Teltowkanal 1

Borderlines

The Teltowkanal is the water version of a freeway bypass around the south side of Berlin. It's a (fairly) straight shot of almost 40 km from the Havel on the west side of the city to the Dahme (a fat tributary of the Spree; see Spree 8 post in July) on the east side, avoiding the absurd midtown meanderings of the Spree and the heavy traffic of central Berlin. (You can see the canal on the Wasserstrasse map that is posted nearby.)

Somehow rivers seem like a spring-summer project (this summer the Spree, next summer the Havel!) and canals seem like an autumn-winter project. Rivers are surprising, they have bends you can't see around; they're like the natural world when everything is growing up and metamorphosing. (And they often have better shade for hot days.) The dreamy monotony of canals seems suitable for the darker times of year.

Griebnitzsee/ Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

The Teltowkanal starts at the Griebnitzsee, which is a side-arm of the Havel, part of the tremendous mess of Havel-lakes around Potsdam. Much of this west end of the Teltowkanal follows pre-existing waterways--first this lake, and then a little river called the Bäke, which has been almost (not quite) completely swallowed up in the canal.

A little geological history here. When the glaciers retreated to the north at the end of the last ice age, the melt-water burbled away to the south in many places: down the Mississippi system in North America, down the Dnieper and the Don and Volga rivers in Eastern Europe. In western Europe the meltwater could not run south, however, because the land tilts up from north to south, and water doesn't run uphill--and of course the water couldn't run north because the glacier was still blocking the way. So the melt-water worked its way east or west along the edge of the glacier, making broad shallow river valleys that geologists call (even in English geological terminology) Urstromtäler. Berlin lies in one of these, the Berlin-Warsaw Urstromtal.

Glacial moraines form the high ground to the north and south of this stretch of the Berlin-Warsaw valley. The moraine on the north side of Berlin is the Barnim plateau, where we were rambling around in the spring and summer, following the Tegeler Fließ (August-Sept posts this year) and the upper reaches of the Panke (April posts). The moraine on the south is the Teltow plateau, which is pretty much unexplored territory for me. 

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The west end of the Teltowkanal, like many Berlin waterways, made up a part of the Berlin-Brandenburg border and thus the East-West border in Cold War days. 

Sort of. The political geography here is complicated. When you get off the S-Bahn at the Griebnitzsee station and look at the signs that tell you where to exit to reach this street or that, one sign points toward a little neighborhood called Steinstücken (Pieces of Rock), which was a particularly complicated piece of border.

This was a chunk of land that the nearby village of Stolpe acquired in the eighteenth century. When Stolpe became part of Berlin in 1920, Steinstücken therefore did too. But it wasn't quite contiguous with Stolpe, or Berlin: it was a little exclave, an island in the sea of Brandenburg. This was not a problem, of course, until the Cold War came along and Pieces of Rock--about thirty acres and a few hundred people--was in the US occupation zone because it was legally part of Berlin, while the entire surrounding territory was in the Russian zone because it was part of Brandenburg.

In October of 1951, East Germany had a try at taking over Steinstücken. A very small, subdued coup attempt. The East German police moved in, cut the telephone line to West Berlin, and tried to hand out East German ration cards, which the inhabitants refused to take. The US displayed muscle in some fashion, well short of waving guns at anyone, and after four days the East Germans withdrew. [Information from Berliner Zeitung article by Sabine Deckwerth, 4 May 1996]

Things were sort of okay until 1961, when the Berlin Wall went up, completely surrounding Steinstücken. You could still get to the rest of West Berlin, but it was a job, and you had to give yourself time: you had to get through one checkpoint at the edge of the neighborhood, then you walked about three quarters of a mile on a path through the Brandenburg woods--well-fenced, overseen by armed men--to the next border checkpoint, and then you were on the West Berlin mainland, so to speak. 

Border near Steinstücken, 1987.  Photo by Jochims, Wiki commons.

There were still freight trains that came through from the west with supplies. American military personnel came and went by helicopter. 

Finally in 1971 there was an East-West exchange of a few acres here and there around the borders, which created a twenty-meter-wide corridor between Pieces of Rock and the rest of West Berlin. So now there was room for an actual street, not just a footpath, and no checkpoints to get through. There was even a bus to and from the mainland. West Berliners came out on weekends to see the exclave, as an interesting oddity. The local beer garden flourished. 

After reunification people didn't come so much any more, it no longer seemed so interesting. The beer garden went under. 

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I don't think Steinstücken is surrounded with the flowering cherries that sometimes mark where the Wall used to be [see Panke 1 post, April 2014]. But some of the original cherries that came to Berlin in 1990, as a gift from Japan, stand along the stairs that lead down from the station to the lake at Griebnitzsee. Under the trees is a memorial plaque with some lines from the Japanese poet Issa:

     Under the branches
     of cherry trees in bloom,
     no one is a stranger.

Fallen leaves under cherry trees, Griebnitzsee, October 2014. My photo.

There is so much Japanese poetry about cherry blossoms, it's tempting to imagine the discussions of a committee set up to pick the appropriate verse for the plaque in Berlin. 

They could have picked this one, also by Issa (translation from: haikuguy.com/issa/index.html): 

    "No soliders
     allowed!"
     say the cherry blossoms.

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The path along the south side of the Griebnitzsee used to be the patrol route for the Wall guards. After reunification there was a plan to turn this route into a public path along the water. But the sell-off of East German state assets in the 1990s turned the villas along the lake back into private hands, and some of the new owners have been hanging on like grim death. My lakeshore! No strangers passing my house! (No branches of cherry trees in bloom along this stretch, apparently.) The matter has been in the courts. 

So after a very short stroll along the water we come to this. (Maybe I'll make a special photo collection, Locked Fences along Berlin Waterways.)

Fence along Griebnitzsee, October 2014. My photo.

There is disagreement among the villas, however. I go back up to the street and head east, looking for a place to get down the water again further on, and see that some of the properties have banners hung on their garden fences saying "Freies Ufer," free (open, public) shoreline.  Others, of course, do not have banners.  And I don't find a way down to the water.

This is the part of urban geography that Germans call the Speckgürtel--the most affluent suburbs outside a big city. (Think North Shore in Chicago, or the Connecticut suburbs of NY.)  Germans are less solemnly respectful of wealth and its display than English-speakers are, so the word is a bit rude. It's the German equivalent of "beer belly." (Would we call Greenwich, Connecticut the beer belly of New York? Probably not. Literally, Speckgürtel means "fat-bacon belt," which has somewhat piggish overtones.)

It's a pretty area, however, agreeably 1900-ish. We can stroll along admiring the villas along Stubenrauchstrasse .... 

Along Stubenrauchstrasse, Potsdam, October 2014. My photo.

Herr von Stubenrauch was the official who drove the building of the Teltowkanal, around 1900. The gardens have the look of gardens that are looked after by professional landscaping services.

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Here we come to the end of the street, and if we go round the corner and under this underpass, we should get back to the water .... Other creatures want to get the water here also, it seems. A sign by the underpass offers the German equivalent of "Help a toad across the road."

Attention! Toads are crossing the street. Near Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

And here we are, we've done it! Around the corner and down the road a bit, and there's the canal.

How remote this is, how nowhere.

Teltowkanal from Kremnitzufer, October 2014. My photo.

We are now in a strange little neighborhood called Albrechts Teerofen, Albrecht's Tar Furnace. People used to make pine tar out here in the woods, from the Middle Ages onward. The neighborhood is a little east-west strip of land about 200 meters wide by 2 kilometers long, between the canal on the north and a big forest called the Parforceheide on the south. 

It feels lost here, it feels remote. The Parforceheide, which is part of Brandenburg, wraps around the neighborhood; even the opposite bank of the canal, to the north, is woods, and a big chunk of it also belongs to Brandenburg.
In Cold War days Albrecht's Teerofen was like a sausage casing, like a long narrow sack-full of West Berlin, marooned on the south bank of the canal.

The way in and out of the neighborhood in those days was the Kremnitzufer: along this little road and out the west end of the neighborhood, like popping out of the mouth of the sack, to a corridor with a bridge over the Teltowkanal to the West Berlin mainland.

Kremnitzufer, October 2014. My photo.

The street looks like one of those one-lane Brandenburg wonders that somehow manage to carry two-way traffic. I'm not so comfortable in the street when a vehicle goes by, there is hardly room for both of us ... and what are they going to do up ahead, where the UPS truck going one way has just met a big delivery van and a bicycle coming the other way?

The bicycle gets precedence, the delivery van wobbles into the soft canal bank on the left, and the UPS truck scrapes into the forest on the right. And then they ease back onto the roadway, neither van having fallen over or got stuck. Well done, all.

What a scruffy, dreamy, out-of-time place it is along here. The neighborhood is part of Berlin but isn't even hooked up to city water or city underground electric cabling: it has overhead wires like the US (which presumably go down in ice storms, like the US). Some bright location scout from a film company picked the neighborhood as a stand-in for Utah (Utah??) in a movie shoot last summer. The reason, I believe, was because the scout found a wooden house there, which is characteristic of Utah but largely unknown in Berlin. (Germans are bemused by the American predilection for wooden houses: I remember one of the respectable German newsweeklies explaining that the reason Americans take their children with them everywhere (unlike Europeans) is because they live in wooden houses and are afraid the houses will catch fire when they are away.) [Sources on the neighborhood: Wikipedia article on Albrechts Teerofen; Tagesspiegel, 18 July 2014, 'Hollywood in Albrechts Teerofen'.]  

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The traffic isn't heavy here, but I'm glad when it's finally possible to get off the street. The Kremnitzufer veers off to the right a bit and becomes a street called (like the neighborhood) Albrechts Teerofen. I am happy I don't have to compete with cars for space on this one, its's even smaller than Kremnitzufer, and harder to get off of.

Albrechts Teerofen: the street, October 2014. My photo.

The straight-ahead line along the water diminishes to a footpath called the Kanalauenweg, the canal-meadow path. It's very well marked (a white blaze with two blue wave-lines), but you do have to watch your footing. One foot exactly and carefully ahead of the other. The path is about six inches wide and full of roots, rocks, holes, and sandtraps.

The Kanalauenweg, October 2014. My photo.

Still, it's pleasant territory along here, and the path gets broader and easier as we go east.

There's some river traffic, not much. Here's a barge being shoved along by a tug --or pushboat, as one says in non-US English--out of Szczecin in Poland (big port in West Pomerania, where the Oder flows into the Baltic). Can't tell exactly what the freight-load is on the barge; the tug itself has a major load of laundry fluttering in the breeze behind the cabin.

Barge on Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

Between the woods and the water are tremendous banks of flowers--mostly pink like this, but occasionally a deeper color, near red. This is Impatiens glandulifera, Himalayan balsam. It's a plant from India that was brought to Britain as an ornamental and has proved horribly invasive. It chokes out everything else, even stinging nettles. (How sad am I about a reduction in stinging nettles?? And I have some sympathy for invasive species--English-speakers in Berlin are an invasive species, probably.... But still, nettles are part of the ecosystem, nettles have some right to live.)

Himalayan balsam along Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

So it occurs to me to ask: how do you set about being a successful invasive species--how do you get the better of the nettles? For one thing, the Himalayan balsam is perfectly happy living along polluted waterways with overdoses of nitrogen and phosphorous from agricultural and industrial runoff. The Teltowkanal is the filthiest waterway in Berlin--it's one stream here from which you don't want to eat the fish--but the balsam doesn't mind.

Also, the banks of pink blooms here are crawling with honeybees and bumblebees, and no wonder. A couple of German biologists have estimated that a bee can get from ten to forty times as much sugar in an hour's work gathering nectar from these flowers as they do in an hour's work with other flowers that typically grow along the European riverbanks, like loosestrife or hairy willow-herb or hedge-nettles. (Ach, these British plant names: Himalayan balsam is also called kiss-me-on-the-mountain or policeman’s helmet (obviously the helment of an English policeman, if you look at the shape of the flower). Its competitor the great hairy willow-herb is also known as codlins-and-cream or cherry pie.) 

Even busy bees like a higher wage per hour, so the bees visit the policeman's helmets more and the cherry pie and the hedge-nettles less, and so the latter set less seed and the policeman's helmets take over. [Chittka and Schürkens, Successful invasion of a floral market, Nature, 7 June 2001.]

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How autumnal it is along here. Here are chestnut trees in the open edge of the wood.

Chestnut trees along the Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

And a fallen log that the ivy has mostly covered ... (I love the woods, I love the woods, how would I live without this if we moved again?)

Along the Teltowkanal, October 2014.  My photo.

But the woods are ending, we must be getting close to Kleinmachnow ....  yes, here is the Machnow lock,  which is a tremendous object:

Lock at Kleinmachnow, October 2014. My photo.

I had better go over to the other side of the canal because at some point I need to get back to Berlin public transit. The street that crosses the canal takes me north a little bit, but I don't want to hunt transit just yet. So I work my way back to the canal .... Hmm, unsigned crossroads in a patch of woods--which way shall I go? Downhill must be toward the water, uphill must be toward the Hakeburg, which sits up at the top of a ridge on the south side of the canal.

I think downhill towards the water. But I do turn aside for a bit to have a look at the Hakeburg. It's a big 1900-ish house, built for one of the local worthies by Bodo Ebhardt, an architect who was the founder and long-time president of the German Castle Association. (You can sort of tell.)

Hakeburg. Photo by Lienhard Schulz, 2005, Wiki Commons.

The local worthy ran into financial problems in the 1930s and sold his castle to the Post Office. During World War II the SS used it as a research and testing site for flight and communications technology. For a while after the war it was home to the Karl Marx Party Academy, which was the post-secondary institution you wanted to go to if your goal was to rise in the East German Communist hierarchy. Later the Academy moved into central Berlin, and the Hakeburg became a guesthouse for the Party.  Krushschev stayed here, Castro stayed here, Gorbachev stayed here.

Yes, and then what do we do with a pseudo-castle on the outskirts of Berlin after the end of the old East Germany? Well, one obvious possibility was to continue it as a hotel, and Deutsche Telekom acquired it with this end in view. (And why does the phone company want to own a hotel? you may ask. Caught up in the frothy enthusiasm of the 90s, perhaps.) Telekom leased it to one of the fraudulent fantasts who were floating around in ex-East Germany at the time [see Spree 6 post, June 2014, for another example]. This was a man named Rösch, a member of the German parliament and free-market enthusiast who ran the place into the ground in a year, leaving immense debts behind, and landed himself in jail for embezzlement and fraud. [Potsdamer Neueste Nachrichten 30.10.04]  Other people bought the property, other people lost money on it and resold it. For a while the exterior shots for a German soap opera were filmed here. 

You can have events at the Hakeburg now--weddings and such. I'm not sure how big this business is.  Meanwhile (why is the place such a fantast-magnet?) the government-in-exile of the principality of Sealand claims the Hakeburg because they say they have a 99-year lease on the place, God knows from whom. 

Sealand is a World War II sea fort off the coast of England that claims to be an independent country. (It's outside everyone's territorial waters, so no one bothers to dispute the claim.) The fort was taken over first by one group of British pirate radio broadcasters in the 1960s, and then by another group, a family named Bates. In 1978, a German lawyer named Achenbach hired German and Dutch mercenaries to storm the place, but they were defeated and captured by the (well-armed) resident Bates family member, who then held Herr Achenbach for a not very large ransom. The German government negotiated Achenbach's release. I am not sure why. Achenbach and his successor are the Sealand government-in-exile who now claim the Hakeburg. I think that they believe there are Nazi treasures buried nearby, but their website is too mad to be clear about this ...  (The motto on their website, from Cervantes, is: Facts are the enemy of the truth.  Which is not even so untrue.)

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Well, I didn't stumble across any Nazi treasure--I was happy not to have stumbled at all, on some of the rough bits of the path further back to the west. But here beyond the Machnower See the path goes on very prettily.

Near Machnower See, October 2014. My photo.

At the end of the lake we come to the street, and walk up it and cross the old border.  There is a sign along the street showing a map of Europe, with a big line running through the continent from north to south, the old iron curtain line. 

The sign says, "Here Germany and Europe were divided until ten in the morning on March 31, 1990."  

Doesn't this sound a little too ... exact, somehow, and conclusive?