What a pleasant little walk this is, from Köpenick to Friedrichshagen along the river. We're transitioning out of turn-of-the-last-century industrial territory to turn-of-the-last-century resort territory ... But aaaugh, I don't like the word "resort," it doesn't have the right feel. A resort sounds like one of those places that telephone you during dinner in the US and offer you an almost-free trip to Florida if you'll listen to their sales pitch for time-shares.
What the Germans called territory like this when it was developed, back in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was die Sommerfrische. The summer-fresh. (It's an old-fashioned word now; it faded out along with the custom of spending the summer in the countryside and the winter in the city.)
There's still a somewhat leisurely feel to the area. The riverside is full of gardens and boats (summer-fresh occupations). Tatters and shards of garden scatter out along the streetside and the waterside.
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| Bachelors' buttons along the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
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| Pirates on the Spree. June 2014. My photo. |
And then we come to the forest. As always in Berlin, if we walk far enough we will come to the forest. When I stand at the window at home and look out, I can see the forest like a green wall out at the edge of sight, at the edge of the city. There is the Grunewald (the Greenwood) to the southwest (and the workmen who come to patch or deliver something in the apartment point and say, Hey, look, that's the Greenwood!). Turn half-north, and there are the Spandauer Forest and the Tegeler Forest out beyond the airport; and straight north, the high ground of the Barnim Plateau with its heaths and woods. We don't look southeast--but if we did, and could see far enough, we would see this:
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| Along the Spree between Köpenick and Friedrichshagen. June 2014. My photo. |
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| Woods along the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
Willows sprawl out over the water.
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| Willow along the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
It is rather solitary here at the moment. A little track veers down to the water and to what looks like a large doorbell at the water's edge. So what happens if you ring the bell, does the witch come out of the woods or does some water-monster come flopping out of the Spree to snap you up?
Nah. What looks like a terrace on the side of this floating house detaches itself, as a raft, and hums across the water to pick you up and take you to the Spree-Ark, the restaurant in the floating house.
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| Restaurant Spreearche, June 2014. My photo. |
The river is starting to open out, the sun is bright ... ah, and the woods open out too. A clearing, a path--should we get sidetracked?
Perhaps not. Someone is sitting on the water stairs by the old Friedrichshagen brewery across the river, playing extraordinarily good jazz saxophone. Let us dawdle and listen.
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| Old brewery, Berliner Bürgerbräu, Friedrichshagen |
This is about the last piece of major industry we will meet on the river, I think. Beer is another of those things that is heavy relative to value, like the sand and gravel and coal that we have seen moving along the Spree. (In Colorado, where I grew up, the slow lane on the highway--especially in the mountains--was called the Coors lane because the Coors beer trucks plodded so, trying to get their heavy heavy loads uphill.) So there was much to be said for brewing right on the water and rolling the kegs straight down from the brewhouse to the barges.
There were commercial brewing operations here from the 1750s onward: first a family business (owners lived for a while in the White Villa next to the brewery, on the right of the picture above), then a cooperative of Berlin restaurants, then a corporation, and then of course a state-owned firm in East German days. Then a family firm again after privatization in the early 1990s--with that dash of the fantastical, the slightly untrue, that new/old East German businesses often seemed to have.
Oh, it wasn't a fake or a disaster, it wasn't the Spreepark (see Spree 6 post). The new company made a go of it for twenty years, and we all drank Berlin Citizens Brew (Berliner Bürgerbräu), it was perfectly decent beer (and the price was always a cut below the other local beers in the grocery store). It was exported successfully to Russia and Japan.
Citizens Brew was the last independent industrial brewery in Berlin--the only thing between the microbreweries with their couple of coppers and fermenters under an S-Bahn viaduct, on the one hand, and the giant Radeberger that owned all the other beer in Berlin, on the other hand. Poor Citizens' Brew: it wasn't a feasible size. The volume wouldn't pay for anything like Radeberger's advertising spend, they couldn't get the giant's kind of price-cut on raw materials--and yet they were industrial, they couldn't live on a little cult following like the microbrews under the S-Bahn.
They did have their local devotees. When the firm finally sold out to Radeberger in 2010, the public worry was, Oh no, what's going to happen to Robin Redbreast?? (This was one of the specialities of the Friedrichshagen brewery.) There was a quasi-audible rustle of sighs of relief around the city--or at least through the newspapers--when Radeberger promised to keep making Robin Redbreast (Rotkehlchen) at its big facility on the north side of town.
I don't understand the popular Berlin taste in beer. Not that I'm much of a beer-drinker anyway, but if I drink it then I like it plain and pure, not full of the stuff that the city traditionally puts in. Consider the absolute Berlin classic, the Weißbier mit Schuß that used to be so ubiquitous on summer beer-garden tables (and is a little less prevalent now, I think, given the changing population). It's a low-alcohol wheat beer with a shot of woodruff syrup (if green) or raspberry syrup (if pink). (Aaagh, pink beer ...) The Rotkehlchen they used to make in Friedrichshagen has caramel in it, which gives it a sort of rusty-red color.
When did they make Rotkehlchen in Friedrichshagen, exactly? This is where the story gets a little fantastical and untrue. The local devotees of the drink were devoted partly because it was a local product. The brewery was a big local deal, it was a place where you could sit by the river playing your saxophone on a summer's day and feel good; you could have a candlelight dinner by the lake, at the White Villa next to the plant (or you could go dancing at the White Villa or get married there). Or you could take a tour of the plant, in which it might be evident that not much brewing was going on. And the guide would say, "Oh some days we just don't brew. Every small brewery has days like this." [Information here and in the following paragraph is from an article in Tagesspiegel, 15 Jan. 2010.]
But actually, more and more of the Berlin Citizen Brew was not being brewed by Berlin citizens any more but was produced more or less secretly down in Chemnitz in Saxony, almost on the Czech border, and trucked up to the facility in Friedrichshagen for redelivery from there. (Exactly how much of this was going on, and how transparent it was, are topics of disagreement.) The Saxons are good technicians and could even chemically copy the Berlin water, with its flaky hardness.
But now Radeberger has taken over. It's a Frankfurt firm, part of a family conglomerate that made its first fortune by introducing baking powder to Germany in the nineteenth century and now has fingers in all sorts of (often but not always literal) pies, from frozen pizza to banking and shipping. I don't see Citizens Brew in our local grocery any more, although it certainly still exists. Maybe Radeberger raised the price, or maybe the local patriotism of our excellent (Turkish) grocer was disillusioned.
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We have to be a little thoughtful about which side of the river we're on here, because there are no more bridges for a long long way. There is, however, a tunnel under the river that would take us into Friedrichshagen.
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| Spreetunnel, June 2014. My photo. |
There's a long flight of stairs at each end, and it is fascinating to watch people getting their bicycles up and down these rather steep stairs. I see one young woman struggling to keep her bike from running away with her on the downward trip, but most people--including the seventy-plus crowd--just toss the bicycle over one shoulder or tuck it firmly under an arm and clatter up and down the stairs at speed, like mountain goats.
Friedrichshagen, on the other side, is a real summer-fresh. It's on the biggest lake in Berlin, and people have always come here to boat and swim and hike and have a little refreshment by the water.
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| Berlin Citizens Brew, brewed according to the Purity Law of 1516. Sign at Friedrichshagen restaurant, July 2014. My photo. |
There was a writers' colony here in the 1890s (and later), and a party spot for the Party in Communist days; nowadays there is a scattering of art galleries, and studios that open to visitors in the summer, along with the beaches and boat rentals and beer gardens. The streets are pretty; Friedrichshagen was too far out to catch many bombs in WWII, and it's been cleaned and polished a good deal in recent years.
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| Street in Friedrichshagen, June 2014. My photo. |
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I go back to the S-Bahn, which has a long steep sweep of stairway up to the tracks, not unlike the stairs in the tunnel under the Spree. The young man ahead of me pauses, balancing his belongings before tackling the stairs. Here he goes--bicycle under the right arm, large takeout pizza balanced on the left palm, and up he runs like a mountain goat.
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