Landwehrkanal 3

Brother Man and Brother Tree

It was good to find the Landwehrkanal banks so accessible this winter. Long stretches were fenced off in recent years, because of an uproar about trees.

In Tiergarten, on the way to the canal. January 2014, My photo.

Trees are to Berlin somewhat as cows are to Delhi. To kill a tree is an impious and thuggish act. Hence, when the city started cutting down trees along the Landwehrkanal in 2007, the relatively genteel local equivalent of all merry hell broke loose.

The trouble was that a retaining wall at one of the excursion-boat stops along the canal fell in during mid-April, and then two weeks later, not so far away, a long stretch of the canal bank slid into the water. Divers investigated and brought back bad news about the general state of the canal banks. Nightmare scenarios arose in the minds of responsible authorities. One of those three-ton willows leaning over the water is going to come down on an excursion boat and squash tourists like flies. A stretch of bank covered in sunbathers is going to slide into the water right into the path of a big boat, and some decorative innocent is going to be chopped up by the propeller. So they banned the boats and fenced the banks to keep sunbathers off and started cutting trees. 

People grumbled about the fences and left rude notes on them or even knocked them down. (Rude public notes are part of the Berlin streetscape.  E.g.,  neighbor-to-neighbor note in an apartment entryway: “Please close this door quietly, even when drunk.”)

The excursion boats, confined to the (overcrowded) Spree, faced with disastrous loss of business, started carrying bedsheet-size banners saying, “Save our jobs!” Don’t just close the canal, do what you have to do to make it usable again. Meanwhile, people chained themselves to the trees and perched in the branches to prevent the tree-cutting.

Excursion boats parked on the Spree in the winter. Building in the background is our neighborhood high school (old and new wings). Photo, Angela Arnold

So where do we go from here? The relevant regulatory authority picks the winners and losers in this fight? Some kind of attempt is made at a market solution--given the money involved in the tourism business and the miles of property value along the canal--and we see who bids higher? 

Nonono. Not in the land that invented the PhD seminar and the theory of communicative action. We talk about it in a well-ordered way, gathering information and writing papers about it that we present to each other in formal sessions under the guidance of professional mediators. For a very long time.

The agreed-on goal was to work out a consensus solution to the problems of the canal that would be “technically workable, sustainable economically, ecologically, and in terms of social welfare, as well as consistent with historic preservation regulations, and would address both the current situation and the future.”  

Oh, right, this is going to happen. Waterways and Shipping was estimating a price tag of 180 million euros to make the canal safe, and if we have to save the trees and social welfare and all the rest of it, what are the costs likely to be, and where is the money going to come from, in a city with perpetual budget troubles? And what a nightmare multiplicity of interests to mediate: at least three districts of the city (each with its own mayor and council), two state-government departments, the various excursion-boat companies, the Waterways and Shipping Authority, the Chamber of Commerce, and twenty-some environmental and other citizens’ groups with probably incompatible interests and varying competence.

The price tag for the mediation process alone, not counting the cost of any actual repair work that resulted, was something like a million and a half euros, and it lasted for years. Bad idea? 

The mediation finally wrapped up just before Christmas of 2013 (some exhausted parties having dropped out along the way). Temporary fixes had got the excursion boats back in the canal, and got most of the fences down, long before the end of the process. No trees had fallen on anyone. Given enough people with enough different viewpoints digging out scientific information (and the locals have a hearty appetite for technical data), it was possible to establish that most of the trees were not a threat to the stability of the banks after all—on the contrary, they were a help—and long-term, there were ways to stabilize the banks that were more environmentally friendly and less expensive than the original plan. The price tag for the revised, mediated, socially and environmentally benevolent, talked-to-death consensus plan was 70 million euros instead of the 180 million that was originally forecast.

So, 110 million savings on an investment of about a million and a half ... Well, let's get reckless and call it an investment of four or five million, to include the costs of unpaid citizen time and annoyance, and it's still a whopper of a financial return. (Not the kind we are likely to see in our retirement plans.) Chalk one up for communicative action, in a sufficiently patient world.

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The Landwehrkanal has also been the site of other kinds of political action. Two notorious political murders were committed along the canal in 1919, in the chaotic months that followed World War I. You can read the memorial plaque as you pass the spot:

On the evening of the 15^th of January 1919, Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Dr. Rosa Luxemburg were mishandled and murdered by soldiers and officers of the Guard-Cavalry-Sharpshooter Division [an army division in the process of degenerating into a death squad]. Rosa Luxemburg, mortally wounded or dead, was thrown into the Landwehrkanal by her murderers here. Karl Liebknecht was shot a little later at the New Lake, a few hundred meters north of here. In a battle against oppression, militarism, and war, the dedicated socialist Rosa Luxemburg died as the victim of a treacherous political murder. This contempt for life and brutality against human beings show man’s capacity for inhumanity. Inhumanity cannot be and must not be a means of conflict resolution.

In January there are always roses here, and red carnations.

Rosa Luxemburg memorial, Landwehrkanal, 2014.  My photo.

The killings were tolerated, or perhaps suggested or ordered, by the center-left government in Berlin. The resulting split between center left and far left (Liebknecht's and Luxemburg's followers) weakened the opposition to the Nazis in the years to come, with bloody consequences.

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Long ago, when the water-traffic patterns were different, there was a turnaround basin about a kilometer south of the Landwehrkanal. The basin was later filled in to make a square that anchors a pleasant Charlottenburg neighborhood, where Archangel’s father lived back in the 1920s and 30s. In the days before he had to flee for his life. First to Portugal, then to the US, which was how A. came to be born in Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Now the square is a pleasant place again, with restaurants and bookstores round about. Not always very good restaurants. But a nice place to be on summer evenings under the trees, in a possibly temporary oasis of less murderous politics. Long live the trees, long live communicative action.

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On the wall along the S-Bahn platform at this square is a plaque that says:

         Brother Man has often let us down.

         Brother Tree, never.

Landwehrkanal in the summer, Kreuzberg.  Photo, Lienhard Schulz