Spree 4

Klingons on the Spree

The city vanishes, over and over, and is replaced by some crass simulacrum that horrifies the old inhabitants. This stretch of the Spree that runs through center city has been in a turmoil of rebuilding for a long time.

Some of the people who lived in West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s hated what the city became in the 90s. (Not everybody who lived in East Berlin was crazy about it either.) People who were euphoric about the place in the 90s got disillusioned in the 2000s. Those who came with enthusiasm in, say, 2003 are becoming unhappy now, as rents rise and tourists choke center city, and construction fences and building cranes (the Berlin state bird) still shoulder into the neighborhoods over and over--irrepressible, inconvenient, changing the familiar cityscape that had grown around us like a second skin. (But we've been rebuilding at a scorching pace for twenty-five years! Aren't we there yet?) 

One night earlier in the spring--when there were still real nights, and the daylight quit before we did--I looked out the east window and saw something strange in the night sky. I called Archangel, who peered at it carefully through the top of his glasses. There's a Klingon warbird hovering over the Hauptbahnhof, he said.

And it looked like it, too, but of course it was the lights on a new set of cranes. 

Spree, bridges, cranes near Hauptbahnhof, May 2014. My photo.

Vanishing Berlin has a long history. Of course postwar Berlin--ruinous, divided, somber--was very unlike Weimar Berlin. Which was not much like fat, ornate pre-World-War-I Berlin, which was not much like the Athens-on-the-Spree of the early nineteenth century, which was not much like Frederick the Great's Berlin, and so on and so on. There were sad campers at every change—and they weren’t even wrong to be sad.

         Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

         What more is there to say?

As Yeats wrote, and then proceeded to say much more.

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There is much that’s unbeautiful and inhumane along this stretch of the Spree, in Mitte and Friedrichshain; but there are also good things. I'm a sucker for the new (2006) train station.

Spree, main railroad station and Moltkebrücke, May 2014. My photo.

How unrecognizable this is, compared to a dozen years ago. I can remember how scrawny and defeated the old train-shed looked then, and how savage the waste ground around it was. 

I have mixed feelings, though, about the park on the Moabiter Werder, the green space west of the station. It's wonderful to have park space along the water, of course, better than waste ground or private usurpations. But aaugh, this stretch of concrete and grass with "elliptical topic areas" planted in it (as a semi-official description says) .... The topic areas are supposed to provide visual references to biological diversity, to fairy tales, to the history of the area as a hunting-ground, and so on.

Wait, wait--as garden design, isn't this too mental? It’s full of concepts and references, and damned if you can find a place to sit in the shade on a hot day. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not sure I want my neighborhood planted with topic areas. 

And yet, and yet ... it grows, and it grows on me, as I walk up and down. I see people being happy here. In a few more years I will probably like it. (What suckers we are for the world.)

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This stretch of the river runs through the Regierungsviertel, the government quarter. The Chancellor's office is here, and the office buildings for the legislature, and so on. Slabby big raw buildings with blank space between them, not much foot traffic, not much humanity.

It may get better. There are new footpaths through grassy spaces; there are little trees that will be bigger after we are all dead. (Which is a time-scale that matters, here.)

The last time that I was strolling around here with Archangel, about a month ago, we met a crow bouncing up and down beside the walk, cawing and flapping, trying to intimidate a red fox on the waste ground nearby. The fox sat with its tail curled around its feet, head down a little, like someone being shouted at by a person who shouts a lot. When we moved closer the fox trotted off, and the crow flew away in the other direction, still shouting.

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There's something fantastical about the Regierungsviertel. Today let us walk through the clouds from office to office ...

Footbridge over Spree, May 2014. My photo.

from the Paul-Löbe-Haus (main legislative office building) to the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus (legislative library, archives, hearing rooms, etc., looking half like a ship about to launch across the water):

Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, May 2014. My photo.

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Then, after these fantastic strolls in the sky, here is an outburst of reality--a stretch of Plattenbau, the notorious East German prefab-concrete building mode, which is to architecture as gruel is to food. 

Along the Spree near Friedrichstrasse, May 2014.  My photo. 

(And oh, that color, that dim brown that used to be so common, regardless of whether you were in old east or old west, regardless of whether you were looking at Communist-era Plattenbau or Imperial-era stucco-work ....  This is what I remember of Berlin in the 1970s, for which I am not especially nostalgic.)

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And after the outburst of reality, an outburst of fantasy. Sous le pavé, la plage, as they said in Paris in 1968. Under the pavement is the beach--though here the beach has flung itself out beside the pavement. 

Beach along the Spree, across from Museum Island, May 2014.  My photo.

Especially along this middle stretch of the Spree, the city and various private parties bring in sand and palm trees and deck chairs in the summertime, and there are beach bars that will sell you complicated drinks with little paper hats on them. 

Then there is more fantasy, of a not entirely benign kind. The cathedral (built around the turn of the last century, finished 1905) is a piece of imperial bloat; it was designed to be overbearing and it is. 

Berlin Cathedral, May 2014. My photo.

And yet, and yet ...  I remember, in a local television documentary, an interview with an older woman who had moved into an apartment nearby several years ago. She said that, as a convinced atheist, she had really disliked living so close to the cathedral at first. She had kept the curtains closed on the window that looked out onto it. (The building is so aggressive!) But without becoming any less of an atheist she had come to be fond of the cathedral. It's a neighbor, it's a friend, the bells speak and sing, it catches the clouds and the sun. (What suckers we are ...)

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A little farther upriver is the absurdist Nikolaiviertel, a thirteenth-century neighborhood that was knocked to pieces in World War II and nearly drowned when the East German leadership planned to widen the Spree and make a harbor here (never happened, like lots of city plans). Finally the quarter was rebuilt as a tourist trap in the last couple of years of the Communist regime. There are some good pieces of restoration work here, but also a lot of quasi-medievalized Plattenbau in a truly startling color, a sort of pus-like yellow-green. 

And here, at the end of the quarter, is one last piece of fantasy: a fine nineteenth-century dragon getting the worst of it from St. George in a sunny space by the river.

Detail of St. George and the Dragon, sculpture by August Kiß, Nikolaiviertel, May 2014. My photo.

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Out of the Nikolaiviertel, eastwards ... I stop to watch the boats going through the Mühlendamm lock, and half-notice a large plastic bottle floating in the river near the lock. (Must people throw their trash in the water?)

Then what is this little flatboat, spinning around in midstream? Here it comes toward the bank ...  One of the occupants leans out the back of the boat with a net on a long pole, dips the empty bottle neatly out of the water, and tosses it into the plastic-recycling bin on the boat. It's the river-sweepers at work. Thank you, Berlin sanitation department.

River-sweepers on the Spree, May 2014. My photo.

It's busy along here. Excursion steamers, river-sweepers, a big tanker, a private cabin cruiser; debris barges like big water-going dumpsters, shoved along by tugs, hauling away the wreckage from the endless construction (deconstructon).

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The south bank of the river here is Kreuzberg (old West) and the north bank is Friedrichshain (old East), which are now joined into a single district that is the exemplification of Berlin cool. This is the hardcore-club district, the innovative-startup district, the anarchists' district, which is struggling with some not-very-welcome gentrification. 

How quickly the cityscape vanishes, scenes flying away like leaves flying off a calendar in an old movie to show that time has passed. Calendar leaf 2007: I used to come to Friedrichshain every week to do yoga with a couple of electro-funk musicians who made their living partly from gigs in eastern Europe. (Solid fan base in Serbia and the Czech Republic.)

Could have done yoga closer to home, of course, but I happened to have met these people, and it was interesting to go across the city. (Reading Nietzsche on the slow streetcar, so that the texts of Zur Genealogie der Moral and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft have the litany of the Friedrichshain stops woven inextricably into them in memory. Thus far, what gives color to existence has no history, says Nietzsche. Otto-Braun-Strasse! says the PA system. Or could we have a history of love, of greed, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? says Nietzsche.  Petersburgerstrasse! says the PA.)

The musicians lived next to a vast construction site where slaughterhouses and stockyards had been, and new housing was being put up. The pile-driving was not an ideal background for meditation. 

It will be different now ... The last time Archangel and I were in Friedrichshain, (calendar leaf 2013), it was for a gallery opening where an acquaintance was selling pictures to raise money for Syrian refugees. Champagne and late-middle-aged small talk; late dinner afterward at a good restaurant in Karl-Marx-Allee.

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But it still looks fairly like Friedrichshain along here.

In Friedrichshain, May 2014. My phot

And here: the big street running toward Alexanderplatz, wide enough for a tank parade, too wide to offer shelter from the winds of darker seasons. A street like The Hobbit's definition of discomfort: Nothing to to sit down on or to eat.

On Holzmarktstrasse, May 2014. My photo.

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Older examples of this half-orc approach to urban design go back to the Stalinist period in the East, but new examples stare you in the face and keep you off the river here. The 1990s transformed both sides of the Spree here from dumping grounds to prime real estate ...  and prime real estate is not always a good thing for your neighborhood to be, if you want to live in it.

Politically troubled waters here--literally: here are residents in boats, demonstrating against real-estate investors in a bigger boat (out of the picture). The investors are trying to inspect their property, the Mediaspree project, which has included major rebuilding on both sides of the river for miles, and has much more building planned. A police boat is monitoring the situation.

Demonstration against Mediaspree, July 2008.
Photo, Ulrich Hofman and Andreas Lang, Wiki Commons.

In a referendum in the district in 2008, 87% of the votes came in against specified elements of the remaining Mediaspree project. Although referenda like this are not legally binding, they have considerable force, and the district authorities started to back off on portions of the project. (Let's cancel this highrise and this auto bridge, let's expand the public space along the water.) In any case, 2008 and the years immediately after were not a time when the investors were in a rush to move forward. 

But eventually they may want to move forward, and meanwhile the city has threatened to take planning authority away from the district, on the grounds that it is not providing sufficient planning security to investors. The investors can claim considerable damages for the changes of plan that the district wanted after 2008, and the city naturally would prefer not to pay. (Question: Who approved this project in the first place, when parts of it looked like urban design by Godzilla? Who thought that there wouldn't be a stink about the way the waterside was treated?)

All this is controversial, of course. The new housing and offices were for industries the city wanted: communications and music, fashion and software and renewable energy consulting. They were supposed to attract the creative classes, to be good for the city. One way of telling the story--with which it is even possible to have some sympathy--is to contrast the investors as responsible creators of jobs and housing with the anarchists who want unrealistic amounts of park space and low-cost rent for their favorite clubs, and expect other people to pay. 

But presumably one could create jobs without building like orcs or klingons? 

Without building these objects that look as if they could, at quite moderate expense, be re-purposed as prisons? 

Just kidding, sort of. Some of the buildings aren't bad, but some of them are, and mein Gott im Himmel, where is ordinary life in the vicinity of these places? Where do you buy bread, or flowers for Aunt Gertrude when you go to have coffee with her? Where do you lock your bicycle? Where are the döner stands and the fresh-produce stands and park benches? Where do you see your neighbors face to face? Somewhere, in the neighborhood ... but not too near these hulking projects.

Mediaspree: Twin Towers and Treptowers. Photo by Dalbera, Wiki commons.
(Note, I have slightly cropped the photo.)

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One of the post-2008 agreements was not to replace the old bridge here, which was blown in the attempt to stop the Russians in May of 1945 and has never been rebuilt.

Brommybrücke remains, May 2014. My photo.

There were plans to do a full rebuild of the bridge in the 1990s (like drowning the Nikolaiviertel, it didn't happen), and in 2001 (didn't happen) and 2007 (didn't happen; financial shortfalls every time, saving Berlin from its too-easy grandiosity). The post-referendum deal is that the rebuilding should be restricted to a pedestrian and bicyclist crossing ... but who knows what will happen in the longer term.

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Here behind the new Energieforum, it is finally possible to reach a portion of the pathetic ten-meter strip that was allowed to the public in the Mediaspree plan. 

In Friedrichshain, behind Energieforum, May 2014. My photo.

Nearby, a few members of the creative class, hunched in intense discussion over some papers, are sitting in the only place it is possible to sit here--on the concrete-covered ground. 

Nothing to sit down on or to eat. 


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Notes:

Quotes are from:
 W. B. Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

 F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, I, 7.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 1.