Spree 2

Kleingarten, Schlossgarten

You have to like cloudy days to enjoy living here. It’s not that Berlin gets so much rain and snow, it just gets a lot of cloud.

But it’s wonderfully various cloud. In winter the clouds sit in the streets like fat bad-tempered spirits, oozing ectoplasm between the houses, so that you can’t see from here to the corner. In the spring, big slate-and-white cloudscapes with fiery edges blow past, bringing the rain. (Too dramatic really, too last-act-of-the-opera!)

Then there's today. What is the color of this sort-of-overcast, almost-monotone sky? Iridescent, not quite white. Mother-of-pearl.

 Does it matter what color the sky is?  Yes.

It would be sad not to pay attention to the world.

Along the water, Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

At the beginning of this stretch of the river I'm still walking along Kleingärten for a while, as at the end of the last post. And good heavens, here are a couple of garden dwarves. How long has it been since I saw a dwarf in a Kleingarten? And they used to be so ubiquitous, decades ago. (Though there's still enough other garden kitsch along here: Scenes from Bambi in plastic relief! Ceramic squirrels with smiles like toothpaste ads!)

The dwarves were made fun of for so long—they were the German equivalent of pink flamingos on the lawn--it sort of discouraged people from having them. 

Garden dwarf. Photo, Martin1009, Wikicommons

In the 90s there was a resurgence of dwarves, but parody-dwarves now, giving the finger to passersby or lying dead with knives in their backs. 

Not an improvement, really. 

Various associations have arisen to address the dwarf problem in Europe. The International Association for the Protection of Garden Dwarves, headquartered in Switzerland like the Red Cross or the League of Nations, encourages the production of historically correct dwarves (male, bearded, with traditional hat, no more than 69 cm high). In France, which takes these things differently, the Front de Liberation des Nains de Jardins rescues dwarves from gardens and sets them free in the woods, which are thought to be their natural habitat. 

The dwarf issue seems quiescent in Berlin. The Kleingärten are flowering madly.

Kleingarten along the Spree, May 2014. My photo.

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And then we come to a complicated bit of water. The Spree makes a ninety-degree turn here and heads south, while a canal continues straight on to link up with the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal at Westhafen [see March posts on the Schifffahrtskanal]. 

There's a bit of a slope somewhere here (an exceptional event, in tabletop-flat Berlin!). On the Spree itself there's a weir, where the water tumbles down with a pleasing small roar. The boat traffic all goes through on the parallel canal, where there's a lock to move the boats down to the level of the lower Spree. 

Weir, Spree, May 2014.  My photo.

A sign on the river says, "Alle Schleusen sind gesperrt."  

       All the locks are blocked.  
       All the locks are locked.  

But presumably this is not true; there are boats coming and going. I see a police boat called the Havel, which is inspecting the Spree. I see a Fisheries Oversight boat called the Catfish, which is presumably inspecting the fish. 

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And then we are round the corner of the river and walking in the Charlottenburg Palace gardens, where water has been pulled in from the river to make a big carp pond and decorative streams for the gardens. 

How dense and intense the green is at this season (and how leafy-green the air smells). 

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

There really is a little stream in this picture; I think it's the Fürstenbrunner Graben--the Prince's Fountain Channel--but it's almost invisible. (Does it go to the prince's fountain? Perhaps not now: the baroque waterworks in the garden are mostly gone, and I think the tourist-drenching fountain in the parterres is postwar.)

Ah, and what shall we think now of palaces and princes, of all this tourist-bait grandeur? What are all these people thinking who are taking pictures of each other by the carp pond and trying to decide whether to spend fifteen euros a pop on seeing the interior? 

Schloss Charlottenburg. Photo, Golliday, Wiki Commons.

I'm not a big fan of palace interiors, country-house interiors. (How my aunt Marie, who started life as a Russian peasant, loved such places. I'd be happy seeing a palace every day of the week, she said. That was when I was living in Munich and took her to see Neuschwanstein---which is surely way too garden-dwarfy?)

Here is a dream of ease and beautiful things: the prince's life as seen in fairy tales, as seen from the peasant's hut. 

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills ....

There are beautiful things here. (Pay your fifteen euros, people.) But not ease, perhaps. 

    Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
    Called architect and artist in, that they,
    Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
    The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
    The gentleness none there had ever known.

Stucco work, Goldene Galerie, Schloss Charlottenburg. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Much of this was destroyed in the 1940s, both palace and garden. Much of what we see now is restoration--somewhat disputed in the case of the baroque garden. The garden is a pleasant simplified 1950 kind of baroque (like the over-orchestrated Bach in Disney's Fantasia. Disney liked German kitsch, he used the garden dwarves for Snow White and used Neuschwanstein for the castle in Fantasyland.)

I take one more turn around the broderieparterres in the garden. (Inside and outside, garden-image and garden, the forms echo and sing to each other, perhaps not perfectly in tune.)

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

Along one of the little streams I surprise a heron fishing.  He's a bit blurry here, because he is just starting to flap and squawk and threaten to sue me for unauthorized photography before disappearing under the bridge.

Heron, Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

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Note: the verse quoted above is from W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Time of Civil War.