Here is the winter at last. Fine sunsets come at half past three. (Oh, the sun sets later than that, officially, but the twilight starts practically after lunch at this latitude.) Hours later, in the long dark, the wind and sleet bang on the outside of the bedroom wall. The winter isn't serious here, not yet, the snow won't stick; but the inside of a well-warmed featherbed is a good place to be.
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| Late-afternoon view from living room. My photo. |
Most days the clouds trail in the streets, gray and close, almost scraping the pavement. But one day when I get up in the black morning, I can see the moon burning like a fat candle in the sky over the bend of the Spree. A clear day coming!
I go out about nine in the morning, when the eastern sky is still yellow from the sunrise--and how bright the day is, sunny as can be, with scarfy bits of white cloud appearing and dissolving in the astonishing blue to the west. Rain in the night has washed all the auto exhaust out of the air and it is fresh and mild--at least, above freezing. Fine walking weather.
In the US people go out in the winter to do something particular and vigorous, like skiing, but I don't think they like the winter fresh air in general, in the way that Germans do. Archangel has a running battle with one of his assistants who wants to fling the office windows open every day of the year. We have friends here who sleep with their bedroom skylight open all year round and think it's amusing to wake with a layer of snow on their bedcovers, if the wind has been in the right direction to drive the snow through the tilted-open skylight.
And people do eat and drink outdoors here through much of the winter. As the autumn fades, big red blankets appear over the chairs at the cafe tables, so that people can huddle in comfort over a sandwich and a coffee, or a not-too-cold beer or a bowl of soup, when it's only a few degrees above freezing.
Now, of course, people are outdoors en masse at the Advent markets, shopping for trinkets and guzzling hot spiced wine and eating gingerbread or roast chestnuts or sausages. All these things taste better in the outdoor cold than they would otherwise. (I have never mastered the technique of outdoor sausage-eating, however, I always end up with mustard on my coat-sleeve.)
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| Christmas market, Breitscheidplatz, Berlin, November 2013. Photo, Arild Vagen, Wiki Commons. |
I am not so good at the technique of getting out the door in the morning with everything I meant to take, either. When I am on the S-Bahn on the way to the Teltowkanal I realize that I have left my maps behind. Maybe the cat had settled on them.
The cat sat on the maps
(perhaps).
Agh. But this is such a straightforward stretch I hardly need a map with me, I think. Just take the S-Bahn south, walk about half a mile farther south from the relevant station to get to the canal, and head eastwards along the near bank.
And this works, sort of. My first choice of a southbound street isn't right, it angles off to the east after a little bit. Then the first southerly cross-street dead-ends in an unpromising way. The second southerly cross-street also dead-ends--and is this even southerly any more, Ms. Misdirection? Ah, but let us examine this dead-end more closely. There's a set of stairs going downward between the houses, and ... Yes, definitely, this is the way to go. Follow your nose. I can smell the wet leaves ahead, the masses of wet leaves that must lie along the canal and not up here among the houses. Here is the water.
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| Teltowkanal near Südende, December 2014. My photo. |
How low the sun is, shining horizontally from the edge of the sky in midmorning. And how much green there is still at this time of year. Ivy, mahonia, boxwood, creeper, the occasional rhododendron, all still have their leaves.
**
There are small harbors along the canal here. Mariendorf harbor, which used to handle fuel before the Mariendorf gasworks closed and was replaced by the biggest solar-power facility in Berlin. Lankwitz harbor, where heating oil comes in and is stored and redistributed.
The oil tanks sleep placidly in the sun, on and on along the water. Like fat white candles or fat white cocoons.
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| Oil tanks along Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo. |
Somewhere around here, as we walk east, we are changing neighborhoods. We've been in Steglitz on the north bank of the canal, where the path is, looking across to Lankwitz on the south. Now it's Tempelhof on the north bank and Mariendorf on the south. Little natural waterways have been absorbed into the canal: the Lanke brook that gave Lankwitz its name, then the chain of pools--glacial meltwater along the edge of a moraine--that formed the medieval boundary between Tempelhof and Mariendorf.
Here is the first street bridge we come to in Tempelhof. Built about 1905, Art-nouveau time, when all the architectural ornament turned to flowers and leafage. Blown up in 1945, rebuilt a few years later.
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| Teubertbrücke on Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo. |
There are Christmas decorations, corny and otherwise, on the balconies of the apartments along the way.
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| Along the Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo. |
The canal lies far below street-level. Long stairways run down the canal bank from the residential streets to the water, in case you should want to step down from your apartment to catch a boat, catch a fish ...
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| Along Teltowkanal in Tempelhof, December 2014. My photo. |
And then suddenly we're at Tempelhof Harbor, and everything is different. The city is a book and the page has just turned. (How wonderful it is to leaf through the book, say from the upper deck of a bus on one of those routes that arc through the city along improbable lines (east here and south there, and why have we suddenly turned down this street?). And wonderful too, of course, to go paragraph by paragraph, street by street, on foot. Densely written pages here, almost every one different. US cities are not quite like this: the pages are less written-on, more alike; sometimes, as it were, stuck together with spilled Coke and french-fry grease.) Though the pages are about to be stuck together here, too: there's a stretch east of the harbor where we can't get close to the water and will have to trudge along some streets that don't look very promising. But meanwhile, there is the harbor ....
Tempelhof Harbor used to look like this (it still does sort of, but not quite):
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| Tempelhof Harbor, 2006. Photo, IHenseke, Wiki Commons. |
There's Ullsteinhaus with its clock tower in the lower left of the picture, and a big warehouse-clump with the red roofs on the other side of the harbor. The city as a book, books in the city: Ullstein is a pubisher, now broken up and moved.
Do you remember how it feels, the first time you can really read another language--not just plod along with a dictionary, but understand, glide through the looking-glass into an alternative world? (Life in other languages, like life on other planets.) I think the first full-length German novel I ever read was an Ullstein book; not anything particularly good, but I remember the Ullstein owl logo happily. And the fish logo on Fischer books and the sailing ship on Insel books (on my somewhat kicked-around Rilke paperbacks, on my father-in-law's incredibly battered, beautiful Rilke hardcovers from the 1920s--did he take the Sonnets to Orpheus with him to Lisbon and New York when he fled, in 1938, or did he recover them after the war? I don't know.)
One of the new-language-world pleasures is the pleasure of getting to know new publishers. Pleasant memories come to mind, of rooming with a French major, admiring the beautiful Pleiade editions, or feeling the thick coarse paper of the books where you still had to cut the pages yourself--and the books didn't come with hard covers because if you were a proper bourgeois you had the books bound yourself, in a style suitable to your library. I don't know if French books still come this way ... It's certainly not the case any more, as it used to be, that German bookstores are organized by publisher rather than by subject matter and author. German bookstores used to have one section of shelves for the Ullstein books, one section for Rowohlt, one section for Fischer, and so on; and you sort of knew what you would find in each place.
German bookstores don't do this any more--although the Reclam books are usually off by themselves still, probably just because they're so small that they need a different size of shelves. Reclams are wonderful little yellow paperbacks of the German classics, that used to cost next to nothing and fit even in a very small pocket, perfect for walks. (And the Reclam books have held up surprisingly well; so many of my paperbacks from the 1970s are falling apart, but the Reclams are not. The corners have sort of rubbed off Hölderlin's Gedichte, which is a book that has had a lot of use; but it is still reliable company on the S-Bahn, the pages will not fall out. O drink the airs of morning! and name what is before your face, says Hölderlin, as the express trains blow past.)
The Ullstein owl still perches over the entrance of the building, which now houses a disco, a bank call center, and various other operations.
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| Owl, Ullsteinhaus. Photo, Dirk Ingo Franke, Wiki Commons. |
The midcentury troubles of central Europe lurk a bit around here. The Ullsteins were Jews, the firm was "Aryanized" and the building renamed "Deutsches Haus" in the 30s. The Ullsteins got the company back after the war, but didn't keep it very long; it was gradually sold off to Springer and other firms.
Also, we aren't so far from Tempelhof field here, where supplies were flown in during the 1948-49 blockade, when the Soviet Union cut off all the roads, railways, and waterways into West Berlin. No food, no fuel, no medications, no anything coming in without the airlift. A cargo plane every three minutes, half an hour on the ground to unload, back again in the air, thousands of tons a day, hardly enough for the city to live on. The warehouses at Tempelhof Harbor were one of the redistribution points for the airlifted supplies.
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| Tempelhof Harbor, warehouses, December 2014. My photo. |
From the end of the 1940s until the 90s, these warehouses were also one of the places where the so-called Senate Reserves were stored. The Reserves were a six-month supply of coal, food, medications, and other daily necessities, sufficient to keep the city going in case of another blockade.
The list of what was kept in the Senate Reserves is curious. Of course there was coal, gasoline, grain, canned foods in great quantity. Also:
96 tons of mustard
380 tons of
rubber soles and heels for shoe repair
18 million
rolls of toilet paper
25.8 million
cigars [surely we could manage without these?]
10,000
chamber pots
5,000
bicycles
19 live
cows
The Senate Reserves are long gone, of course. After the Wall came down, the coal stockpile went to the power plants bit by bit, in the normal course of events. The food and medications were donated as aid to the Soviet Union.
Ah, but what to do with the storage buildings, like the big warehouse at Tempelhof? Major renovation in recent years: offices, shopping center, bits of new building, not all of it attractive. Near the shopping-center entrance is a low building covered with thin metal plates pierced in seagull-shapes, which you can see if the light is right.
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| At Tempelhofer Hafen, December 2014. My photo. |
The light is not so generous at this season, even on a day as bright as today. As you walk up into the neighborhood on the north bank of the canal, you see streets--broad enough streets, two lanes of traffic and a line of parked cars on each side--where the sunlight doesn't come for weeks (months?) in the winter. The sun is too low, even on this bright noon: the house-shadows lie over the streets all day, every day. It's only if you face south over a big open space that you get the light ..
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| On Wenkebachstrasse, Tempelhof, December 2014. My photo. |
How tremendous the vine is that rambles over the lower stories of this house, greening in the sun. ... And across the street, the light is generous at the end of the big hospital complex that stands here:
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| Hospital, Wenkebachstrasse, December 2014. My photo. |
Other parts of the complex lie more in the winter dimness; this end is the hospice. Sunlight for the dying, on the days when the sunlight comes.
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