Spree 5

Like the tracks of birds in the sky

Suppose you're on the U-Bahn about to cross the Oberbaum bridge--

U-Bahn crossing the Oberbaumbrücke. Photo, Quentin Scouflaire, Wiki Commons.

or on the S-Bahn about to cross the (much more utilitarian) Elsen bridge upriver. If you're watching your fellow passengers, you might note a drift of attention, and perhaps people, to one side of the car. The goal is to get a good look at Molecule Man, which stands in the river between the bridges. (The people who know it's coming drift first, because they want to look at it again--it's a very look-at-again piece of public art--and then others follow.)

Molecule Man, by Jonathan Barofsky. May 2014, my photo.

Allianz Insurance--bless their actuarial little hearts--funded Molecule Man. They also occupy the undistinguished but very large building that dominates this section of the Spree-shore. (It's the easternmost object in the Mediaspree project on this side of the river; see previous post.) There are lots of want-to-look-again buildings in Berlin. Augenweide, one says in German, eye-pastures, pastures where the eye can graze long and happily-- but the Allianz building is not one of them. It's just big.

**
We need to back up and begin at the beginning of this stretch of the river. Out of the S-Bahn at Ostbahnhof, a little downriver from the Oberbaumbrücke. Head for the water, thread through the tourists at the East Side Gallery. 

Here, on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the names of the paintings are: 

          Paradise out of darkness

          The spirit is like the tracks of birds in the sky

          Weary death

          Say what wonderful dreams hold my mind surrounded

          Thank you, Andrei Sakharov

And so on. In 1990, the year after the Wall came down, 118 artists from 21 countries painted a long section of the wall-remains here in Friedrichshain.

Gabriel Heimler, Mauerspringer [Wall jumper].
East Side Gallery, May 2014.  My photo.

The East Side Gallery has struggled more than a little with destructive graffitists and real estate developers. There was a cleanup and repaint job in 2009, which saved some deteriorating paintings, but it has been hard to save the gallery--and this, the largest continuous remaining stretch of the Wall--from the developers. Some sections have been destroyed to make a clear path from the river to a bloated arena named for a cell-phone company. Some sections have been destroyed because the developers want to plant their new high-rise just exactly SO and not otherwise. 

Karsten Wenzel, Die Beständigkeit der Ignoranz. [The persistence of ignorance.]
East Side Gallery, May 2014.  My photo.

**

Past the East Side Gallery, over the bridge from Friedrichshain into Kreuzberg. We cut through a little bit of east Kreuzberg: imaginatively painted houses, strings of little cheap eating places with battered picnic benches set out along the sidewalk, occupied by the international young (the would-be rock stars and software moguls and world-savers, the travelers and squatters) in furious conversation, over bowls of chili or hummus plates that cost a couple of euros. One cubbyhole restaurant that has put out actual, if somewhat derelict, chairs, with backs, instead of the backless benches native to the street, looks uncomfortably pretentious. 

In Kreuzberg, near Schlesisches Tor, May 2014. My photo.

Then we can get back to the water, perhaps, down this side street diminishing to a sort of path through aggressively private property?  Ah, yes. We just have to get past the bear, which is one of the less benevolent-looking of the many Berlin bears.

Bear near Twin Towers, May 2014. My photo.

Walking this whole Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg stretch of the river is a battle to get to the water (unlike the long placid stretches of public greenway before and after). Past the bear, we come to one of the mingy ten-meter public strips that are supposed to exist along the river here and sometimes actually do but sometimes do not. 

How shabby this little strip by the Twin Towers is.  I, who am no anarchist, find that my mind is occupied with wondering: what is the original French for these two statements?

    Property is theft. (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? 1840)

   The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to    say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the      true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many      murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the    human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have    cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this impostor; you are lost, if you    forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all, and the earth itself to nobody! (J.-J. Rousseau, On the Origin of Inequality, Second Part, 1755.)   

The last sentence used to be written on the 57th Street underpass, under the   Illinois Central Tracks, in Chicago.

The view from the ten-meter strip is good, however.

Molecule Man, May 2014. My photo.

But of course the strip goes a little way and then is blocked by a fence, the purpose of which is not obvious. Sheer pedestrian discouragement, perhaps.

Back inland, round a few corners, under the S-Bahn ....  Ah, a different world entirely! Suddenly! 

Here is Treptower Park, where the wonderful plane-tree avenue of Puschkinallee seems to shine with its own light, even on this dark day.

Puschkinallee, Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

Russian tourists are eating Italian ices in front of the Russian war memorial on the plane-tree avenue. The flowerbeds are gracious and old-fashioned, in a respectable old-East kind of way.  

Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

There is all the room in the world to walk, there are places to sit down by the water and to eat and drink; there is a long string of steamer piers and a small cluster of houseboats (one very handsome, painted a sort of denim blue and topped with red geraniums and solar arrays). Between the steamers a cormorant is thrashing around in the water trying to swallow a fish that looks almost as large as it is.

Spree at Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

We have left behind the edgy urbanism of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg--the clubs, the squats, the startups, the immigrants, a certain kind of battle over real estate development. (There's a different kind out here; more on that next time.)

Treptow-Köpenick is the biggest and most thinly populated of the Berlin districts.  Before the district consolidations in 2001, before Treptow was put together with Köpenick, the Treptow district coat-of-arms gave a basic idea of the character of the district. (Or part of the character, at least.) Woods and water, water and woods. There is even a little set of ... well, people do call them mountains here. "The Berlin Alps," says Cousin Gisela (who lives out here) with a mildly satirical look. 

Old Treptow district coat of arms. Wiki commons.

Oh, the heart-burnings in these district consolidations, back at the beginning of the new millennium! Which of the two old district names is to come first in the new, combined district name? (Shall we call it Treptow-Köpenick or Köpenick-Treptow?) Which Rathaus will be the Rathaus for the new district, and what shall we do with the other one? How are the coats-of-arms to be combined? 

The Treptow-Köpenick arms have kept the castle wall with the small bear in the middle for the top, and have replaced the woods and big bear down below with two large fish. 

Treptow-Köpenick coat of arms. Wiki commons.

Köpenick is full of big lakes and thus presumably fish. (Which may provide a challenge in another 15 k or so, but we'll see.)

**

Which brings us back, in thought, to the Oberbaum bridge, where the rivalries of another combined district (Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg) play out every summer in the Battle of Vegetables. 

Crowds on the Friedrichshain end of the bridge try to push into Kreuzberg and are shoved back by the crowds on the Kreuzberg end trying to push into Friedrichshain. Weapons allowed in the hand-to-hand fighting are soft and messy things: water, bags of flour, vegetables and fruits ripe enough to be very soft and thus no danger if they whack somebody on the head. Friedrichshain wins, most years. It does leave a mess, of course. In 2012 an anarchist party challenged the organizers to pay for the cleanup, rather than leave it to the city, and the organizers (the Pirate Party members of the Berlin City Council) raised the money to do so. 

Anarchists are not always so bad.  (La propriété, c'est le vol, said Proudhon.)