What a day for staying indoors by the fire, or more precisely, by the big radiator in the living room. North-European autumn is not like the traditional American autumn, with its blue skies and bright leaves. This is storms-are-on-the-ocean time, wet and morose. I am possibly going to get my head soaked, but other days this week look
worse in the weather forecast, so I’ll pack the umbrella today and see what
happens. It's slate-dark and windy and damp out there.
The plan is to go down to Wannsee on the S-Bahn, and then take one of
the bright blue Havel buses to the Teltowkanal in Kleinmachnow.
How edge-of-the-world it is out here at Wannsee: the buses come slowly, and it's chilly in the big street with the wet wind kicking up. There’s hardly anyone on the bus, and in order to get from point A to a not very distant point B we must--good heavens--go out on the freeway. Have I ever been on a freeway in Berlin before? I think once in 1996. There isn't much Autobahn mileage in the city: Berlin is the antithesis of those southern California cities where you can open the curtain in your hotel room in the morning and see three or four levels of freeway stacked on top of each other right outside your window.
Once off the freeway, the bus threads through a sort of office park that looks as though it could be out on the edge of Frankfurt. I feel as though I've been kidnapped by aliens.
How edge-of-the-world it is out here at Wannsee: the buses come slowly, and it's chilly in the big street with the wet wind kicking up. There’s hardly anyone on the bus, and in order to get from point A to a not very distant point B we must--good heavens--go out on the freeway. Have I ever been on a freeway in Berlin before? I think once in 1996. There isn't much Autobahn mileage in the city: Berlin is the antithesis of those southern California cities where you can open the curtain in your hotel room in the morning and see three or four levels of freeway stacked on top of each other right outside your window.
Once off the freeway, the bus threads through a sort of office park that looks as though it could be out on the edge of Frankfurt. I feel as though I've been kidnapped by aliens.
But then here we are out of alien-land, into the more Berlin-like part of Kleinmachnow, and here is the canal lock--time to get off the bus. West of the lock, between here and the Griebnitzsee (see last post) the canal runs in the bed of the little river Bäke. But east of the lock the canal runs in the (broader) bed of the Machnower See, and the Bäke has a small separate existence to the south of the canal. Last week I walked along the north side of the Machnower See, but I want to go back and have a look at the Bäke.
By the lock, near the south bank of the canal, there should be a road called the Allee am Forsthaus, which we can follow into the Bäketal (Bäke valley) nature preserve. And here is the Allee: big loose Brandenburg cobbles with a slither of wet leaves on top. The Bäke is a wetland tangle off to the right.
The place-names waver between Slavic and Germanic here. We are on the Teltow plateau (and if we didn't get off the bus we would end up in Teltow city, a little further on). The -ow ending is a Slavic suffix meaning "place," more or less; so just as Pankow is the place along the river Panke (April 2014 posts), Teltow is the place along the river Telte. When the German settlers came here during the middle ages they kept a lot of the Slavic names, like the Panke, but they didn't keep the name of the river Telte.
They didn't replace it with anything very brilliant, either. "Bäke" is just a form of the word "Bach," meaning brook. (Terribly unimaginative naming habits hereabouts: let's call the brook Brook, and call the big lake Big Lake, and so on ... And yes, the composer's name is Johann Sebastian Brook--prompting Beethoven, in a wise-guy moment, to say, "He shouldn't be called Brook, he should be called Ocean--infinite, inexhaustible ...")
As the cobblestones give out on the road, it gets very muddy. The canal is over on the left, with occasional piles of stone along it, perhaps for some bank-reinforcing project; the body of water on the right in the picture below is one of the larger puddles in the street. The Bäke is further to the right, somewhere in a mess of marsh woodland.
The light comes and goes, as the clouds thicken and thin, without breaking. The wind rises and falls in the trees. The Allee gets smaller and smaller--but a little higher and dryer, too, better cobblestoned again on the crown of the road. Not a bad day for a walk after all. It isn't pouring (yet).
Just before we get to the nature preserve there's a bit of settlement over on the right, the most salient element in which is a landscaping firm with a loud rooster in its backyard, crowing its foolish head off in the dark midday.
The landscapers could stand to do some work on their own landscaping and fix the stone wall along their property, which is crumbling in places.
Or perhaps it's best not fixed, it has some charm as is.
A little further on, a large muddy path splits off into the Bäketal, where the worthy citizens of Kleinmachnow have identified and labeled many of the shrubs and trees. (Thank you, worthy citizens.)
Here are old winter-lindens--smaller-leaved than the summer-lindens that one thinks of as the typical village-linden or dance-linden or court-linden--the big tree in the village center under which public events took place for generations. Here are Norway maples and sand birches, here are ... What are these?
Urweltmammutbäume, say the labels. Prehistoric mammoth trees.
They were known first as fossils and then discovered living in the 1940s, in Sichuan Province in China. (They were planted subsequently in a variety of other places, in part to make sure the species would survive, as the numbers in China in the last century were not large.) In English they're called dawn redwoods, but "prehistoric mammoth tree" does have rather a ring to it ...
**
The path takes us round an open meadow, past the prehistoric mammoth trees and then closer to the Bäke. It seems more and more remote (and muddy). How long will it take the leaning tree here to fall, another year or two? The water in the river hardly moves. There is no one along the path. (Not even a prehistoric mammoth.)
Somewhere hereabouts there is ... not exactly the usual Dorfkern, the village core, such as you find in many of the outer-Berlin villages, with a village green, old prosperous-farmer houses on each side of the green, a little medieval fieldstone church in the center, maybe an old linden.
Most of Kleinmachnow town is on the other side of the lake and dates from later centuries. The medieval settlement down here on the river was a lordly establishment, not a farmers' village. The beginning of it was a Burg, a little fortress at the place where the trade route from Leipzig to Spandau crossed the river. The local lords--the von Hakes, from about 1400 on--perched in the Burg, inhibiting free trade by collecting tolls from the merchants at the river crossing.
How are we to think of this sort of thing? Taxes paid in return for keeping down the bandits in the woods? Protection money extorted in the manner of organized crime, in return for not being the bandits in the woods?
According to an old unvouched-for tale, one of the early sixteenth-century Hakes (presumably with henchmen) robbed Johann Tetzel on a wild winter night in the country south of here. Tetzel was the seller of indulgences--get-out-of-hell-for-a-dime certificates, priced pardons for your sins and your family's sins--whose crude marketing tactics sparked Luther's career as a reformer.
Because indulgences sold well, Tetzel was carrying plenty of cash. When Hake intercepted him on a lonely stretch of road and demanded the money, Tetzel threatened him with the wrath of God--which did sometimes intimidate attackers in those times. But Hake said, I'm okay, I bought an indulgence from you yesterday, for future sins as well as past. Hand over the cash box.
But things change, over the centuries. The von Hakes stop collecting tolls at the river crossing and stop looking for travelers with cash boxes in the woods, and they become Prussian officers and civil servants. (There come to be nation-states that follow something like the rule of law within but not across their boundaries.) One of the eighteenth century Hakes becomes a real estate developer, of sorts, draining and parceling out the land that is now Hackescher Markt in central Berlin. They build an Enlightenment-era country house, somewhere around here .... Here is a little footbridge over the Bäke, which might take us in the right direction to find what is left of all this.
Look back along the river: the water is so still that the leaves don't even float downstream. The river is stopped, time is stopped, and the midday is as dim as evening. The clouds have got heavier again.
But look the other way from the bridge, and there is the mill--which has been here from time more or less immemorial, periodically burnt down or simply fallen down, rebuilt by the Hakes in the seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth. (There's been a restaurant in the mill for some years, which I believe has had mixed fortunes.)
Let's go down the street a bit, around the mill, then back into the woods--the rest of the buildings must be nearby.
And yes, here we come to a gate in the forest, or rather a pair of gates. One way leads to the powers spiritual, and the other way to the powers temporal. Here on the right is the churchyard gate, with a couple of glacial boulders to mark it.
The von Hakes built a church here late in the sixteenth century, for
household services on Sundays, for family weddings and funerals. Sort of a cross between a family chapel and ein feste Burg. (It was one of the first churches in Brandenburg to be built explicitly as a Protestant church.)
The trees block much of the view of the church until you're almost up against it, and then it beetles at you like a fortress wall. This is not medieval stuff, this was built all in one piece in the 1590s, with past and future wars of religion floating around it like bad dreams.
On the other side of the glacial boulders is the Medusa Portal that led to the country house. There is a Medusa head on the central arch, and above it a coldly serene classical-deity head--presumably Minerva, who lent Perseus a mirrored shield so he could cut off Medusa's head without looking directly at it and thus without being turned to stone. (Ah, but they're all turned to stone here, Medusa and Minerva, and Perseus too, if he were to appear anywhere on the portal.)
The powers temporal took a direct bomb hit in WW II. There's nothing left behind the portal, or nothing to speak of: some cellar vaulting and bits of foundation, I think.
Lost worlds. Life before the revolutions, when it was still important to put Greek and Roman deities on your doorway, to show that you had a classical education.
The classical world--the ruin in our intellectual forest--looms here, more or less large, more or less fantastical, according to the time. Very large and very fantastical when the von Hakes were perched in their Burg, extorting tolls. Think of the medieval towns in western Europe that were huddled entirely within an old Roman arena, using the arena stands as the city walls (like building a village on the field in a football stadium). The ancient Romans who had built such immense things must have seemed as fantastical as visitors in flying saucers. Think of the semi-educated people at the time who had heard names like Aristotle and Virgil--Aristotle the alchemist who could turn lead to gold, and Virgil the magician who built a metal horse that could cure live horses of any illness.
With the Renaissance, the classical world becomes better known and thus more human-scale, less flying-saucer-like. In the middle ages I don't think people routinely imagined themselves being Virgil the magician. But in the sixteenth century, it seems possible to be a character in classical literature: a conquering prince out of Plutarch or a rhetorically gifted statesman like Cicero or a literate country gentleman interested in crops and horses and beekeeping like the narrator's voice in Virgil's Georgics. The electors of Brandenburg--the feudal superiors and employers of the von Hakes--take classical names for a while: Johann Cicero, Albrecht Achilles, Joachim Hector (the names on the cross-streets out in the western stretch of Kurfürstendamm).
Then, gradually, the classical world sinks from an imposing model to a mark of class--a gentleman can quote the classics, a non-gentleman cannot--and from a mark of class to mere decoration. And then even the decoration vanishes.
We see this in the US: state capitols built in the nineteenth century are basically the Roman Pantheon with a taller dome and extended sides. These are statements that the US is the new version of the Roman republic, intending to embody Roman-republican virtues (and do 'em one better, just you wait!).
But US state capitols built in the twentieth century don't look like the Pantheon any more. What did the US mean to be when this piece of stretched neo-medievalism was built in the 1920s? I'm not sure, but I don't think it was the Roman republic.
And the same thing happens here in the Brandenburg woods. The neoclassical house with the Medusa Portal was the Old Hakeburg. The New Hakeburg, built on the other side of the Machnower See by one of the Hake cousins at the beginning of the twentieth century, is in romantic neo-medieval style. This is the place mentioned in the last post: the SS research center for secret weaponry in World War II, and so on--looking absurdly sinister from this side of the lake, on such a dark day. (It isn't really sinister, people have been having weddings and corporate outings here ...)
It's tempting to see the neoclassical world--the vanished Enlightenment-age country house--as a world of relative reasonableness and humanity, and to see the romantic enthusiasm for the middle ages as a dangerous turn away, toward a sleep of reason that would bring forth monsters. But I don't know. The insomnia of reason brings forth monsters also. (After all, when the SS occupied the New Hakeburg, they were using it for people to do science ...)
**
I cross to north side of the canal, back to the Canal Meadow Path that I was following in the previous segment. (The Bäke goes a little farther here, before being paved over and disappearing underground, but I'm headed back to the Teltowkanal.)
It's a pleasant open shoreline along the north bank of the canal. In one stretch there's an odd pair of concrete tracks--a remnant of old road? Someone's idea of a bicycle path? I don't know.
It's getting quite urban again here: there are some big apartment blocks on the other bank of the canal, and we're about to run into a hotel and a nursing home and retail blocks on this bank.
The canal passes under a biggish street, and on the other side of the street it's not obvious how you get back to the water. There must be a way somewhere ... Ah yes, further up the street, then down through the hotel parking lot, past the hotel garbage, and here we are again, on an excellent stretch of path.
There are a couple of minor find-and-lose moments like this. Some places where you might wander the wrong way are well-signed, some are not signed at all, some are rather excessively signed ...
At one point there's a little stretch of industrial harbor and adjacent buildings, all fenced off. It's not so clear how far we have to go to get around this ... According to my map, if I don't come to some other, better opportunity first, I will hit a sizable street called Sachtlebenstrasse that should take me back to the canal.
I don't see any sizable streets yet, but I do see a track that might be headed for the water. And it even has a sign ... ah, this is Sachtlebenstrasse. Not exactly a place for two-way truck traffic--it looked more substantial on the map--but it's a nice route back to the canal.
Here's the water, and here's a barge churning along on business: the Pati out of Wroclaw. (And if our east-European geography is not so good, we will say, Where is Wroclaw? It's in Poland--but look back in time, and the borders ripple around it like troubled water: now it's in the kingdom of Bohemia, now in Hungary, now in Prussia or Austria or Germany--and of course often in Poland, also, depending on the date.)
Where Wroclaw really is, of course, is in Silesia; it has always been in Silesia, and the question has been what larger unit, if any, Silesia belonged to. (Where is the boundary within which we have something like the rule of law, and across which we do not? The von Hake who laid out Hackescher Markt was one of Frederick II's generals in the First Silesian War, when Frederick--thus far the model of an enlightened and humane young prince--shocked Europe by seizing Silesia from Austria without a declaration of war. Why give the Austrians a chance, after all? Why have more equally-matched battles, in which more people will die?)
And of course one war leads to another, so in a few years we have the Second Silesian War, and then the Third Silesian War, which involves a lot more than Silesia. The North American part of it is the French and Indian War, which gives the American colonies the self-consciousness and political and military organization that will support them in splitting from England in another fifteen years .... And the moral of this story is that you can't know all the consequences of your actions. When Count von Hake set off for Silesia in 1740, he certainly wasn't imagining that the consequences would include the military education of a young George Washington and all that would follow from American independence.
**
When you think of places like Silesia, you have to think: Poor Woodrow Wilson, how could he have thought that it would be straightforward to sort out eastern Europe into unambiguous ethnic-national states? (What is so dangerous as an American in the grip of a European idea?--and the idea of ethnic-national states is a European idea, a nineteenth-century Romantic creation.)
Wilson's Fourteen Points for establishing peace after World War I said that the Balkans could be sorted out "along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality," and that a new Polish state should be established "which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations." Ach du meine. Historically established lines of nationality in the Balkans? Indisputably Polish populations? There were such things of course; but the trouble was the disputable populations and the gaps and muddles in the historically established lines.
Language was used as a common marker of nationality, but .... In Silesia a lot of people spoke Silesian, but is Silesian Polish? Is it a dialect of Polish or a separate language? There were (and are) differences of opinion. (And if it's not Polish, is this still Poland?) Around Wroclaw there were more German-speakers--and also people who identified as Germans but were really Sorbish-speakers like their neighbors in Brandenburg. (Did this make them Germans or Poles? Neither--but since there was no nation of Sorbia, what were they?)
I am reminded of a group of sociologists surveying peasants in Poland, I think early in the twentieth century. They asked, among other things, about ethnic identity. Are you Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Czechs ...? In some of the remoter areas people just stared at them blankly, unable to make sense of the question. We're from around here, they said.
National identity isn't some inevitable, eternal Platonic idea. Archangel--whose father hightailed it out of Berlin for points west in 1938--has always been taken aback that my father's family did not think of themselves particularly as German. They had left Germany for southern Russia in the eighteenth century--before Germany was a state, before romantic notions of ethnic nationalism had made such headway. They spoke German (not Russian) and called themselves Russian (not German) if they had to call themselves something. But what did it mean? This is very hard to say.
My grandparents would drive a hundred miles and more to see movies set in Russia. I think the first non-Disney film I was allowed to see as a child, certainly the first film I was allowed to see that admitted the existence of sex, was Dr. Zhivago. Being Russian trumped even being puritan (which--at the time--required a big trump).
But then music was a central part of life, and of course music was German. Christmas carols, church music, Bach Chorale Preludes, Schubert lieder. Probably the first thing I learned to sing in four-part harmony as a child, undistracted by other voices going off in other directions, was a German hymn:
Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming flowers of spring ....
The melody is a Silesian folk song. Most of the text is older and anonymous; but this verse seem to have been added in the nineteenth century by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who is also also the author of Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. (And a collection of songs about Texas, but that's another story).
How terrifically German this passion for the meadows and the woodlands is, invading the hymnbook and everywhere else. How terrifically German is the idea that walking in the woods is a necessary activity, good for you morally as well as physically:
A grave and lovely word stands written in the woods,
About right action and love, and a refuge for humanity,
says that quintessential German walk-in-the-woods romantic, that required-reading classic of German literature, Joseph von Eichendorff. Who grew up in Silesia, and whose first language was possibly Polish. Or Silesian, if you believe in a difference. When he and his brother were students together in Heidelberg, people used to say, "Oh, the poor young Polish counts, they must have only one good shirt between them. You never see them both going out on the same evening." Are the poor young Polish counts indisputably Polish? Or German?
Poor Woodrow Wilson
**
The Pati is eastbound, probably headed home. The Teltow canal runs into the Dahme, which links to the Oder-Spree canal, and the Oder will take the Pati back to Wroclaw.
I should be eastbound, headed home, also. On the way back I duck into the grocery store at our home U-Bahn stop to pick up a few things. When I come out of the store the rain is pouring down at last, silvery and cold.
By the lock, near the south bank of the canal, there should be a road called the Allee am Forsthaus, which we can follow into the Bäketal (Bäke valley) nature preserve. And here is the Allee: big loose Brandenburg cobbles with a slither of wet leaves on top. The Bäke is a wetland tangle off to the right.
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| Allee am Forsthaus, October 2014. My photo. |
The place-names waver between Slavic and Germanic here. We are on the Teltow plateau (and if we didn't get off the bus we would end up in Teltow city, a little further on). The -ow ending is a Slavic suffix meaning "place," more or less; so just as Pankow is the place along the river Panke (April 2014 posts), Teltow is the place along the river Telte. When the German settlers came here during the middle ages they kept a lot of the Slavic names, like the Panke, but they didn't keep the name of the river Telte.
They didn't replace it with anything very brilliant, either. "Bäke" is just a form of the word "Bach," meaning brook. (Terribly unimaginative naming habits hereabouts: let's call the brook Brook, and call the big lake Big Lake, and so on ... And yes, the composer's name is Johann Sebastian Brook--prompting Beethoven, in a wise-guy moment, to say, "He shouldn't be called Brook, he should be called Ocean--infinite, inexhaustible ...")
As the cobblestones give out on the road, it gets very muddy. The canal is over on the left, with occasional piles of stone along it, perhaps for some bank-reinforcing project; the body of water on the right in the picture below is one of the larger puddles in the street. The Bäke is further to the right, somewhere in a mess of marsh woodland.
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| Teltowcanal, Allee am Forsthaus, October 2014. My photo. |
The light comes and goes, as the clouds thicken and thin, without breaking. The wind rises and falls in the trees. The Allee gets smaller and smaller--but a little higher and dryer, too, better cobblestoned again on the crown of the road. Not a bad day for a walk after all. It isn't pouring (yet).
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| Teltowkanal, Allee am Forsthaus, October 2014. |
Just before we get to the nature preserve there's a bit of settlement over on the right, the most salient element in which is a landscaping firm with a loud rooster in its backyard, crowing its foolish head off in the dark midday.
The landscapers could stand to do some work on their own landscaping and fix the stone wall along their property, which is crumbling in places.
Or perhaps it's best not fixed, it has some charm as is.
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| Along Allee am Forsthaus, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
A little further on, a large muddy path splits off into the Bäketal, where the worthy citizens of Kleinmachnow have identified and labeled many of the shrubs and trees. (Thank you, worthy citizens.)
Here are old winter-lindens--smaller-leaved than the summer-lindens that one thinks of as the typical village-linden or dance-linden or court-linden--the big tree in the village center under which public events took place for generations. Here are Norway maples and sand birches, here are ... What are these?
Urweltmammutbäume, say the labels. Prehistoric mammoth trees.
They were known first as fossils and then discovered living in the 1940s, in Sichuan Province in China. (They were planted subsequently in a variety of other places, in part to make sure the species would survive, as the numbers in China in the last century were not large.) In English they're called dawn redwoods, but "prehistoric mammoth tree" does have rather a ring to it ...
**
The path takes us round an open meadow, past the prehistoric mammoth trees and then closer to the Bäke. It seems more and more remote (and muddy). How long will it take the leaning tree here to fall, another year or two? The water in the river hardly moves. There is no one along the path. (Not even a prehistoric mammoth.)
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| River Bäke, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
Somewhere hereabouts there is ... not exactly the usual Dorfkern, the village core, such as you find in many of the outer-Berlin villages, with a village green, old prosperous-farmer houses on each side of the green, a little medieval fieldstone church in the center, maybe an old linden.
Most of Kleinmachnow town is on the other side of the lake and dates from later centuries. The medieval settlement down here on the river was a lordly establishment, not a farmers' village. The beginning of it was a Burg, a little fortress at the place where the trade route from Leipzig to Spandau crossed the river. The local lords--the von Hakes, from about 1400 on--perched in the Burg, inhibiting free trade by collecting tolls from the merchants at the river crossing.
How are we to think of this sort of thing? Taxes paid in return for keeping down the bandits in the woods? Protection money extorted in the manner of organized crime, in return for not being the bandits in the woods?
According to an old unvouched-for tale, one of the early sixteenth-century Hakes (presumably with henchmen) robbed Johann Tetzel on a wild winter night in the country south of here. Tetzel was the seller of indulgences--get-out-of-hell-for-a-dime certificates, priced pardons for your sins and your family's sins--whose crude marketing tactics sparked Luther's career as a reformer.
Because indulgences sold well, Tetzel was carrying plenty of cash. When Hake intercepted him on a lonely stretch of road and demanded the money, Tetzel threatened him with the wrath of God--which did sometimes intimidate attackers in those times. But Hake said, I'm okay, I bought an indulgence from you yesterday, for future sins as well as past. Hand over the cash box.
But things change, over the centuries. The von Hakes stop collecting tolls at the river crossing and stop looking for travelers with cash boxes in the woods, and they become Prussian officers and civil servants. (There come to be nation-states that follow something like the rule of law within but not across their boundaries.) One of the eighteenth century Hakes becomes a real estate developer, of sorts, draining and parceling out the land that is now Hackescher Markt in central Berlin. They build an Enlightenment-era country house, somewhere around here .... Here is a little footbridge over the Bäke, which might take us in the right direction to find what is left of all this.
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| Bridge over Bäke, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
Look back along the river: the water is so still that the leaves don't even float downstream. The river is stopped, time is stopped, and the midday is as dim as evening. The clouds have got heavier again.
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| River Bäke, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
But look the other way from the bridge, and there is the mill--which has been here from time more or less immemorial, periodically burnt down or simply fallen down, rebuilt by the Hakes in the seventeenth century and again in the nineteenth. (There's been a restaurant in the mill for some years, which I believe has had mixed fortunes.)
Let's go down the street a bit, around the mill, then back into the woods--the rest of the buildings must be nearby.
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| Near the Dorfkirche, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
And yes, here we come to a gate in the forest, or rather a pair of gates. One way leads to the powers spiritual, and the other way to the powers temporal. Here on the right is the churchyard gate, with a couple of glacial boulders to mark it.
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| Gate to village church, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
The von Hakes built a church here late in the sixteenth century, for
household services on Sundays, for family weddings and funerals. Sort of a cross between a family chapel and ein feste Burg. (It was one of the first churches in Brandenburg to be built explicitly as a Protestant church.)
The trees block much of the view of the church until you're almost up against it, and then it beetles at you like a fortress wall. This is not medieval stuff, this was built all in one piece in the 1590s, with past and future wars of religion floating around it like bad dreams.
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| Dorfkirche, Kleinmachnow. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons. |
On the other side of the glacial boulders is the Medusa Portal that led to the country house. There is a Medusa head on the central arch, and above it a coldly serene classical-deity head--presumably Minerva, who lent Perseus a mirrored shield so he could cut off Medusa's head without looking directly at it and thus without being turned to stone. (Ah, but they're all turned to stone here, Medusa and Minerva, and Perseus too, if he were to appear anywhere on the portal.)
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| Medusa portal, Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo. |
The powers temporal took a direct bomb hit in WW II. There's nothing left behind the portal, or nothing to speak of: some cellar vaulting and bits of foundation, I think.
Lost worlds. Life before the revolutions, when it was still important to put Greek and Roman deities on your doorway, to show that you had a classical education.
The classical world--the ruin in our intellectual forest--looms here, more or less large, more or less fantastical, according to the time. Very large and very fantastical when the von Hakes were perched in their Burg, extorting tolls. Think of the medieval towns in western Europe that were huddled entirely within an old Roman arena, using the arena stands as the city walls (like building a village on the field in a football stadium). The ancient Romans who had built such immense things must have seemed as fantastical as visitors in flying saucers. Think of the semi-educated people at the time who had heard names like Aristotle and Virgil--Aristotle the alchemist who could turn lead to gold, and Virgil the magician who built a metal horse that could cure live horses of any illness.
With the Renaissance, the classical world becomes better known and thus more human-scale, less flying-saucer-like. In the middle ages I don't think people routinely imagined themselves being Virgil the magician. But in the sixteenth century, it seems possible to be a character in classical literature: a conquering prince out of Plutarch or a rhetorically gifted statesman like Cicero or a literate country gentleman interested in crops and horses and beekeeping like the narrator's voice in Virgil's Georgics. The electors of Brandenburg--the feudal superiors and employers of the von Hakes--take classical names for a while: Johann Cicero, Albrecht Achilles, Joachim Hector (the names on the cross-streets out in the western stretch of Kurfürstendamm).
Then, gradually, the classical world sinks from an imposing model to a mark of class--a gentleman can quote the classics, a non-gentleman cannot--and from a mark of class to mere decoration. And then even the decoration vanishes.
We see this in the US: state capitols built in the nineteenth century are basically the Roman Pantheon with a taller dome and extended sides. These are statements that the US is the new version of the Roman republic, intending to embody Roman-republican virtues (and do 'em one better, just you wait!).
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| Colorado State Capitol. Photo, Cris Gonazalez, Wiki Commons. |
But US state capitols built in the twentieth century don't look like the Pantheon any more. What did the US mean to be when this piece of stretched neo-medievalism was built in the 1920s? I'm not sure, but I don't think it was the Roman republic.
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| Nebraska State Capitol. Photo by Ammodramus, Wiki Commons. |
And the same thing happens here in the Brandenburg woods. The neoclassical house with the Medusa Portal was the Old Hakeburg. The New Hakeburg, built on the other side of the Machnower See by one of the Hake cousins at the beginning of the twentieth century, is in romantic neo-medieval style. This is the place mentioned in the last post: the SS research center for secret weaponry in World War II, and so on--looking absurdly sinister from this side of the lake, on such a dark day. (It isn't really sinister, people have been having weddings and corporate outings here ...)
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| Neue Hakeburg by Machnower See, October 2014. My photo. |
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I cross to north side of the canal, back to the Canal Meadow Path that I was following in the previous segment. (The Bäke goes a little farther here, before being paved over and disappearing underground, but I'm headed back to the Teltowkanal.)
It's a pleasant open shoreline along the north bank of the canal. In one stretch there's an odd pair of concrete tracks--a remnant of old road? Someone's idea of a bicycle path? I don't know.
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| Along Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo. |
It's getting quite urban again here: there are some big apartment blocks on the other bank of the canal, and we're about to run into a hotel and a nursing home and retail blocks on this bank.
The canal passes under a biggish street, and on the other side of the street it's not obvious how you get back to the water. There must be a way somewhere ... Ah yes, further up the street, then down through the hotel parking lot, past the hotel garbage, and here we are again, on an excellent stretch of path.
There are a couple of minor find-and-lose moments like this. Some places where you might wander the wrong way are well-signed, some are not signed at all, some are rather excessively signed ...
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| Footpath crossroads near Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo. |
At one point there's a little stretch of industrial harbor and adjacent buildings, all fenced off. It's not so clear how far we have to go to get around this ... According to my map, if I don't come to some other, better opportunity first, I will hit a sizable street called Sachtlebenstrasse that should take me back to the canal.
I don't see any sizable streets yet, but I do see a track that might be headed for the water. And it even has a sign ... ah, this is Sachtlebenstrasse. Not exactly a place for two-way truck traffic--it looked more substantial on the map--but it's a nice route back to the canal.
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| Sachtlebenstrasse, Berlin (Zehlendorf), October 2014. My photo. |
Here's the water, and here's a barge churning along on business: the Pati out of Wroclaw. (And if our east-European geography is not so good, we will say, Where is Wroclaw? It's in Poland--but look back in time, and the borders ripple around it like troubled water: now it's in the kingdom of Bohemia, now in Hungary, now in Prussia or Austria or Germany--and of course often in Poland, also, depending on the date.)
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| Barge on Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo. |
Where Wroclaw really is, of course, is in Silesia; it has always been in Silesia, and the question has been what larger unit, if any, Silesia belonged to. (Where is the boundary within which we have something like the rule of law, and across which we do not? The von Hake who laid out Hackescher Markt was one of Frederick II's generals in the First Silesian War, when Frederick--thus far the model of an enlightened and humane young prince--shocked Europe by seizing Silesia from Austria without a declaration of war. Why give the Austrians a chance, after all? Why have more equally-matched battles, in which more people will die?)
And of course one war leads to another, so in a few years we have the Second Silesian War, and then the Third Silesian War, which involves a lot more than Silesia. The North American part of it is the French and Indian War, which gives the American colonies the self-consciousness and political and military organization that will support them in splitting from England in another fifteen years .... And the moral of this story is that you can't know all the consequences of your actions. When Count von Hake set off for Silesia in 1740, he certainly wasn't imagining that the consequences would include the military education of a young George Washington and all that would follow from American independence.
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When you think of places like Silesia, you have to think: Poor Woodrow Wilson, how could he have thought that it would be straightforward to sort out eastern Europe into unambiguous ethnic-national states? (What is so dangerous as an American in the grip of a European idea?--and the idea of ethnic-national states is a European idea, a nineteenth-century Romantic creation.)
Wilson's Fourteen Points for establishing peace after World War I said that the Balkans could be sorted out "along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality," and that a new Polish state should be established "which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish populations." Ach du meine. Historically established lines of nationality in the Balkans? Indisputably Polish populations? There were such things of course; but the trouble was the disputable populations and the gaps and muddles in the historically established lines.
Language was used as a common marker of nationality, but .... In Silesia a lot of people spoke Silesian, but is Silesian Polish? Is it a dialect of Polish or a separate language? There were (and are) differences of opinion. (And if it's not Polish, is this still Poland?) Around Wroclaw there were more German-speakers--and also people who identified as Germans but were really Sorbish-speakers like their neighbors in Brandenburg. (Did this make them Germans or Poles? Neither--but since there was no nation of Sorbia, what were they?)
I am reminded of a group of sociologists surveying peasants in Poland, I think early in the twentieth century. They asked, among other things, about ethnic identity. Are you Poles, Germans, Lithuanians, Czechs ...? In some of the remoter areas people just stared at them blankly, unable to make sense of the question. We're from around here, they said.
National identity isn't some inevitable, eternal Platonic idea. Archangel--whose father hightailed it out of Berlin for points west in 1938--has always been taken aback that my father's family did not think of themselves particularly as German. They had left Germany for southern Russia in the eighteenth century--before Germany was a state, before romantic notions of ethnic nationalism had made such headway. They spoke German (not Russian) and called themselves Russian (not German) if they had to call themselves something. But what did it mean? This is very hard to say.
My grandparents would drive a hundred miles and more to see movies set in Russia. I think the first non-Disney film I was allowed to see as a child, certainly the first film I was allowed to see that admitted the existence of sex, was Dr. Zhivago. Being Russian trumped even being puritan (which--at the time--required a big trump).
But then music was a central part of life, and of course music was German. Christmas carols, church music, Bach Chorale Preludes, Schubert lieder. Probably the first thing I learned to sing in four-part harmony as a child, undistracted by other voices going off in other directions, was a German hymn:
Fair are the meadows, fairer still the woodlands,
Robed in the blooming flowers of spring ....
The melody is a Silesian folk song. Most of the text is older and anonymous; but this verse seem to have been added in the nineteenth century by Hoffmann von Fallersleben, who is also also the author of Deutschland, Deutschland über alles. (And a collection of songs about Texas, but that's another story).
How terrifically German this passion for the meadows and the woodlands is, invading the hymnbook and everywhere else. How terrifically German is the idea that walking in the woods is a necessary activity, good for you morally as well as physically:
A grave and lovely word stands written in the woods,
About right action and love, and a refuge for humanity,
says that quintessential German walk-in-the-woods romantic, that required-reading classic of German literature, Joseph von Eichendorff. Who grew up in Silesia, and whose first language was possibly Polish. Or Silesian, if you believe in a difference. When he and his brother were students together in Heidelberg, people used to say, "Oh, the poor young Polish counts, they must have only one good shirt between them. You never see them both going out on the same evening." Are the poor young Polish counts indisputably Polish? Or German?
Poor Woodrow Wilson
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The Pati is eastbound, probably headed home. The Teltow canal runs into the Dahme, which links to the Oder-Spree canal, and the Oder will take the Pati back to Wroclaw.
