S-Bahn Smells
Someone has broken the glass again in the door of our neighborhood S-Bahn station. (How often is this, every third month?) But how wonderful the station smells in the morning, from the fresh flowers piled shoulder-high around the doors. The bakery-kiosk under the escalator smells of good fresh croissants and bad fresh coffee; and the schedule for Berlin’s three main opera houses is posted by the elevator, along with advertisements for movies, romance novels, and European Parliament candidates.
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| Florist, S-Bahn Bellevue, April 2014. My photo. |
Ah, so homelike, so like
small train stations where I have hung out in the US. So many hours spent waiting
to be picked up by family or friends in some sad dump with broken benches and no heat in the dead of winter.
Karow as a whole seems to be comfortable enough; a lot of new single-family houses have been built here since reunification. The private structures are okay, it's just the public structure, the station, that is squalid.
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The station is not so close to the river here, but in less than a mile we’re back to the waterside. It’s a cloudy day, with springtime kinds of clouds in marbly patterns behind the new leaves.
It won’t rain; it just likes to threaten.
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| Along the Panke in Karow, April 2014. My photo. |
I’m still thinking about the Karow station.
Query: why are dereliction and the accompanying lack of small retail still marginallly more common in old East Berlin than old West Berlin, once you're out of the middle of the city? (Dereliction and lack of retail go together: on the one hand, you don't want to rent space for your bakery in a place where the smell will make people gag; on the other hand, if no one rents space in the station, there isn't so much money available to fix it up.)
Multiple choice options for the explanation, pick one or more: (A) Too little capitalism in the (distant) past: Private business ownership was discouraged for two generations in the East and is recovering only slowly. (B) Too much capitalism in the (recent) past: Deutsche Bahn, which is responsible for the S-Bahn, meant to do a big public stock offering several years ago, and in order to make the financials look good, it allegedly made some ill-advised maintenance cuts that have had long-term negative effects on the S-Bahn. (For accountant friends: it smells like real earnings management around here!) (C) A lot of small retail in Berlin is run by non-Germans; and non-Germans are wary of the old East, which has a bit of a reputation for skinhead xenophobia.
(C) appears to have a lot of explanatory value if you look around places like the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops in our home neighborhood. Those wonderfully "European" institutions, the ubiquitous florists and fresh-produce stands and bakeries and cafes, are run by the Vietnamese and the Turks and miscellaneous Middle Eastern and Balkan types who might feel uneasy in the remoter stretches of the old East.
Query: why are dereliction and the accompanying lack of small retail still marginallly more common in old East Berlin than old West Berlin, once you're out of the middle of the city? (Dereliction and lack of retail go together: on the one hand, you don't want to rent space for your bakery in a place where the smell will make people gag; on the other hand, if no one rents space in the station, there isn't so much money available to fix it up.)
Multiple choice options for the explanation, pick one or more: (A) Too little capitalism in the (distant) past: Private business ownership was discouraged for two generations in the East and is recovering only slowly. (B) Too much capitalism in the (recent) past: Deutsche Bahn, which is responsible for the S-Bahn, meant to do a big public stock offering several years ago, and in order to make the financials look good, it allegedly made some ill-advised maintenance cuts that have had long-term negative effects on the S-Bahn. (For accountant friends: it smells like real earnings management around here!) (C) A lot of small retail in Berlin is run by non-Germans; and non-Germans are wary of the old East, which has a bit of a reputation for skinhead xenophobia.
(C) appears to have a lot of explanatory value if you look around places like the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops in our home neighborhood. Those wonderfully "European" institutions, the ubiquitous florists and fresh-produce stands and bakeries and cafes, are run by the Vietnamese and the Turks and miscellaneous Middle Eastern and Balkan types who might feel uneasy in the remoter stretches of the old East.
Last summer there was a big flap in Hellersdorf (very East Berlin, as far east as you can get), when an empty school building was turned into housing for Syrian refugees. (The empty school in our neighborhood that had been serving the same purpose was needed as a school again.)
Vehement protests, on the edge of violence, broke out in Hellersdorf. Some of the locals said they didn’t want refugees housed nearby because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the refugees were criminals who might attack them. The refugees were also up in arms, saying they didn’t want to be housed out in godforsaken Hellersdorf because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the locals were criminals who might attack them.
Vehement protests, on the edge of violence, broke out in Hellersdorf. Some of the locals said they didn’t want refugees housed nearby because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the refugees were criminals who might attack them. The refugees were also up in arms, saying they didn’t want to be housed out in godforsaken Hellersdorf because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the locals were criminals who might attack them.
It was an uglier version of the scene in Mozart’s Magic Flute where Papageno is afraid of Monostatos because he is black, and Monostatos is afraid of Papageno because he is wearing feathers, and they both hide behind trees (or whatever props the stage offers) singing “Hu! Hu! That must be the devil! Hu!”
The protests have eased off in Hellersdorf since last summer. People from the neighborhood church and other groups have turned out in favor of the refugees, have stopped by to help out with German lessons, to bring toys for the children and warm clothes for everyone. Other sorts of people have followed the refugees when they are out on errands, throwing bottles at them. In March, a car belonging to one of the refugee-helpers was burned out in the parish-house parking lot. Hu! Das ist der Teufel sicherlich!
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But the putrid station is behind us, and we are northbound along the river again. It's fine to walk cross-country here: the new leaves are coming out in raspberry thickets that go on for yards and yards, and the buttercups are thick by the water.
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| Buttercups along the Panke in Karow, April 2014. My photo. |
Several months ago I saw a television documentary about a slightly problem-prone housing project on the edge of Berlin. (Too many of the wrong sort of people have moved in here, said the old inhabitants, you can tell they don't know how to behave because they're here for months without putting proper curtains in the windows.) Two of the interviewees were young men of Middle Eastern descent, who had grown up in the project and were occasionally inclined to tough-guy stances; one was a rapper with some angry lines. But do you know what the best thing is? one of the two, a Lebanese, said. You can take long walks in the country from here.
What a very German Lebanese. At least, different from the Lebanese neighbors I grew up with in the American West, who would no more have taken long walks in the country than they would have stood in the courthouse square wearing clown noses. But then, maybe they were very Western-American Lebanese. (We do not do long country walks in western America, or at least we didn't in those days.)
What a very German Lebanese. At least, different from the Lebanese neighbors I grew up with in the American West, who would no more have taken long walks in the country than they would have stood in the courthouse square wearing clown noses. But then, maybe they were very Western-American Lebanese. (We do not do long country walks in western America, or at least we didn't in those days.)
It's post-glacial wetland out here, marsh and dune landscape like parts of Michigan or Wisconsin. On the edge of Karow is a nature preserve: lagoons and reed-beds and patches of woods full of breeding waterfowl and sometimes clouds of migrants. (Are refuges for migrant birds easier to provide than refuges for migrant people?) The diversity of duck calls on a spring morning sounds like twenty kinds of car horns in a Manhattan traffic jam.
A big hawk, a marsh harrier, glides low over the reeds for a long way, looking for prey to rip to pieces, and there is a swathe of silence where it passes (not such a refuge for the migrants here after all, perhaps.)
Here, where we are almost at Buch (the next S-Bahn stop), there is more water--the so-called Moorlinse, the marsh lens--and more noise. How loud birds are. Gulls screak and chitter at each other; swans do slow, booming liftoffs like loaded 747s.
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| Moorlinse, near Buch, April 2014. My photo. |
People have lived here since the stone age. The Funnel-beaker Culture, as the archaeologists call it, had settlements in these parts. Not Germanic, not Slavic, not even Indo-European speakers, probably. Houses on wooden piles in the water; hunting, fishing, a little unimpressive grain-growing; some of the first and most intensive cattle-raising in the stone age. If you have the gene mutation that lets you digest lactose even after you're an adult, you probably owe it to the Funnel Beaker folks, where the mutation apparently originated (Nature Genetics 2003). The gene spread around the world from northeastern Europe, and the Funnel-Beaker Culture was overrun by the next wave of immigrants. Funnel Beakers are on the dustbin of history! Globular Amphorae rule! (I'm not kidding, the next lot in this territory is the Globular Amphorae Culture, which probably brought the Indo-European language group with it. I had a lot of fun in my European Prehistory course in college....)
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Of course, in spite of all these rural vistas, really we are still in the city. Turn right from the Moorlinse, dodge under the tracks at the S-Bahn station (which is getting a big face-lift: good move, Deutsche Bahn!), and we're and back along the Panke and in Buch, the northernmost sub-district in Berlin.
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Of course, in spite of all these rural vistas, really we are still in the city. Turn right from the Moorlinse, dodge under the tracks at the S-Bahn station (which is getting a big face-lift: good move, Deutsche Bahn!), and we're and back along the Panke and in Buch, the northernmost sub-district in Berlin.
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| Along the Panke in Buch, April 2014. My photo. |
When Archangel walks with me, he grumbles that I chase squirrels--meaning that I wander off in the direction of anything that looks interesting rather than going briskly from point A to point B. I intend to chase a few squirrels at Buch, but that is for next time.
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