Tegeler Fließ 3

Hayfields, highrises, dune forest

<This is getting posted late: I lost some weeks to travel, flu, hosting family reunion, etc. So here it is October, and this post is about September.>

The summer does not suddenly stop here when August is over. There's no big red sign that says end of season like Labor Day in the US or the rentrée in France--the universal return to work and school and politics after the universal late-summer shutdown. In France the schools start on exactly the same day (probably the same minute) all over the country, but in Germany the (six-week) summer breaks are staggered, state by state, so that the Bavarians with school-age children may be coming back from the mountains or the beach at a very different time than the Hessians are, and the Saxons are doing it at a different time than either of them, and so on. And the schedule rotates, so that if you have an early slot one year you get a later slot the next year.

So the summer slips away uncertainly. But then there's some day when you realize--oh, but it's dark after dinner, we have to turn the lights on ... after you haven't turned on a light in what feels like months, because the daylight has lasted so long. And there's some morning when you shove the shades up and see that, for the first time in a good while, the city has a white scarf of fog over its shoulders.

So it's fall, but only just, in September. The geraniums are in tremendous form, big fluffs of red or pink flowers bursting from window boxes and balcony rails all over town. (European geraniums, not the pelargoniums that we call geraniums in the US.)

Geraniums in window boxes, Lübars, September 2014. My photo.

In Lübars, near the Tegeler Fließ, even some of the stables and barns are blooming with window-box geraniums. (Heavens, what would my father have said about blooming window-boxes on a barn? Unthinkable, in a hard-scrabble world where even putting a decent coat of paint on the barn would have seemed like getting above yourself.)

So--here we go from a bus stop in Lübars, down a side street, which dwindles promptly into a path across the meadows. How lovely this is, one of my favorite places in the world. 

Tegeler Fließtal from Lübars, September 2014. My photo.

When I was younger I liked savage and extravagant landscapes: red desert in Utah, the Rockies above timberline, and that sort of thing. The (terrifying) sublime, not the (unterrifying) beautiful, as they would have said in the eighteenth century. 

Any more, I like this: something humane and undreadful, something that looks like a place where human life could prosper.

**
But the Märkisches Viertel is still right behind us. Just look back over your shoulder and there it is, looming at the edge of the hay meadows. 

Märkisches Viertel. Photo by Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons.

(About the name: there is some tradition in Berlin of naming real-estate developments for other regions of Germany: the Rhenish quarter, the Bavarian quarter, the Hansa quarter, and so on. Märkisches Viertel means the Brandenburg quarter, as "Märkisch" is (obviously) the adjectival form of "Brandenburg.") 

We live seven or eight miles due south of here, so the Märkisches Viertel is the farthest thing I can see from my study window on a clear day. There it is all summer long, a toothy little white wall against the dark-blue thunderstorms that roll along the Barnim Plateau behind it; and then in the fall it gradually fades out of view in the mists. For much of the winter it's invisible, and then it comes into sight again in the spring when the fogs lift, like an animal coming out of hibernation. 

It used to have a rep--back in the later 70s and 80s--as one of the worst places in West Berlin. (Bus tours went by to give the tourists a comfortable shiver: Skyscrapers! Desolation! Crime!) It was the great local exemplar of too-big government-sponsored housing projects gone wrong; after the MV, Berlin backed off from planning gigantesque urban-renewal projects like this.

It's about the nearest you get in Berlin to things like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago, or Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, which gave public housing a terrible name and eventually were abandoned and dynamited. 

How strange it feels to have this right up against the amiably Midwestern farmscape around Lübars. The last time I was up here, a week or so ago, I was thinking that the hay needed cutting, and indeed it's all down now, drying in the September sun, smelling wonderful. (Why is the smell of fresh hay such an easy object of sentiment? Why not the smell of turnips, for example? Oh the moonlight's fair tonight along the Wabash, from the fields there comes the breath of ... What? New-mown hay, says the Indiana state song. Not turnips or cabbages. If we were horses and enjoyed eating hay, it would be more understandable that we love the fragrance--but as things are, it's a puzzle.)

Near Lübars, September 2014. My photo.

It's tremendously horsy out here in this part of Berlin, and it is obvious, as I walk, that a lot of people were riding along these paths during the weekend. You have to watch your footing on a Monday.  

**

So the Märkisches Viertel was about the closest Berlin ever got to a criminal monstrosity like the Robert Taylor Homes--and the closest you get here is so, so far away from something like Robert Taylor. The MV wasn't trash housing strung in desolation along an expressway, without green space; it wasn't intended as a place to concentrate and warehouse the poorest of the poor. It was intended as pretty good housing--affordable, not luxurious, but not a terrible place to live. 

Some of the early tenants, in the 1960s, were moved up here from Wedding [see Panke 1 post, April], while parts of the bombed-out tenement districts there were being knocked down and rebuilt. People moved from insanitary dumps into genuinely decent apartments: solidly built, well-maintained places with light, space, heat, view, and all the modern plumbing conveniences that were so notably absent in Wedding.

And some of the new tenants killed themselves--there was a scandalous wave of suicides in the MV--because we aren't white rats, we aren't always better off in cleaner cages. People need meaning as much as they need plumbing, and meaning is social, and this sort of got left out of the planning process.

People were tossed randomly into the MV, neighbors no longer next to old neighbors, and the infrastructure development didn't keep pace with the residential building. You didn't know the people who lived next to you any more, they had no meaning as people because you had no common history. There were no places to meet the people who used to be your neighbors, no replacements yet for the rickety and insanitary beer joints in Wedding. This was not a world in which low-income people were likely to have their own telephones, so you couldn't just call up your old friends and neighbors. The public transit was a little lacking out here, still, so you couldn't so easily get out of the new neighborhood. And these weren't necessarily people who had experience or skills in coping with this kind of thing. They had always been in Wedding, their parents had always been in Wedding; they knew how to cope with other hazards, but not this.

So some people killed themselves. It gave the place a bad name and perhaps skewed the mix of later-arriving tenants toward people who couldn't get an apartment elsewhere or didn't care where they lived. 

**

But things change; so many things change.  When the MV went up, the Cold War border was just on the other side of the hay meadows. I walk east now through the meadows for a bit, and then turn north--the thing that you would not have wanted to do thirty years ago--trying to get closer to the water of the Fließ again. (The information quality of my maps declines near the Brandenburg border, so this is all sort of wander-and-guess walking.) 

I know that if I go north I should come to the Mauerweg, the bike path that runs where the Berlin Wall used to be. It's about the only paved pathway hereabouts, so you know it when you meet it. I do meet it soon, and there's nice signage up along it—big boards with information about the flora and fauna, and good area maps with walker-level detail on them.

The only thing wrong with the map-boards along the path is that they don't seem to have any “you are here” marks on them. A problem for those of us who are directionally challenged and who have absolutely no clue where we are when we have got there.

Still ... I'm guessing that I should go back west along the Mauerweg for a little bit, and then I will meet the Tegeler Fließ again and be able to follow it north.

Things change, summer is over. There are apple trees along the Mauerweg; the fallen fruit rots gently on the path, making hazards for the cyclists and adding a fermented-cider note to the smell of fallen leaves in the sun. The goldenrod is massively in bloom, higher than my head, and the red berries are thick on the hawthorn bushes. Was the wall here? (Where, in this wood?) It’s hard to believe, now.  

Hawthorn along the Mauerweg, September 2014. My photo.

The Märkisches Viertel is out of sight now behind the dense woods. People in the left-wing student movement, the so-called Extra-Parliamentary Opposition (APO), had a working group in the MV in the 1970s, writing news about the place, critiquing the bad planning that went into the process of moving people up from Wedding before the infrastructure was in place, advocating for the residents who were already up there, trying to radicalize them, in some cases radicalizing themselves. 

That was a long time ago. Things change; people's lives went on from the APO in different ways. Maybe into mainstream politics (think of Joschka Fischer, who started out in the APO and ended up as Foreign Minister of Germany). Maybe into obscure ordinary life, maybe into the terrorist groups of the late 70s. It's said--I don't know if this is true--that a few of the people in the MV working group ended up with the Red Army Fraction, robbing banks and blowing up department stores and assassinating capitalists in the later 70s.

That was the first time I lived in Germany, in 1977, down in Baden-Württemberg where some of the serious terrorist action was. I remember going to the apartment of some acquaintances to see Bergman's Magic Flute film on television, and someone who was supposed to come that night was very late because he had been stopped for a long time at a roadblock while the police searched everyone's car trunks for dead capitalists.

There were four or five Chinese students at the apartment that night, one of the first groups of mainlanders sent out to study abroad. They were a bit wary and remote, all in gray Mao suits, looking out at the European world as if it were made of glass, fragile and dangerous. What did they make of Bergman, or Mozart? They couldn't tell us, maybe we didn't know how to ask.

People forget; looking back, the past seems so safe. But it wasn't. The atmosphere of armed fear that fall was like a greasy fog, catching at your throat. That fall some of the Red Army Fraction's Palestinian allies hijacked a Lufthansa jet, shot the pilot, and held the passengers hostage to pressure the German government to let the RAF leaders go. The Israelis killed the Palestinians and rescued the hostages. (But with a bit of bad luck, everyone might have been dead.) In response, the RAF killed a German capitalist. Some of the RAF leaders in prison killed themselves. Some of the righteous burghers of Stuttgart rose up and said, "Don't give those people decent funerals in our city cemetery! Throw the bodies out by the side of the road!"  Not a nice season.

**

You never know what you'll find by the side of the road. Baden-Württemberg in the late 70s was where I learned the pleasures of country walking, going through the woods from village to village, looking for Roman camps and medieval castle ruins, confusing myself with hiking maps. I was out walking one autumn day and came out of the woods to a road on a hillside, somewhere near Herrlingen I think (but when do I ever know where I am?). Down below there was a field where people seemed to have got into trouble with their farm machinery: it was smoking spectacularly, with bits of licking flame at the bottom of the smoke-pillar, and the people were running back and forth. I waited a while to see if the dry stubble-field was going to catch fire. While I was waiting I noticed an apple tree at the roadside, fountaining over a little marker, and went closer to read it. (Text, Archangel says to me, you can never resist text.) It marked the spot where Erwin Rommel killed himself in 1944, under duress, after he was accused of complicity in the plot to kill Hitler. 

**

Well, the world is not such a good place, often. But the bodies of the dead terrorists were in fact not thrown out by the side of the road in Stuttgart in 1977. The mayor of Stuttgart, Manfred Rommel, Erwin Rommel's son, said--in the face of opposition from some of his party and fury from some of the voters: Every hostility has to end somewhere. For me, in this case, it ends with death.  So bury them decently in the city cemetery, he said; and that is what was done. Bless you, Manfred Rommel.

**

So what has happened to the Märkisches Viertel, after all these years? The (city-owned) real estate companies that ran the place did gradually improve it--redesigned the public areas, created more playgrounds and green space, sponsored social events, brought in more bars and restaurants. (More bars as a solution to social problems is about as un-American a city-planning idea as you can get, given American puritanism about alcohol, but it has some things to be said for it.) 

All this pretty much worked. And so, far from being dynamited like its US counterparts, the MV sits placidly in the autumn sun, showing off its super-energy-efficient renovations and its geranium plantings. People have lived their way into it. The schools aren't the best in Berlin but they aren't the worst either. The crime rate is modest. Some people who grew up here have gone away and then come back to raise their children here. 

People rest their feet in Fountain Square, in the middle of the shopping district, watching their neighbors. It's downscale here: Woolworth's, a discount drugstore, discount electronics, McDonald's, a decent bakery. It's normal life, it's not a terrible place to live.

Brunnenplatz, Märkisches Viertel.  Photo by Pygmalion, Wiki Commons. 

**

But I need to think where I'm going. Here along the path is the Köppchensee, a place where people used to dig peat for fuel, and the water has filled in the resulting hollow. This tells me where I am, and tells me that I should be rejoining the Tegeler Fließ shortly.

Köppchensee, September 2014. My photo

And here is the Fließ again, at last, where the Mauerweg crosses it, and the horses come down to drink and the dogs to gambol when they are out for walks with their owners.

Tegeler Fließ at the Mauerweg, September 2014. My photo.

I follow the Fließ north, out of Berlin, into Brandenburg. Farther along, the path parts company from the Fließ again as the water spreads into impenetrable marsh. 

But this is a wonderful stretch, this mix of wood and meadow. It's sand-dune country; I’m glad I’m not trying to get a bicycle along some of these stretches. 

The track I’m on is partway up the side of a dune; the wetland is down at the bottom. Ah, now here is a little sandy sidetrack going up through the trees toward the top of the dune. It seems worthwhile to explore this. Maybe there’s a view at the top. And sand is, in its way, easy climbing—you don’t slip on it like rock. It’s not far. 

So here we go, what is at the top?  

Ah, an outdoor basketball court, what else? Beyond, there's a little scurf of new houses, which presumably provide the basketball players. 

**

Somewhere around here we have to get over or under a rail line--the line of the Heidekrautbahn, the Heather Train, that runs up into the lake- and heath-country north of Berlin. It appears from the map that the path and the Fließ take the same underpass, which will be nice if it’s true.  

Ah, that looks like the underpass up there. It also looks like a bit of a tight fit for my path and the Fließ both ...  

Heidekrautbahn underpass, near Schildow, September 2014. My photo.

But it does all fit--here we are on the other side, with everything in good order. The Fließ swells placidly into a small pool and my shoes are still dry.

Tegeler Fließ at the underpass, September 2014. My photo.

There is more woods-and-fields mix, and then we come out of a patch of trees to a little Brandenburg town called Schildow.

Schildow, September 2014. My photo.

There's an easy country track then for another mile or so to the S-Bahn stop at Mühlenbeck, and--since we're out of Berlin--a last goodbye to the Tegeler Fließ.

The Fließ runs past a little lake called the Kiessee, which turns out to be a popular spot on a warm afternoon, with lots of people out on--I suppose you can't call it a beach, but on the pleasant lawn that runs between the woods and the water. 

I had meant to take a photo, but under the circumstances it seemed awkward. Taking pictures of strangers always seems intrusive, and when none of them has a stitch on, it's obviously more so. The farther out you are from central Berlin, the lower the likelihood that anyone will have a swimsuit on when the weather is warm. And here it is half-summer, still; it's a lovely day.