I never thought of these stories being connected to me that the language we spoke at home linked me to those camps like a railway line stretching all the way from the Irish Sea to Auschwitz.”
The Baltic Sea island where Pascal spent summer holidays was the one place that truly felt like home. It became a real home both for him and for his father, who learned to love it through his wife. This sense of home had nothing to do with deep roots or birthright. The island represented Pascal’s memories of time spent with his parents and grandfather. Home is depicted not as a place but as the memories we create with the people we love most.
I absolutely loved this book. As an immigrant myself, the emotions described resonated deeply with me and reminded me strongly of W. G. Sebald’s writing. I highly recommend it. I will definitely more books by this author.
