Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 1

Graveyard shift

Late winter morning. Out of the central railroad station, with its twelve hundred trains a day, through a chaos of taxis and bicycles and lost tourists and traffic entangled in new construction sites; past outdoor fast-food places getting no business on a windy winter day. Over the Sandkrug Bridge with its roaring traffic, and then here we are, here is the greenway sign, blessed release from the traffic, onto footpaths and bicycle paths that will meet the streets only a handful of times again in the next several miles.

Schifffahrtskanal, Nordhafen.  My photo, January 2014

The Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal makes a near-straight shot from the Spree in center city to the Havel in the west (12 kilometers in comparison to the Spree’s wobbling 18 km to make the same journey). The canal skirts a string of cemeteries in this first stretch, dropping down from the Sandkrug Bridge into the Invalidenfriedhof, the military cemetery that was laid out behind a home for disabled veterans (the Invaliden) in the eighteenth century. A little further out are cemeteries belonging to the center-city churches which, as the city grew, could not keep burying their parishioners in the center-city churchyards.

Invalidenfriedhof.  My photo, February 2014

I've spent much more time in graveyards in Germany than in the US. In general the living spend much more time in graveyards, and the dead spend much less time there, in Germany than in the US. 

In the US, the living don’t spend much time in cemeteries because cemeteries can be dangerous places: you can get mugged bringing flowers, as in the Detroit cemetery where some members of Archangel’s family are buried. Or cemeteries can be derelict places: perhaps the management took the maintenance-trust money and ran, as in the Colorado cemetery where my father is buried. 

Here, the cemeteries are more peaceable and orderly. In December and January the graves are thickly heaped with fresh evergreen branches and dotted with pots of blooming heather or hellebore, and the tombstones are polished. (You can get tombstone cleaner from the store here, it's on the shelf next to the tub-and-tile and ceramic-cooktop cleaners.)  

But once you’re underground in the US, you’re likely to stay there quite a while; you own the plot, after all. Here, people don’t buy plots, they buy usage rights for a standard period. In Berlin it’s twenty years. (In Vienna—always more class conscious!—it’s ten years for standard graves and twenty for premium.) One day recently I was cutting through the St.-Johannis cemetery, further up the canal, and saw parking tickets on a number of the tombstones: red stickers saying, “The use rights on this grave have run out. Relatives should check with the administration.” Renewals are possible, but if no one tends to the renewal after the twenty years, then it’s time to clear the space for others. 

Graves of notable people and military graves are under a different set of rules; they aren’t cleared out under normal circumstances. And so there is a long-breathed, time-stopped feeling about the back reaches of the military cemetery along the canal, where the generals’ tombs sleep in the winter light. Here are Frederick the Great’s generals from eighteenth-century wars, generals from the War of Liberation against Napoleon, generals from the nineteenth-century wars of unification. The taste in monuments belongs to a lost world. Weeping angels, piles of antique swords and shields carved in stone. The occasional lion.

Invalidenfriedhof, Scharnhorst tomb.  My photo, February 2014

The front reaches of the Invalidenfriedhof, directly along the canal, were cleared out when the Berlin Wall was built, because the canal itself was the border between East and West Berlin. Manfred von Richthofen’s grave was here; when the Wall went up, the family was invited to take the Red Baron’s bones elsewhere. (Note for Colorado friends: did you know that the Red Baron's uncle Walter was a Denver real estate developer in the nineteenth century? He built East Colfax as an upscale residential district. Lined the street with big trees like a good German; the trees were ripped out later to make room for more traffic. Possibly a bad idea.)

Where the bicycle path runs now in the Invalidenfriedhof was the death strip, the no-man's-land, between the main wall and the lower "back wall" that was intended to discourage people from getting close to the main wall. People were killed here: mostly would-be escapees; once, an East Berlin border guard in a nighttime firefight between East and West Berlin forces, sparked by the attempt of a fourteen-year-old to get out of East Berlin by swimming the canal. (The fourteen-year-old  made it.)

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In the mid-nineteenth century the landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné planned agreeable tree-lined walks on both sides of this canal, as he did for the Landwehrkanal (see Landwehrkanal posts, February). But the work on the Schiffahrtskanal got started later, and before the landscape gardening could be done, there were wars and budget troubles and land-grabs for industrial purposes, and then worse budget troubles and worse wars. But late does not mean never, and about a hundred and fifty years after Lenné planned for “great-crowned trees” to stand along the water, the trees were finally planted—summer-lindens, the classic urban-boulevard and village-square tree in Germany.

How small they look, still, after twenty years. Lindens don't grow fast.

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There was a big church nearby, before the Second World War, where the funerals were held for people who ended up in this graveyard. 

Church near Invalidenfriedhof, 1901 postcard

The church had a famous ring of steel bells, with a “sensationally” pure tone, according to the accounts of the time. One of the bells, named Auguste Viktoria, traveled to Chicago in 1893 to be admired at the World's Fair. 

The church took a direct bomb hit in World War II, and the remains were slowly looted away in the years that followed. The lead from the leaded glass windows went, the copper from the remains of the roof went. Finally in 1967, presumably as part of the work to clear out more space behind the Wall, the East Berlin authorities blew up the ruins and carted them away to a scrapyard.

The ruins included Auguste Viktoria, which had survived the bombs and the looting and the demolition more or less intact, but was now in danger of being melted down or broken up. A neighborhood pastor bought the bell from the scrapyard before the worst happened, and it lived silently in his backyard for years, like a large hibernating tortoise. First in Berlin and then in a small town in Thüringen when he changed congregations.

Finally in the first winter after the Wall came down, people from the city in the Rhineland where the bell had been cast came looking for Auguste Viktoria. They bought the bell, restored it, and put it back to work in a parish church for a couple of decades. In 2011 they gave it to Berlin. And here it hangs by the water, in a peculiar little structure that looks like the illegitimate offspring of a sharpshooter stand and a lifeguard tower.

Bell Tower, Invalidenfriedhof. My photo, February 2014

The bell isn't rung any more, which is a waste. A good city is full of bells (and Berlin is): change-ringers practicing their mathematical combinations, carillons beating out popular tunes, church bells tumbling through the sky for feast-days and weddings.

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There are other strange relics along this stretch of the canal as well. The construction cranes have been busy here, on the cleared ground freed up by the fall of the Wall. There is a string of new apartment houses near the path. In the backyard of one of them, squatting glumly between the bicycle stand and the recycling pickup, is one of the old watchtowers of the Berlin Wall, left as a reminder.

Along the Schiffahrtskanal, north of the Invalidenfriedhof. My photo, February 2014.

Scraggly stretches of the back wall still stand in the military cemetery, and also in other cemeteries that were disturbed by the building of the Wall.  If you walk away from the canal a bit, where the Wall turned away, you land in St. Hedwig’s cemetery, which still has fragments of the back wall in it, grass-grown and graffiti-covered.  How small and cardboardy it looks …

Remains of back wall, St. Hedwig's cemetery, Liesenstrasse.  Wiki commons photo.