Teltowkanal 7

The Beautiful Junkyard Across From the Marzipan Factory

Late January morning. Back to the Blaschkoallee U-Bahn stop with the midsummer-daydream pictures on the station walls:

U-Bahn station wall, Blaschkoallee, January 2015. My photo.

This looks like a picture of Schloss Britz, which is not far from the station. When the winter is over I must get Archangel to come down here and explore. 

And perhaps we would walk to the south side of the neighborhood too, to the Britzer Garten. Perhaps in tulip time. 

Britzer Garten, tulips. Photo, Wiki Commons.

In the Britzer Garten there is a cafe with a sort of micro-library in it and an outdoor terrace on the edge of a lake, where I once spent a summer afternoon working out a theoretical problem in statistics. (Nothing very complicated: Archangel can do proofs of this sort in his head, but I can't get through them without making little numerical examples and waving my fingers.) 

This is still my picture of a kind of paradise of leisure and freedom: to sit outdoors on a perfect summer day, by the water, under the trees, in a garden, learning math that it not terribly urgent for me to know. (Math is not something I am very good at, any more than I am good at gardening: but how beautiful they are, the theorems and the tulip-beds.) And how is it that we do not get to our paradises of leisure and freedom? The last time I was at the Britzer Garten was seven years ago. But this summer, perhaps.

**

Last time I was down here for a canal walk I was in the end stages of a bad cold and I wasn't paying attention any more by the time I got to the U-Bahn station. But this time, being more alert, I saw that there was something excessively pink looming up just behind the station entrance:

At Blaschkoallee U-Bahn Station, January 2015. My photo.

So I got sidetracked. I should have gone east to the canal, but I wandered off to the west to see what was on the other side of the station. It was a handsome line of apartments, but I couldn't seem to get the right angle for a photo without falling into the garbage dumpsters or otherwise embarrassing myself; so I am borrowing someone else's photo from a mellower time of year.

On Fritz-Reuter-Allee. Photo by Mangan2002, Wiki Commons.

Well, this is rather nice, I thought. So then what happens if we go to the next street? 

More wonderful color.

On Liningstraße, January 2015. My photo.

This has to be Bruno Taut, I say to myself--the advocate of strong color in architecture. How good these places make me feel. (Sing and shout, it's Bruno Taut!) 

If I had had a better grip on where I was, I would have realized that I was up on the north edge of the Hufeisensiedlung, Taut's greatest Berlin project. I hadn't realized the Siedlung stretched up this far. This is just the trailing edge, not the main part.

How would we translate Siedlung into American English? "Housing project" isn't right because it sounds like a dump, and Siedlungen aren't dumps. "Housing development" isn't quite right, because that sounds commercial and the great Berlin (and Vienna) Siedlungen like this one were not commercial ventures. 

The translation problem works the other way too. I have been reading a German dissertation about post-World-War-II city planning, which uses the term Siedlung indifferently for the worst housing projects in the US--places that have been dynamited out of existence like Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis and Mill Creek in Philadelphia--and for places like Reston, Virginia, that land up on "Ten Best Places to Live" lists. In English there are separate words for these separate types of places, but not in German. (No term has been created here for "planned, state-subsidized slum." Guess why.) [Regina Fiorito, Wohnsiedlungsarchitektur der 60er Jahre in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika und Deutschland - Eine vergleichende Untersuchung. Universität Köln, 1999]

Not that Berlin did not have slums. The population of Berlin quadrupled in the last half of the nineteenth century--it was the most populous city in the world after London and New York then--and housing construction did not keep pace. It was, in part, a capital-allocation problem: when new industries were booming, and new workers coming in by the tens of thousands, capital flowed to the lucrative new industries and not so much to construction, which offered lower returns. It was only in slack times for other industries that it was attractive to put your money into construction. So when the need for housing was greatest, the supply was slow to respond. [Renate Banik-Schweitzer Wohnverhältnisse in Berlin, Wien und Budapest um die Wende zum 20. Jahrhundert, Siedlungsforschung. Archäologie-Geschichte-Geographie 5, 1987, S. 177-204.]

Here our introductory economics text will say: Ah, but then because housing is in such high demand and short supply, rents will rise (Berlin has always been a renters' city). Returns on construction will therefore rise and soon there will be enough housing. This works well enough for the people who have the money to pay higher rents, and indeed, substantial portions of Berlin were built on these terms. But then, there were also many people who did not have the money to pay higher rents. For them there were other solutions that I do not recall appearing often in introductory economics texts. One was to crowd more people into the same space--and although the resulting conditions would kill some of them, it would not kill enough of them, fast enough, to endanger the labor supply seriously. As this solution did not commend itself to everyone, there was also some growth in not-for-profit housing of various kinds.

Cooperative housing expanded in Berlin toward the end of the nineteenth century. Big firms kicked in capital for co-ops for their workers, unions assembled funds for their own co-ops, and the state helped out: the German national pension and disability-insurance system, founded in the later nineteenth century, invested some of its funds in providing long-term low-interest loans to the co-ops. The co-ops still make up about 10% of the Berlin housing supply--not a lot, and they aren't grand places, but they do help. 

(They don't work like US co-ops: you don't buy your apartment at the market rate--since, after all, part of the purpose of these organizations was to take housing out of the speculative asset markets. Instead you pay a small one-time entry fee and then a modest amount for the shares that that entitle you to a specific apartment. In what I believe is the biggest co-op in Berlin, the current entry fee is 110 euros, and the shares cost 160 euros per 5 square meters. So a place the size of our apartment would cost about 2400 euros to buy into. Then you pay a monthly fee that covers your share of the costs of running the place--substantially less than commercial rents.)

Of course there weren't anything like enough co-ops for everyone who couldn't afford a for-profit apartment, and not everyone could scare up the historical equivalent of even a couple of thousand euros to get in. At the end of the First World War almost another quarter-million people crowded into the city, displaced by post-war boundary shifts. A one-room apartment with a kitchen counted as overcrowded in Berlin only if more than four people lived in it. [Hufeisensiedlung, German Wikipedia] 

The poorest neighborhoods were packed deathtraps, breeding-grounds for tuberculosis, typhoid, and the like. When Käthe Kollwitz came to Berlin from Königsberg with her husband in the 1890s, he set up a medical practice in such a neighborhood, and you can see from the prints and drawings in the Kollwitz-Museum in Berlin what it looked like: the parents with dead children, the children with dead parents. Not really better in 1920 than in, say, 1895, when the Kollwitzes were young.

Käthe Kollwitz, Mother with dead child.

But by 1920 other young professional people had also come from Königsberg to Berlin. (Ah, Königsberg, the capital of Prussia, where Immanuel Kant lived nearly all his life, revolutionizing European philosophy, having guests at his dinner table every day and telling them jokes because laughter is good for the digestion and you aren't going to get through the work that it is your duty to do in the world without a good digestion. Königsberg, where the Electors of Brandenburg declared themselves kings of Prussia (safely outside the bounds of the Empire, within which they could not have declared themselves kings without the Emperor's permission). Do people come to Berlin from there now? Perhaps. Now it's called Kaliningrad: a Russian exclave in Poland, living--not so well--by smuggling and black-marketeering and prostitution and a bit of Kant-tourism. "The Calcutta of the North," a German newspaper calls it. ["Der gute Deutsche von Kaliningrad," Süddeutsche Zeitung 17 May 2010])

Here is young Bruno Taut, lately come from Königsberg and about to set up his own architectural office in Berlin with his new friend Franz Hoffmann. Bruno's younger brother Max would join them a few years later.

Bruno Taut, 1910. Photo, Wiki Commons.

The new architecture firm has its ups and downs. In the war, Hoffmann lands in the army, but manages to survive. Bruno Taut (does this asthmatic little man look like soldier material?) supervises the construction of a powder factory and writes an anti-war manifesto. (Käthe Kollwitz creates devastating anti-war prints.)  

Architecture jobs are not so easy to come by in the economically shaky years after the war. To keep afloat, Taut does theater designs; he takes time to theorize about building and city-planning. He designs an attendant's hut for an exposition in Magdeburg; it isn't built, but the plans are published and a version is built, years later, as a house for a writer in the artist's colony at Worpswede, outside Bremen. People like it; they call it the "Worpswede cheese cover."

The "Worpswede cheese cover." House by B. Taut.

Well, I dearly love Bruno Taut, who arguably was the great artist in building the Berlin Siedlungen, but equal honors should probably go to Martin Wagner, the organizer. Who lights candles for great bureaucrats, who leaves roses on their graves? People should. Wagner, who came from Königsberg to Berlin at about the same time as the Tauts, half a generation or so after the Kollwitzes, was one of those people who has "committee chair" stamped on his forehead in letters that other organizationally competent people can read. (He was also an architect, but it was probably more important that he was someone who made things happen--a Gestalter, the Germans say.)

Wagner founded and led an organization of union-related housing cooperatives, the Association of Social Construction Firms. He was the head of a housing-related offshoot of the socialist German unions, the Imperial (later German) Housing Aid Society for Civil Servant, Employee and Worker Homes. (One doesn't say long thumping names like this in German. All the long names have their pronounceable acronyms: the housing aid society was first REWOG, later DEWOG.) It was made up of local branch organizations: the Berlin branch was GEHAG, the Nonprofit Home, Savings, and Construction Corporation. Which still exists, after a fashion.

The Hufeisensiedlung here in Britz was a joint project of Taut and Wagner, of GEHAG and the city of Berlin--of which, by 1926, Wagner was the city building officer. Like most people with "committee chair" stamped on their foreheads, he knew that you have to be able to finance your ideas, and that you have to be persistent. In 1916 he had started to call for a tax on real estate to fund more low-income building; after eight years of persistence he finally got it. (The hyperinflation of the early 1920s had wiped out the debt of people who had borrowed money earlier to acquire income-producing property; by 1924 there was some public feeling that these folks should share their windfall.) For the next eight years there was a tremendous wave of nonprofit, state-subsidized building, paid for by the new tax and designed by great architects like Taut and Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe and Hans Scharoun. (Scharoun is not so much of a name in the US, but you can't miss him in Berlin.)

Berliner Philharmonie, by Hans Scharoun. Photo, Manfred Brückels, Wiki Commons.

So a lot was built, in Berlin and elsewhere, during the "house tax era," as it is sometimes called. Decent housing, mostly apartments, some row houses. Plain, handsome, well-built, safe, full of "Light! Air! Sunshine!" as the architects' battle-cry went.

All this ended badly. When the Nazis came to power, they started taking the house tax revenues for other purposes. In 1943 they demanded that owners buy themselves out of the tax by paying ten years' worth of the tax at once; it was an important contribution to the financing of the war. 

Long before this, Wagner and the Tauts and their friends were in trouble. Hitler's first priority was not the economy or the military, it was the arts. He became chancellor at the end of January, 1933, and cleared his artistic enemies out of the academies and universities before doing almost anything else. In February, Käthe Kollwitz and Bruno Taut were booted out of the Academy of the Arts in Berlin, and Wagner quit the Academy in protest. In March he lost his job with the city; Taut was removed from his technical-university professorship; they were essentially unemployable in Germany.

Like many intellectual and political figures in trouble with the Nazis, Wagner and Taut ended up in Turkey. (Turkey was full of Germans before Germany was full of Turks--it's a long-standing connection. Paul Hindemith founded the music conservatory in Ankara; Ernst Reuter--later the mayor of Berlin, the man who pulled it through the angst-producing days of the early Cold War--worked for the Turkish government in the 1930s, re-organizing the railroad price system, and teaching city planning to aspiring Turkish bureaucrats.) 

Martin Wagner worked for a few years in city planning in Istanbul; Bruno Taut was a professor of architecture there and designed university and school buildings. (Brother Max lay low in a small Brandenburg town with his in-laws; he had married the daughter of the local innkeeper and blacksmith. Bruno had married the other daughter, but it hadn't lasted so well.)

In 1938, the last year before the war, Wagner got out to the US, to a professorship at Harvard. One of nature's committee chairs, one of nature's Harvard professors: it's that writing on the forehead. Perhaps something might have been arranged in the US for Bruno Taut as well, but before year-end he was dead, killed by an asthma attack on Christmas Eve. (The great advocate of Light! Air! Sunshine! suffocating in the winter dark of a strange city.) 

They seem to have liked Taut in Istanbul. He was the first (and perhaps still the only?) foreigner and non-Muslim to receive the honor of burial in the Edirnekapi Martyrs' Cemetery in Istanbul. (Where tradition says the fallen soldiers of 1453 were buried--the ones who captured Constantinople for the Turks and put an end to the Byzantine Empire. But the tradition may not be true.) 

In Britz, the stretches of intensely blue houses alternate with stretches of red and yellow houses, picking up their bit of Light! Air! Sunshine! in the gray January morning.

On Liningstraße, January 2015. My photo.

I must come back, in the spring, and explore properly. But this is not spring, and this is not the direction in which the Teltowkanal lies, so let's backtrack a bit, back to the U-Bahn station and back along ugly Späthstrasse ...

Here we have a five-foot high hot dog pouring ketchup on itself, wrapped in the American flag, advertising a snack joint down the street.

Hot dog ad on Späthstraße, January 2015. My photo.

But we mustn't give up on streets--this one gets more interesting further on.

Here is a fine sort of neo-Romanesque auto repair place. (These folks had a post on Facebook last year: "Today is Valentine's Day, give your sweetheart something really different, like an auto inspection.")

Auto repair shop. Späthstraße, January 2015. My photo.

And then comes a marzipan factory, floating a pleasant faint almond-paste fragrance into the winter morning.  Across from it is a junkyard with the most wonderful fence, perhaps inspired by the neighborhood colors. (The firm will dismantle your old assembly lines or elevators or heating systems: "clean, punctual, and conscientious," says the advertisement. Dear junkyard, thank you for the beautiful fence, say I.)

Beller Dismantling, Old Metal, and Scrap, Späthstraße, January 2015. My photo.

And here we are at the water, at last, in its winter dimness.

Teltowkanal, Britz, January 2015. My photo.

The fence on the other side of the water (which you can barely see) in the background is screening a freeway; on this side of the water is a long stretch of Kleingärten, very dead in the winter. Though you can smell smoke--people with woodstoves burning in their little garden-houses, or possibly a bit of illegal bonfire somewhere--and there are a few people out, already doing end-of-winter cleanup. (It will snow again, of course, but you might as well get a start on the spring work.)

The garden associations have names like Harmony and Peace Garden and Edelweiss. There are posters on the fences and the canal-side trees announcing that the Edelweiss canteen is having an Eisbeinessen, a ham-hock feed, on the weekend. You really have to be German to go for Eisbein, I think (also called Schweinshaxe): we won a canned version in a Christmas charity raffle this year, and we haven't brought ourselves to open the can yet.

Eisbein/ Schweinshaxe at Schweizerhaus, Vienna. Photo, Clemens Pfeiffer, Wiki Commons.

**

Walking along the back of the Kleingärten isn't as boring as I was afraid it would be. The bones of the trees stand out at this season: it's a fine day for tree-structure. There are willows:

Along Teltowkanal, January 2015. My photo.

Oaks, I think--young ones, without the massive horizontality they will have later:

Along Teltowkanal, January 2015. My photo.

A birch tree, filigree-fine against the winter cloud.

Along Teltowkanal, January 2015. My photo.

I stop at the Massantebrücke (number 47 on the list of bridges over the Teltowkanal--and there are only 52 altogether, so we're getting close to the end). No more path on this side of the canal, according to the map. It's time to head home again: I'm doing short stretches on these chilly January days. 

I pick up a bus which will go to an U-Bahn station, and which also turns out to provide a tour of the east side of Gropiusstadt, the huge 1960s-70s development on the southern edge of Berlin. 

This was intended, at least in some views, as an extension, a bigger version, of Bruno Taut's and Martin Wagner's project in Britz. But Gropiusstadt got sort of out of hand. 

Gropiusstadt. Photo by Photocapy, Wiki Commons.

It's a vast place, almost nineteen thousand apartments. Walter Gropius himself drew up the initial plans but died before it was finished, and the realized version does not bear so much resemblance to the plans. The city, anxious about its lack of expansion room after the Wall went up, added buildings and subtracted green space. GEHAG, which had built Taut and Wagner's Hufeisensiedlung and was now a city-owned corporation, had responsibility for a big chunk of the building. 

GEHAG still owns and operates portions of the Hufeisensiedlung and Gropiusstadt. But it's not a nonprofit any more. It was privatized in 1998, bought by an American mutual fund and a German bank in 2005, and flipped to a publicly traded German company in 2007. Not a great moment to acquire real estate. We will hope this all works out. (Rest in peace, Bruno Taut.)

**

Martin Wagner came back to Germany once for a postwar visit and hated it. He wasn't just being a cranky old man. He and the Tauts had imagined beautiful, humane, well-built cities; and in the (necessary) rush to rebuild after the war, much that went up was ugly and brutal and poorly made. And it would block the streets for generations; the lost opportunity was a bitter thing for him.

Wagner's last piece of writing, finished just before he died in 1957, was a polemic against the neighborhood where we live, which was then on the drawing board. The planning was too expensive, it didn't really correspond to current social needs, Wagner said. Possibly true. But, well, it was an available opportunity, it was better than leaving the neighborhood lying in ashes, as it still was, fourteen years after it had been bombed flat. Others of the old Siedlung-planning crowd--Walter Gropius, Max Taut--were contributing buildings to the neighborhood.

And it's not so bad, Herr Wagner. It doesn't catch at the heart like the best of Bruno Taut's work. But we do have Light! Air! Sunshine!--no north-facing apartments here, the architects were very careful about this--and a bit of color here and there in the buildings, and room for the linden trees that will knock your head back with fragrance in the early summer. The neighborhood holds as many people as it did in its pre-war version and has three times the green space that it did before. (Neatly done, planners!)

The neighborhood sort of melts into the northern edge of Tiergarten: our street runs like a river of trees into the sea of trees to the south. If I go out of our front door, past the not very attractive Max Taut house across the street and then past the Academy of the Arts, I come to a sheltered spot in the park where the snowdrops are almost ready to open, and the winter aconite buds are fat and yellow and would be ready to burst if the sun were ever to come out again--which looks like a long shot at the moment. (Fog, says the forecast for today. Fog, says the forecast for tomorrow. Cloud, says the forecast for the day after that.)