Teltow connection canals 1

Routes and Branches: Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal

On the east side of Berlin the Teltowkanal splits in three [see Teltowkanal 7 post]: the main canal turns south, the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal goes north, and a third branch, the Britzer Verbindungskanal, goes straight ahead east. Having gone to the end of the Teltowkanal itself, I want to come back and walk the branches. 

We are getting to the end of winter here: there are days when the whole sky lifts up, far above the rooftops. The sky is full of clouds, but the clouds are up where they belong, backdropping the skylines out at the city's edges (there's the Siemens tower in the west, there's the Märkisches Viertel in the north), instead of dragging in the streets, trailing their cold damp fingers over your face like something un-dead.

The season is unreliable, however. The online weather shows a big sunshine icon and says that it is clear now and will be clear all day today. But in fact it's as gray as a 1950s overcoat out there. And cold.

Lohmühlenbrücke, Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015.  My photo.

Here we are at the start of the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, having taken the S-Bahn to Ostkreuz (that massive long-term construction site), found the bus stop in a windy corner of the construction, and taken the bus south. Past a four-story apartment house with four-story-high metal daisies in various colors blooming around it. Past apartment houses with strong-colored murals on their end-walls. Across beautiful Puschkinallee, where the white trunks of the plane-trees lining the avenue glow with their own light, even on such a day.

I get off at the Lohmühlen bridge, which is where the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal (this side of the bridge in the picture above) takes its leave of the Landwehrkanal (other side of the bridge). The far side of the Landwehrkanal is Kreuzberg; this side is Neukölln, a famously tough and troubled part of Berlin. (It used to be called Rixdorf, and it had such a bad rep in the 19th century that the city fathers changed the name to Neukölln in the hope of getting a fresh start. No luck.) 

Here along the wall of the canal a graffitist invokes a warmer season.

Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, near Lohmühlenbrücke, February 2015. My photo.

There are anti-gentrification posters and banners hung on the houses, or across the front of the occasional vacant lot, as the higher-rent wave creeps down from Kreuzberg. One of the posters rallies the neighbors to call for Milieuschutz for the neighborhood near the bridge. (Milieuschutz is a legal measure that can be taken to keep the neighborhood diverse, to keep landlords from clearing out their renters solely on the grounds that there are now people willing to pay half again as much for the space. Property-rights economists would disapprove of Milieuschutz. But then, how nice is it really, when someone comes along and says, I like your home, I think I will take it away from you, and I can do this because I am richer than you are?)

It is still damp and gray and cold. 

Here is no continuing city, here is no abiding stay.

Ill the wind, ill the time, uncertain the profit, certain the danger.…
Evil the wind, and bitter the sea, and grey the sky, grey grey grey.

**

But the neighborhood, here, now, feels good. Here bulky comfortable old apartment houses hunker down around a park, balconies overlooking the green space. There is a good playground, with a scattering of parents in parkas and very small children giggling on the swings in the dark cold morning. 

And "green space" is not merely a technical, official designation here. Look! The first new leaves are opening in the shrubbery at the edge of the park.

The path along the canal is small and muddy, and busy with bicyclists and young runners and old walkers. (And how we do track in the mud at this season, in spite of the multiple shoe-cleaning mats that separate raw nature and the living room floor.) 

Last year's seedheads fluff out on the vines entangled in the waterside railing, ready for a strong spring wind to take the seeds.

Along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

The alders along the water are in bloom, hung with long catkins.

Alder catkins along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

How things grow here, how leafy it will be here in the summer, how green-smelling ... We aren't there yet, but the sky has gone all blue above the canal:

Wildenbruchstrasse bridge, February 2015. My photo.

This bright weather will not last, but we've been getting a couple of hours of it most days, between the early cloud and the late cloud. Or sometimes a couple of hours at day's end, when persistent clouds clear off. (Look, the evening star!)

It feels like a contention between winter and spring. It feels as if there ought to be an allegorical sculptural representation, The Strife of Winter and Spring, or The Triumph of Spring Over Winter, like those allegorical Baroque sculptures that work so uneasily on our modern tastes: the Triumph of Faith over Heresy (well-clothed female terrorizing old men who are falling back with their clothes flying off them, in the Church of the Gesù), Time Unveiling Truth (old geezer pulling the drapery off a young female, in various versions by minor sculptors for vanished princely gardens), Wisdom Trampling on Vice (slightly clothed female standing on … well, it isn’t quite clear: some shaggy beast, in the park at Tsarskoye Selo).

This kind of sculpture is no longer produced. It doesn't seem so interesting or inspiring nowadays to have our naked physical selves representing abstractions like Prudence or the Nation or Truth. We're perhaps more comfortable with having abstractions represent us. (I remember a fascinatingly 1900-ish fuss when John van Alstine's abstract sculpture, Funambulist, was installed near one of the Michigan State dorms in 2010 or so: there were quaint outcries against modern art, and it was vandalized multiple times, not just out of a casual urge to spray, but out of specific hatred for the sculpture. But the vandalism eased off over time, and a few years later, a student who lived in the dorm said something like: I really hated it at first, but I went past it every day, and it got to be like, This is me, this is how my life feels. I sort of liked seeing it. It's a big intellectual step, after all, to represent the self as something outside the self, something that can be examined at a little distance.)

Perhaps this is the problem with the large allegorical figures on the neo-Baroque Bismarck monument that I often pass on my after-lunch walks in Tiergarten: they aren't ways of stepping outside the self to look critically at it (as, in some ways, the traditional virtue-and-vice figures were--Is that figure of Prudence really me? Or am I Gluttony?). Here on the Bismarck monument we have a heavily clothed female representing the Wisdom of the State, looking into the Book of History; a heavily clothed female representing the Power of the State, trampling down the Leopard of Discord; a considerably less clothed Siegfried-at-the-forge, hammering out the Sword of Empire. (If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning.... An allegorical hammer, that was. It's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom. Or perhaps not, in this case.)

**

There is actually an allegorical Contention of Winter and Spring, but it's an eighth-century pastoral poem, not a Baroque sculpture group.  Winter and Spring debate over whether the cuckoo, the traditional European messenger of spring, should be allowed to come. A group of shepherds with Greek-pastoral-poetry names are to judge the debate. (What is this rather precious, nostalgic, urbanized poetic style doing at the barely literate court of Charlemagne??)

Winter: Let him not come, Cuckoo!  

For toil comes with him and he wakens wars, 

Breaks blessed quiet [armistices in the Ukraine!] and disturbs the world ...  

Spring: And what are you that throw your blame on him? 

That huddle sluggish in your half-lit caves 

After your feasts of Venus, bouts of Bacchus?  

Winter: Riches are mine [more real estate developments!] and joy of revelling,  

And sweet is sleep, the fire on the hearth stone. 

Nothing of these he knows, and does his treasons.  

Spring: Nay, but he brings the flowers in his bright bill, 

And he brings honey, nests are built for him. 

The sea is quiet for his journeying, 

Young ones begotten, and the fields are green.  

Winter: I like not these things which are joy to you. 

I like to count the gold heaped in my chests; 
And feast, and then to sleep, and then to sleep.   

**

Well, "then to sleep" doesn't sound bad, but the spring is coming regardless.     The trees grow regardless, gradually swallowing up the railing along the water.  (Some local wit has painted eyes on one of them to make a face ....)

Trees along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

The colored houses along the canal swim in the blue water.

Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, Feburary 2015. My photo.

Blue, blue--even the unloading-cranes are bright blue, as the canal becomes more industrial.

Crane on Ziegrastrasse, February 2015. My photo.

We've been past the power plant, around the sharp angle the water takes, headed toward the Teltowkanal. We're getting into a big junk and recycling stretch: scrap metal places, scrap paper places. Across the street are auto repair joints and a building where your rock band can rent space to practice full volume and do recordings. Then suddenly there is an enormous new hotel, glassy and slant-walled. 

Here we are at the Sonnenallee bridge, which used to be troubled by reckless drivers parking (and unparking) in the free center space between the lanes of fast heavy traffic on each side. What to do? Put little concrete pillars in the center space, so people can't park there .... Yes, but sweeten it a little bit. The pillars are blue and white like a summer sea and have a couple of large figures of swimmers rising above them, in front of the Brillux paint factory.

Sculpture, "Welle," by Eigidius Knops, Sonnenallee bridge, February 2015. My photo.

The Contention of Art and Parking, perhaps.

**

The eighth-century Contention of Winter and Spring ends with the shepherds deciding the debate in favor of spring and the cuckoo, unsurprisingly.

    Have done, have done, Winter, spendthrift and foul,
    And let the shepherd's friend, the cuckoo, come ...
    Green be our grazing, peace in the ploughed fields,
    Green branches give their shadow to tired men.


 And so the green branches will do, later, along the canal. 

Along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal. Photo, Andreas Haas, Wiki Commons.

**

The likelihood of getting farther on foot today, among the harbor and highway mess and the industry, is not high.  So, over the bridge to the Sonnenallee S-Bahn station, on a bright Neukölln street ... 

Corner of Sonnenallee and Saalestrasse, February 2015. My photo.

And so, home in the sunshine.

**

"Here is no abiding city ..." is from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. 
The Strife (or Contention) of Winter and Spring is by Alcuin; the translation is by Helen Waddell.

Teltowkanal 8

From Rip-Wolf to the Cement Works

This is the last of the winter. The February days dribble snow, and the basil on the kitchen windowsill huddles in its pot, looking depressed. Archangel, who checks the news and weather on his way out of bed in the morning, says unbelievingly: The weather forecast for today is "Dark."  Well, yes. 

This is also the last of the Teltowkanal--or strictly speaking, the first of it, since I've been walking upstream. Here the city dribbles out into chaotically half-built areas, reminiscent of those fringes of middling US cities where there are scattered little houses on outsize lots, lugubrious bars with no windows, and gun shops and places to get second-hand parts for your third-hand car.

My starting point today is not quite like that yet, however. The relevant U-Bahn station for this stretch is at the far corner of Gropiusstadt [see end of previous post]. The wall of highrises at my back here is a helpfully orienting object, like a small mountain range, when I come out of the unfamiliar station and can hardly tell one direction from another in the late-winter murk. 

Gropiusstadt isn't a slum, but it's a bit problematic. Somewhere I read a piece that used the following item as an indicator for Gropiusstadt's not being quite there yet, socioeconomically speaking. (Try using this question to test the okayness of your own neighborhood.) The question is: Does your neighborhood have rush hours on the public transit?  

The writer of the piece noted, with something between startlement and horror, that the U-Bahn stations in Gropiusstadt were quite busy for a couple of hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening, and then the rest of the time they weren't busy. What an uncomfortable and undesirable thing, thought the writer of the piece. What an un-Berlin kind of thing. (When have I seen the trains busiest on the Stadtbahn, the backbone of the Berlin transit system? The rush hour is not obvious. Summer Sunday evenings when people are coming home from the woods? Saturday nights when the young are headed for the clubs? Weekday midafternoons when the kids get out of school?) 

The idea of this criterion is that a real neighborhood is multi-purpose (and life is multi-purpose), and therefore people are coming from the neighborhood and going to it in all directions at all hours of the waking day and night. The  neighborhood is not just a place where people are warehoused in their (rigidly designated) off-work hours. (Ah, this was the great mistake of the modernist city-planners in the twentieth century. They were right about Light! Air! Sunshine! [see previous post] But they were wrong about functional separation: the idea that residential and commercial and industrial areas should be quite separate, all sealed off from each other. Terrible idea.) 

So Gropiusstadt is a bit too residential-warehouse-like, and some of the industry down here has an un-integrated look as well. History has been rather hard on the area. Having left Gropiusstadt half a mile or so behind, I am in Rudow, which in Cold War days was the last little dangling southeastern bit of West Berlin, surrounded on three sides by the East. The roads stopped here, the rails stopped here, people didn't come here much. Now people pass through, without stopping, along the new freeway that goes down to the nonusable new airport (and on south to Saxony). The place has a semi-coherent, semi-existent sort of feel.

Beyond the bridge where I quit last time, I have a choice of routes. I could cross to the other side of the canal, to a bicycle path that runs narrowly between the water and the freeway fence (and cyclists complain on the web about doddering old pedestrians getting in their way when they're zinging along in eighteenth gear). Or I could stay on this side, on Canalstrasse, where I will see the front of the industry that backs on the canal. Or maybe the back of the industry that fronts on the canal. 

Well, Canalstrasse for me: I don't want to breathe auto exhaust for the next hour, and industry is fun, at least sometimes. The industrial strip along the canal, close to the new freeway, looks fairly flourishing. This is good.

The older buildings--refitted and in use--are dignified with red brick and formal design features: the medallion in the gable, the symmetrical window placement, the brick relief panels between the windows. Newer buildings on the street have a form-follows-function character; here, in an expiring breath of classicism, form still follows rules.

On Canalstrasse, Rudow. February 2015. My photo.

Much of the street is occupied with little recent-ish business parks with room for six or eight firms, mostly of a metal-bashing or building-related nature. There are also bigger outfits that have whole building complexes to themselves: roofers, tile-layers, firms that do environmental cleanup, a firm that puts coatings on things. 

There is a sizable-looking firm called Rip-Wolf that will destroy data for you, in either paper or electronic form. (Okay, I know that Rip-Wolf (Reisswolf) is just the German word for shredder, but the English cognate makes an excellent word, and the firm logo does have a wolf-head on it.)   

I am not sure what the people with the bright yellow shed do, other than provide interesting streetscape. (How I love the (unclassical) form of this, the tower with the loader that goes back to the canal, and then the deep-lemon shed that livens up the monochrome of the winter street.)

On Canalstrasse, February 2015. My photo.

**

Canalstrasse is not long, and the trick will be finding a place to get under the highway and back to the water when the street comes to an end. This is straightforward enough if you go down to the next substantial street, but that's somewhat out of the way, and according to one map there is a footpath shortcut that stays closer to the water. According to other maps there is no such thing, but let us travel hopefully.

The shortcut appears to go through a large Mercedes truck dealership. I feel awkward--do I look like a customer for large Mercedes trucks? But I can see the highway up there, and it looks as though there is really an underpass. 

Yes.  I have made it through the endless lines of vehicles for sale without being challenged by salesmen or run down by customers, and here we go under the highway. We are crossing from the last of the old West to the old East, from Rudow to Altglienicke. 

Some of the territory on this side is still a bit unreconstructed-East, broken-windowed in the winter cold.

On Rudowerstrasse, east of highway, February 2015. My photo.

Once under the highway, I turn north, back toward the water. And here is the reconstructed East, with awkwardly scattered new housing and a very large plastic palm tree in someone's yard.

Am Bruchland, February 2015. My photo.

Well, well.  Here, just by the plastic palm, we are at the water at last. Not beautiful, but I do want to record the achievement of getting to the waterside again:

Teltowkanal, Altglienicke, February 2015. My photo.

I disturb a heron fishing in the canal, who flies off with angry cries. The herons in center city are not so shy, but there's no one out on foot in these parts, and the herons are unused to company. 

You couldn't tell from this stretch, but there is actually a long history of settlement in this part of Berlin. There are remnants of Bronze Age hearths. There was a Germanic tribe here in Roman times, and Slavic settlers later, and then Germans again. The name of the village in the Middle Ages was Glinik, from the Slavic word glina.

Glina means mud. Yes. The street looks relatively respectable in the picture below, but in some places there are iced-over potholes in which you could lose a small motorcycle. 

Am Bruchland, Altglienicke, February 2015. My photo.

How desolate these little streets with their separate houses are ...  And presently we plunge into a stretch of Kleingärten. But these are a bit different from their counterparts on the west side of the highway, where the garden-associations have names like Harmony and Edelweiss. Here they have names like Luna Park and Land Reform, and the garden-houses are sometimes more makeshift:

Kleingarten along Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

Or kitsch run wild:

Kleingarten along Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

**

We come to the Altglienicke Bridge over the canal, which is a sad mess. It was blown up in April of 1945; a few years later, the pieces of the bridge were lifted out and put together again in a makeshift sort of way that kept having to be patched up in the subsequent decades. In 1995 a temporary bridge was put in nearby, to carry the traffic while the old bridge was either replaced or rebuilt properly. 

"But then," says an Altglienicke website, in an absolutely classic Berlin-building-project sentence, "suddenly there was no more money." Doch dann war plötzlich kein Geld mehr da. (Oooh, that's the end of so many stories here--or at least it's a long pause in the story.) The temporary bridge turned out to have been placed too low to let the biggest canal-freighters through, so money was scrabbled together to raise it a couple of feet. By now the temporary bridge has started to go through a close-patch-reopen cycle like the old bridge--since, in twenty years, the project to put in a solid permanent structure has never moved forward. 

Construction debris lies here and there along the water. (Agh, why are some construction projects such long-running farces here? Others go well enough.)

Near Altglienicker Brücke, February 2015. My photo.

The next bridge pair carries the Adlergestell, the "eagles' path through the woods"--the longest street in Berlin--and the railroad that runs beside it. Under the bridges the good Brandenburg sand of the path is ankle-deep. What is to be done for bicyclists, who would sink to a dead stop into this? Pave the path? Naah. Lay matting across the sand--and this sort of works, as I see from the progress of the bicyclist up ahead of me. (I squelch happily through the deep sand; I like sand-walking.)

**

On the other side of the Adlergestell we are suddenly in a different world--and a different sub-district too, having left Altglienicke behind and entered Grünau. Instead of "old mud" we have "green meadow"--a place-name given hopefully by the Rhinelanders who were settled here as immigrants in the eighteenth century and thought they could turn the banks of the Dahme into a wine-growing region. (Not a chance, folks.)

Although the Dahme does not warm its banks enough to support wine-growing, it has other uses. We are not far from the so-called regatta stretch of the river, which was the site for the canoeing and rowing events in the 1936 Olympics and is still a moderately busy boat-race site in the summer. The opposite bank of the canal for the next kilometer or so is nothing but boat storage.

Boat storage along Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

How winter-dreamy this all is. Everything here is stopped, wrapped up, asleep, waiting for summer. Boats are parked in the water, on the shore, back among the trees--looking, at times, as if they had floated up in high water and stranded among the branches.

Boat storage along Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

I'm counting bridges. This is the Outer Ring railway bridge, the fifty-fifth of the fifty-six bridges over the Teltowkanal. 

Railway bridge, east end of Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

Now that we are out of the fragmented provisorium of Altglienicke, there is actually a bench by the water. Not something I have seen for miles of messy, confusedly privatized waterside:

Near end of Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

If it was not absolutely freezing outdoors, I could sit here and have some lunch and read Kierkegaard and admire the cement plant across the water. I like cement plants, though this one is terribly melancholy-looking compared to the one up on the Spree, not so far away [see Spree 6 post, June 2014]. 

Cement plant, Teltowkanal, February 2015. My photo.

This one looks rather like a prison, in fact.


But here we are at the last bridge. Here is the water-junction, where the canal meets the Dahme, that fat water-street that laps against the boat-builders' sheds on Regattastrasse and carries traffic from Berlin to Poland and the Baltic. 

Teltowkanal - Dahme junction, from Grünauer Brücke, February 2015. My photo.

Bleak and Februarized as it can be. But there is a gently clattering streetcar crossing the bridge, pausing at the nearest halt (named, reasonably, Cement Works)--and I see that this line is the wonderful number 68, that runs down to Alt-Schmöckwitz, a remote corner of Berlin on a sort of peninsula where the Dahme sprawls out into lakes. 

I adore the 68. It runs more or less parallel to the Dahme, and for some way it runs through the forest--no street, just the poky little tram humming through the trees, with properly signed and scheduled stops in places where you would hardly expect anyone but a wild boar to be waiting.

Well, when the leaves start coming out, we will walk down through the woods along the river to Alt-Schmöckwitz, and then we will take the 68 back again.

Now it's time to get to the S-Bahn and go home to where the city is more solid. Time to wake up the cat, toast myself against the living-room radiator, and enjoy the last outburst of bloom from my Christmas amaryllis, before the spring gets under way.

Amaryllis and cat, February 2015. Photo, M. Seadle.