Orange was a popular color here in cold-war days, especially in the old east. The Palace of the Republic, the East German seat of government, was orange. (And these days you can buy East German souvenirs in a Berlin shop called VEB Orange. VEB was the label for state-owned companies in East Germany: "the people's own firm," Volkseigener Betrieb. In the shop it is supposed to stand for "many memories remain," viele Erinnerungen bleiben.) The Palace of the Republic is gone, knocked down and loaded into barges and floated away on the Spree to some building-materials graveyard. People don't build orange buildings any more.
But in the colorless winter, the 1950s orange buildings in our neighborhood warm the cityscape. Most of the city is white or gray or manila-folder colored, ranks of concrete-slab buildings like racks full of manila folders half lost in the fog. We appreciate moments like the one below, when the sky lifts a bit and you can see beyond your own block. In the winter the city is so muffled in the mist of its own breath, sometimes you can’t see past the next cross street for days on end.
 |
| View from living room, December 2014. My photo. |
Things seem muddy and shabby and broken-down in the late winter. When I am out on errands in one of the scuzzier parts of the neighborhood I see that a dead mattress has been dumped in front of the Embassy of Tadjikistan, blocking the bicycle path in a somewhat hazardous way. (Richer countries nabbed the more elegant embassy sites when the capital moved back to Berlin in the 90s, and people like the Tadjiks and the Hondurans ended up in potluck neighborhoods like ours.)
Ah, but it's not so bad as thaw time in the Midwest, when a long season's worth of snow starts to retreat like a receding glacier, leaving behind moraines of french-fry wrappers and lost mittens and dog turds along the sidewalks.
**
Now I am on my way out for a morning of exploration along the canal, and find that things are a bit out of order: the escalator is broken at the Bundesplatz U-Bahn, the escalator is broken at the Herrmannplatz U-Bahn. (The sand and slush that people track in from the street get into the escalator mechanisms in the winter; the repair workers bang wearily on the metal.) Young women struggle on the stairs with baby strollers.
The U-Bahn takes off with a sudden jerk just as I am swinging my backpack off and am a little off balance. I land on the feet of the woman across from me, a sturdy fifty-ish Berlin type with electro-orange hair. I apologize, she laughs and says, My feet are a soft landing place. And so they are: big padded boots.
Ah, but it's not so bad as thaw time in the Midwest, when a long season's worth of snow starts to retreat like a receding glacier, leaving behind moraines of french-fry wrappers and lost mittens and dog turds along the sidewalks.
**
Now I am on my way out for a morning of exploration along the canal, and find that things are a bit out of order: the escalator is broken at the Bundesplatz U-Bahn, the escalator is broken at the Herrmannplatz U-Bahn. (The sand and slush that people track in from the street get into the escalator mechanisms in the winter; the repair workers bang wearily on the metal.) Young women struggle on the stairs with baby strollers.
The U-Bahn takes off with a sudden jerk just as I am swinging my backpack off and am a little off balance. I land on the feet of the woman across from me, a sturdy fifty-ish Berlin type with electro-orange hair. I apologize, she laughs and says, My feet are a soft landing place. And so they are: big padded boots.
The Herrmannplatz stop, where I get out, is on the south (less gentrifying) side of Neukölln, which is, along with Wedding, regarded as the worst neighborhood in Berlin.
The street is lively. Here are cheap cell-phone places, money-transfer places, bakeries; here is a storefront that is vacant except for a mannequin in an elaborate wedding dress and a gas mask. Here are apartment houses dotted with satellite dishes; here is a dress shop with beautiful Muslim fashions, slinky long dresses with coordinated headscarves. (The young women bicycling past in the slush are doubly wrapped up, with woolly hats and heavy mufflers over their scarves.)
The dress shop reminds me of a list I keep in my mind of the odd lots of things that people buy in our (excellent, Turkish-run) neighborhood supermarket. Maybe this is amusing only if you're used to US-style grocery shopping, in which people go once a week or so and the purchases are therefore extensive and diverse. They don't really tell you much about your neighbors except whether they live on frozen dinners or do their own cooking. Here, where you shop every day or every other day (and can be in and out of the store in about ten minutes if you're efficient), people do buy curious little assortments:
- Middle-aged professional-looking man: three bottles of whiskey and a large
bag of kiwi fruit. (What kind of party is this going to be?)
- Very young man: two extra-large pizzas and six beers. (You know what
kind of party this is going to be.)
- Elegant young Muslim woman in silk headscarf: latest issue of Vogue and a
bag of gummi bears. (Looks like a quiet evening at home.)
... And then there was the old woman who wanted some fresh radishes but not the whole bunch, the way the store was selling them.
Pick out as many as you want, said Ali the cashier, and we'll charge by weight. (You can buy as little of anything as you want here; you can buy a single egg, if you like.) She picked her four or five radishes and gave them to Ali with a suspicious look. Don't weigh the tops, I don't want you to charge me for the tops! So Ali, who is a dear patient man, took the tops off for her and weighed the radishes.
You can have the tops if you want them, he said. She glared at him. I don't want the tops!
The neighborhood postman was standing at the end of the counter grinning, waiting to hand Ali a stack of letters. Does anyone have a rabbit at home? he called out to the store at large. Free greens!
And I think of the supermarkets elsewhere, where the cashiers are timed to make sure they're maximizing throughput; and if you're at the wrong end of the timing distribution you get fired or re-educated. Sad hearts at the supermarket .... I like our neighborhood.
**
In a half mile or so I'm back to the canal and in the sub-district of Britz, which is quieter and less used-looking than Neukölln:
The Smell still drifts across the path from time to time. Same as in the last stretch of the canal, a sort of rotting-coffee-grounds smell--but where can it be coming from? It's intermittent. Maybe it's coming up with the steam from the manholes? I can't tell.
There are surely additional rotting things in the abundant trash along the park strip by the canal. A lot of public space in Berlin could use more frequent trash pickup. (I used to get annoyed because there was trash scattered on the ground around half-empty trash bins in our part of town. Can't people get their trash in the bins? I thought, or can't the city crews take the time to pick up the mess? This was unfair, however, as I discovered when I saw the neighborhood crows--the big gray-backed crows that dominate the Berlin sky in winter--at work on hitherto orderly bins. They would dig down and fling out one thing after another, scattering the bin contents all over the ground, aiming for some crow-preferred tidbit further down in the bin. They seem to have a taste for cheap pizza.)
Ist ein Krähenwetter, you can say in German, of the drearier stretches of winter. It's a crow-weather.
**
The path is well-marked here, where you couldn't possibly lose it anyway; the blue-and-white blazes on the trees remind us that the Teltowkanal path is number 17 of the twenty main greenways through the city.
The path along the Spree, which we followed last summer, is number 1. The path along the Havel, which we will try when spring comes (that hardly imaginable event) is number 12. (But how long will it be, really, until the first crocus are out along the water and the sun comes back? Maybe not so long.)
**
The next bridge, with its pleasant bunches of chestnut leaves wrought in the railing, is the Rungius bridge. Named, I discover, for one Heinrich Rungius, a minor Protestant theologian and pastor in Neukölln in the nineteenth century.
Rungius, Rungius-- Why does this name sound familiar? I don't know anything about minor Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century.
Ah, but I was once in Cody, Wyoming, making a run out of Yellowstone, with an early snowstorm riding the bumper, years ago. We stopped at the Buffalo Bill Center, where the museum of western art has some works by Carl Rungius, the first really successful wildlife painter in the US, the picture-maker for the world that Theodore Roosevelt and his friends inhabited, or liked to imagine themselves inhabiting. (It's magazine-illustration stuff; there's much more of this sort of thing elsewhere in Wyoming, at a museum in Jackson Hole.)
Carl Rungius was the son of the Neukölln pastor and theologian for whom the bridge is named. He grew up in Neukölln and Britz, where the theologian sometimes shot stray cats in the garden and turned them over to his son for anatomy studies.
Carl moved to America in the 1890s, fell in love with the Rockies, and spent the rest of his life hunting and painting in the West. It was the one thing he had always wanted to do; these things work out for some people. (And Banff was a more humane place to be than Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucky man; but one wonders if his luck ever felt strange to him.)
**
Next comes the Buschkrug bridge, and an oldish cemetery on the north bank of the canal:
Somewhere around here, from the late fourteenth century until 2001, there was an inn called the Buschkrug, for which a variety of local objects are named. (And what was the fateful event in 2001? Highway construction: the inn was knocked down to make room for a freeway entrance. The freeway was built to carry traffic to the new Berlin airport, which still does not, for all practical purposes, exist.) [Berliner Zeitung 15.03.2001]
**
There hasn't been any traffic on this stretch of the canal today; but here as we get close to the Britz-East harbor, a couple of big barges are dozing at the bank. This one's out of Sczecin, in Poland:
The freeway bridge looms up ahead, and there the canal splits in three. The Teltowkanal proper makes a sharp turn and heads south along the freeway. The straight-ahead water is the Britzer Verbindungskanal (or Zweigkanal), which runs east and then north to join the Spree near the end of the Plänterwald [see Spree 6 post, June 2014].
A bright blue-and-yellow tug comes bustling under the highway bridge from the Verbindungskanal and turns into the Britz-East harbor, from which the third canal, the Neuköllner Schifffahrtskanal, runs north to join the Landwehrkanal.
We are taking the sharp turn south to follow the Teltowkanal through what promises to be a rather dreary stretch. To the left is the canal, with the freeway on the other side. To the right are miscellaneous things: a lumberyard (smels wonderful!), a construction site sunk in winter mud, vacant land.
This hasn't been a long stretch, but when I get to the Späthstraße bridge it seems like a good moment to head for transit and home, as the next really good transit connections will be substantially further along. So, back we go west toward the U-Bahn, along unlovely Späthstraße and then ... oh well, let's have a look at this park before heading home.
It's the Park am Buschkrug, an old graveyard/ war-rubble dump/ gravel pit, now turned into something that calls itself a Motorikpark, with all manner of equipment for working on your flexibility and balance. There are things on springs:
There are logs to balance on and various sorts of chain and rope walks and climbing opportunities. There is a sort of house-high vampire that includes various climbable and slide-able bits:
Well, never a dull stretch of cityscape here--or at least not often. I walk back down the little hillside of the park to the U-Bahn station.
The walls of the station are covered with pictures of summer.
Just so we don't forget, in the crow-weather, that summer eventually comes.
 |
| Hermannplatz. Photo by Alex1011, Wiki Commons. |
The street is lively. Here are cheap cell-phone places, money-transfer places, bakeries; here is a storefront that is vacant except for a mannequin in an elaborate wedding dress and a gas mask. Here are apartment houses dotted with satellite dishes; here is a dress shop with beautiful Muslim fashions, slinky long dresses with coordinated headscarves. (The young women bicycling past in the slush are doubly wrapped up, with woolly hats and heavy mufflers over their scarves.)
The dress shop reminds me of a list I keep in my mind of the odd lots of things that people buy in our (excellent, Turkish-run) neighborhood supermarket. Maybe this is amusing only if you're used to US-style grocery shopping, in which people go once a week or so and the purchases are therefore extensive and diverse. They don't really tell you much about your neighbors except whether they live on frozen dinners or do their own cooking. Here, where you shop every day or every other day (and can be in and out of the store in about ten minutes if you're efficient), people do buy curious little assortments:
- Middle-aged professional-looking man: three bottles of whiskey and a large
bag of kiwi fruit. (What kind of party is this going to be?)
- Very young man: two extra-large pizzas and six beers. (You know what
kind of party this is going to be.)
- Elegant young Muslim woman in silk headscarf: latest issue of Vogue and a
bag of gummi bears. (Looks like a quiet evening at home.)
... And then there was the old woman who wanted some fresh radishes but not the whole bunch, the way the store was selling them.
Pick out as many as you want, said Ali the cashier, and we'll charge by weight. (You can buy as little of anything as you want here; you can buy a single egg, if you like.) She picked her four or five radishes and gave them to Ali with a suspicious look. Don't weigh the tops, I don't want you to charge me for the tops! So Ali, who is a dear patient man, took the tops off for her and weighed the radishes.
You can have the tops if you want them, he said. She glared at him. I don't want the tops!
The neighborhood postman was standing at the end of the counter grinning, waiting to hand Ali a stack of letters. Does anyone have a rabbit at home? he called out to the store at large. Free greens!
And I think of the supermarkets elsewhere, where the cashiers are timed to make sure they're maximizing throughput; and if you're at the wrong end of the timing distribution you get fired or re-educated. Sad hearts at the supermarket .... I like our neighborhood.
**
In a half mile or so I'm back to the canal and in the sub-district of Britz, which is quieter and less used-looking than Neukölln:
 |
| Along Teltowkanal near Britzer bridge, January 2015. My photo. |
The Smell still drifts across the path from time to time. Same as in the last stretch of the canal, a sort of rotting-coffee-grounds smell--but where can it be coming from? It's intermittent. Maybe it's coming up with the steam from the manholes? I can't tell.
There are surely additional rotting things in the abundant trash along the park strip by the canal. A lot of public space in Berlin could use more frequent trash pickup. (I used to get annoyed because there was trash scattered on the ground around half-empty trash bins in our part of town. Can't people get their trash in the bins? I thought, or can't the city crews take the time to pick up the mess? This was unfair, however, as I discovered when I saw the neighborhood crows--the big gray-backed crows that dominate the Berlin sky in winter--at work on hitherto orderly bins. They would dig down and fling out one thing after another, scattering the bin contents all over the ground, aiming for some crow-preferred tidbit further down in the bin. They seem to have a taste for cheap pizza.)
Ist ein Krähenwetter, you can say in German, of the drearier stretches of winter. It's a crow-weather.
**
The path is well-marked here, where you couldn't possibly lose it anyway; the blue-and-white blazes on the trees remind us that the Teltowkanal path is number 17 of the twenty main greenways through the city.
 |
| Along Teltowkanal, east of Hermannstraße, January 2015. My photo. |
The path along the Spree, which we followed last summer, is number 1. The path along the Havel, which we will try when spring comes (that hardly imaginable event) is number 12. (But how long will it be, really, until the first crocus are out along the water and the sun comes back? Maybe not so long.)
**
The next bridge, with its pleasant bunches of chestnut leaves wrought in the railing, is the Rungius bridge. Named, I discover, for one Heinrich Rungius, a minor Protestant theologian and pastor in Neukölln in the nineteenth century.
 |
| Rungiusbrücke, Teltowkanal, January 2015. My photo. |
Rungius, Rungius-- Why does this name sound familiar? I don't know anything about minor Protestant theologians of the nineteenth century.
Ah, but I was once in Cody, Wyoming, making a run out of Yellowstone, with an early snowstorm riding the bumper, years ago. We stopped at the Buffalo Bill Center, where the museum of western art has some works by Carl Rungius, the first really successful wildlife painter in the US, the picture-maker for the world that Theodore Roosevelt and his friends inhabited, or liked to imagine themselves inhabiting. (It's magazine-illustration stuff; there's much more of this sort of thing elsewhere in Wyoming, at a museum in Jackson Hole.)
.jpg) |
| Bighorn Sheep on Wilcox Pass, by Carl Rungius, Whitney Museum of Western Art. Photo, Wiki Commons. |
Carl Rungius was the son of the Neukölln pastor and theologian for whom the bridge is named. He grew up in Neukölln and Britz, where the theologian sometimes shot stray cats in the garden and turned them over to his son for anatomy studies.
Carl moved to America in the 1890s, fell in love with the Rockies, and spent the rest of his life hunting and painting in the West. It was the one thing he had always wanted to do; these things work out for some people. (And Banff was a more humane place to be than Berlin in the first half of the twentieth century. Lucky man; but one wonders if his luck ever felt strange to him.)
**
Next comes the Buschkrug bridge, and an oldish cemetery on the north bank of the canal:
 |
| Friedhof am Buschkrugallee, January 2015. My photo. |
Somewhere around here, from the late fourteenth century until 2001, there was an inn called the Buschkrug, for which a variety of local objects are named. (And what was the fateful event in 2001? Highway construction: the inn was knocked down to make room for a freeway entrance. The freeway was built to carry traffic to the new Berlin airport, which still does not, for all practical purposes, exist.) [Berliner Zeitung 15.03.2001]
**
There hasn't been any traffic on this stretch of the canal today; but here as we get close to the Britz-East harbor, a couple of big barges are dozing at the bank. This one's out of Sczecin, in Poland:
 |
| Barge on Teltowkanal, east of Buschkrugbrücke, January 2015. My photo. |
The freeway bridge looms up ahead, and there the canal splits in three. The Teltowkanal proper makes a sharp turn and heads south along the freeway. The straight-ahead water is the Britzer Verbindungskanal (or Zweigkanal), which runs east and then north to join the Spree near the end of the Plänterwald [see Spree 6 post, June 2014].
 |
| Teltowkanal and Britzer Verbindungskanal intersection, January 2015. My photo. |
A bright blue-and-yellow tug comes bustling under the highway bridge from the Verbindungskanal and turns into the Britz-East harbor, from which the third canal, the Neuköllner Schifffahrtskanal, runs north to join the Landwehrkanal.
We are taking the sharp turn south to follow the Teltowkanal through what promises to be a rather dreary stretch. To the left is the canal, with the freeway on the other side. To the right are miscellaneous things: a lumberyard (smels wonderful!), a construction site sunk in winter mud, vacant land.
This hasn't been a long stretch, but when I get to the Späthstraße bridge it seems like a good moment to head for transit and home, as the next really good transit connections will be substantially further along. So, back we go west toward the U-Bahn, along unlovely Späthstraße and then ... oh well, let's have a look at this park before heading home.
It's the Park am Buschkrug, an old graveyard/ war-rubble dump/ gravel pit, now turned into something that calls itself a Motorikpark, with all manner of equipment for working on your flexibility and balance. There are things on springs:
There are logs to balance on and various sorts of chain and rope walks and climbing opportunities. There is a sort of house-high vampire that includes various climbable and slide-able bits:
 |
| Park am Buschkrug, January 2015. My photo. |
Well, never a dull stretch of cityscape here--or at least not often. I walk back down the little hillside of the park to the U-Bahn station.
The walls of the station are covered with pictures of summer.
 |
| Station wall, Blaschkoallee U-Bahn, January 2015. My photo. |
Just so we don't forget, in the crow-weather, that summer eventually comes.
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