Grunewald Lakes 2

A Little Water in Villa-land

February was time for some disorderly late-winter wanderings through the lake- and fen-land in southwestern Berlin, in the long glacial scoop-out that runs down the side of the city. This is not so much "walk by the water" as "walk some considerable distance from the water because the shores are private property"--but it's an interesting neighborhood.

Today we're working along part of the little tributary valley that runs east-west to meet the north-south valley of the main Grunewald lake-chain. We start at Heidelberger Platz, about halfway along the little tributary: the streetier half of it is better for today, in the wet and cold, and we'll do the parkier half when it's really spring. 

The U-Bahn station at Heidelberger Platz is more than a little grand:

Heidelberger Platz U-Bahn station.
Photo, Stadtlichtpunkte, Wiki Commons.

We are getting down toward grand-land here, toward the old Nobelviertel with the ambassadors' residences and such. We aren't quite there yet, but already here at the station there's a flavor of the manic historicism of 1900-ish building in these parts. (Let us build big Roman railroad stations! Let us build big Byzantine banks, let us build big Venetian villas!) 

Here are the gates at the foot of the stairs, as we leave the station and head up into the late-winter drizzle:

Heidelberger Platz station gates. February 2016, my photo.

Well, I do like some ornament in the subway (and other places). I like the exuberant joy of technical skill that you see in the architecture here: Look what we can do with iron!  Look what we can do with stone, with glass, with plasterwork! 

The historicist architects who built this kind of thing in Berlin in the half-century or so before World War I don't get a lot of love in more recent times. Who even knows, these days, who Franz Schwechten was, let alone who Wilhelm Leitgebel was? These are lost names. (And there are some good reasons for not admiring them. There's too much bloat in the buildings--they're big lumpy swaggering things that no longer strike us as beautiful). But these people gave a certain feel and flavor to the city: Berlin without fat historicism would be like curry without coriander. 

Leitgebel built this U-Bahn station at Heidelberger Platz, and built the next one as well, Rüdesheimer Platz, also with ornate iron gates, just before the First World War. 

Ironwork at U-Bahn station Rüdesheimer Platz. Photo, JCornelius, Wiki Commons.

The war pretty much put an end to the lush replication of historical styles in architecture in these parts. It also pretty much put an end to ornament (especially naturalistic ornament) on buildings. Starkness and abstraction set in. (Does this really make sense? Slaughtering fifteen or twenty million people means that we can't represent vegetation in the subway stations any more?)

It's partly guilt by association, of course. Fat historicism was the dominant style of the dominating class in Germany before the war, and these folks seemed utterly bankrupt--politically and intellectually and artistically as well as economically--by 1919.  'Tis well that an old age is out,/ And time to begin a new, as people always say after slaughters. (The lines are Dryden's celebration of the end of the murderous seventeenth century.) Time for white concrete cubes and the like, in the streetscape. 

The guilt by association isn't entirely unfair. Fat historicism kept some bad company in Germany. Gothic revival, for example, gets carried along on different political currents here than in the Anglo-American world. English neogothic architecture carries with it a breath of Ruskin's and Morris's utopian socialism; model workers' housing in England can be neogothic. But socialist neogothic is not so likely here, where medieval architectural styles were kidnapped by aggressive, conservative nationalism. 

Here at Heidelberger Platz we're on the edge of a neighborhood called the Rheingauviertel, named for the Rheingau wine region in Hesse; the street and square names are names of villages with well-known vineyards. (If you're a Riesling drinker, the names should sound familiar: Rüdesheim, Johannisberg). This is not altogether about innocent joy in good wine, however. I think that the (numerous) quarters in Berlin that were developed in the later nineteenth century and named for other parts of Germany were in part declarations of national connectedness, declarations that Berlin was the capital of all these places. (Not an uncontroversial statement, in the days when Germany as a national state was new.) 

Thus there's some nationalist aggressiveness stirred into the good wine; and especially as we get closer to the turn of the century, the historicist style gets to be kind of a bad drunk. (It's loud and rude, it talks tastelessly about money and power.)

You can sort of get the tone of the time from looking at Franz Schwechten, who was a big-time historicist architect in Berlin in the decades before WW I. A bit overbearing in style, perhaps. 

Franz Schwechten, about 1895. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Schwechten, whose name is largely forgotten these days, built major Berlin landmarks. He built the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtnis-Kirche, the church on Kurfürstendamm that was left as an iconic semi-ruin after WW II, as a warning against wars. He built the dopey tower in Grunewald in honor of Wilhelm I (see Havel 4 post from last summer). He built the ex-brewery in Prenzlauer Berg, the Kulturbrauerei, that in these days is stuffed with clubs and theaters and such and is a big gathering-place for the young. Schwechten also built the wildly Gothic part of our local power plant in Moabit (see Berlin-Spandauer Schiffahrtskanal 2 post). (Don't you feel that your neighborhood power plant needs a Gothic turret or two?)  

Ah well, up the steps we go from the U-Bahn station, to the more brutal beauties of the postwar city. (I love the Berlin power plants, including ones like this--but surely the freeways are esthetically unredeemable?)

Kraftwerk Berlin-Wilmersdorf and highway. Photo, Dieter Brügmann, Wiki Commons.

Then we are past the freeway, into one of those non-grand little scraggles of city that are left over from highway-building, like scraps of fabric left when you've cut out an odd shape like a sleeve or a collar from a length of fabric. 

Here is vacant land, fenced-off land of uncertain uses. Among the simpler graffiti someone has painted a woman with a bandage over her mouth and the legend, "She does not have the courage of her opinions."

Near Heidelberger Platz.  February 2016, my photo.

Well, me either, much of the time. 

In the course of development, some stretches of the tunnel valleys out here were drained and filled in, while others were deepened to gather the waters and turn them from seasonal damp spots to year-round lakes. Here is an oddity, an apparently unnamed, somewhat seasonal pool, an unreconstructed stretch of low ground along Forckenbeckstrasse that collects excess water when there are heavy rains. It stands behind the big Wilmersdorf Secondary School, in a way that is in principle handsome ....

Wilmersdorfer Sekundarschule and pond, Forckenbeckstrasse.  February 2016, my photo.

... but mein Gott, this place is filthy. How trash-strewn the water's edge is, what dubious and rotting objects float in the water. Where is Max von Forckenbeck when we need him?  

He gets a street named after him because he was the Oberbürgermeister of Berlin for fourteen years, beginning in 1878, and would have held the office longer if he had not died of pneumonia in 1892. Berlin was in its wild weedy industrial growth period then, with more people coming in from the poor countryside than the city could hold; insanitary shantytowns were crammed into the dank edges of the city. (Think Rio, think Delhi, though on a smaller scale.) Forckenbeck built sewers and schools, and transit and clean water supply and park space, and more sewers and more schools and more transit, and did it without making a mess of the city finances. A good man, Forckenbeck. 

As we go round the west end of this body of water, this rotting corpse of water, the path through the trees climbs toward something dark and angular:

Path to back of Kreuzkirche. February 2016, my photo.

It looks a little grim on such a shadowy winter day (terrible day for taking pictures, there's no light). But here's our alternative to historicist architecture, before classic modernism--the real white-cube stuff--comes along. This is Expressionist architecture, north-German brick Expressionism, which I had no idea existed until I started wandering around Berlin. (I thought Expressionism was all angry periodicals put together by young men and given titles like Storm and Action; I thought it was poems that invoke the end of the world ("the hat flies off the bourgeois's pointy head ... the trains fall off the bridges"), and Edvard Munch painting The Scream, and Alban Berg writing sex-death-and-dissonance operas.  But an Expressionist church building?? This was news.)

I think the first time Archangel and I seriously paid attention to this kind of building was several years ago when we were in Hannover and fell somewhat in love with the Anzeiger Hochhaus, a 1920s newspaper building that was one of the first high-rises in Germany and has a terrific street-presence.  

Here's a bit of the Anzeiger Hochhaus, with the dramatic outlines and the dark, prickly, twisting brickwork that is characteristic of these buildings.

Anzeiger Hochhaus, Hannover. Photo, Carl Dransfeld,
between 1928 and 1938.Wiki Commons.

And here's the Kreuzkirche in Berlin, as we sneak up on it from behind, from the rotten pond. Also some dramatic shapes and zippy brickwork:

Kreuzkirche, Berlin-Wilmersdorf. Photo, Manfred Brückels, Wiki Commons.

The Expressionists liked distortions and startlements, and we get one as we come around to the front of the church here. It has a blue majolica, somewhat pagoda-like entryway, where I shelter for a while from the increasing rain. 

Kreuzkirche entryway. Photo, Mutter Erde, Wiki Commons.

There's a dubious smell about a lot of the Expressionist work, as there is about the pond we have just passed. Fritz Höger, who was officially the architect of the Anzeiger Hochhaus in Hannover, got into various problems for plagiarism, including for the Hannover building, which is over-dependent on the design of an unsuccessful rival for the commission. Höger also is the nominal architect of a very striking Expressionist church in this neighborhood (Hohenzollernplatz) which is said to have been mostly designed by his junior in the office, Ossip Klarwein. (Klarwein was a Polish Jew whom Höger--an early and sincere Nazi--fired for being Jewish already in 1932, before there was any pressure to do so, since the Nazis were not yet in power. Klarwein had the good sense to get out to Palestine before worse things happened.) 

Some of the other Expressionists, painters and poets (Emil Nolde, Gottfried Benn), were enthusiastic Nazis as well. Nazism appealed to their anti-modernism, their hatred of cities and machines; it appealed to their taste for violent feelings, their glorification of the manly Nordic world. After an initial flirtation with Expressionism, however, the Nazis didn't love them back; the Party sold off or burned their paintings and burned their books. The Nazis mostly left the architecture alone, however. (After all, it's harder to change or destroy a building than to burn a painting.)

... But dear me, we've wandered a little out of the straight path to the lakes here. (Getting past the freeway, being distracted by this and that, being reluctant to pull out the map to get it wet in this drizzle.)  Here we are at Grieser Platz, which is a little farther north than we want to be.

Europa macht Handstand, sculpture by Ernst Leonhardt, 1995.
Grieser Platz.  February 2016, my photo.

A few streets further on, and we're into Grunewald--Grunewald the sub-district, not (yet) Grunewald the forest. Nobelviertel stuff from here on. No more big graffiti, no more jokey 1990's public sculpture. 

Big, big old villas, ravingly historicist:

Villa, Grunewald. February 2016, my photo.

... mixed with clinically severe modernism. (The modernism is like a breath of fresh air in a room that's been shut up for too long--but if the whole city looked like this, it would be like living in the open in a perpetual cold wind.)

On Caspar-Theyß-Strasse.  February 2016, my photo.

The street stirs together old and new styles, villas and apartments and commercial space. (Near the buildings in the pictures above is the most architecturally discreet auto-repair place I have ever seen.) The mix gives the neighborhood its peculiar flavor, a kind of sweet-and-tart tang, not like a mono-style residential suburb.

Here we come to Koenigsallee, which is sort of a main drag through the neighborhood. There should be a bus stop along here, which would be good to note for the future .... Aagh, it's a ravingly historicist bus stop:

Departure for the hunt under Kurfürst Joachim II from Jagdschloss Grunewald.
Mosaic on Koenigsallee. Photo by Axel Mauruszat, Wiki Commons.

This mosaic represents the sixteenth-century Kurfürst (Elector) Joachim II heading out for the hunt from the Jagdschloss (hunting lodge, sort of) Grunewald. (The Jagdschloss is on one of the lakes in the Grunewald lake chain, and we will get to it some day when it stops raining. Preferably well into the spring, when the place is open so we can have a look at the sixteenth-century paintings inside; I think the place is closed during the winter.)

One of the paintings in the Jagdschloss is a closer look at Joachim II himself, a contemporary portrait without any sentimentalizing 1900ish cleanup. He looks more than a little dangerous.

Joachim II of Brandenburg, by Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Photo, Wiki Commons.

He was, too. Debased the coinage, oppressed the merchants, confiscated property in the interests of his building and territorial-expansion projects, and loaded the country with debt. (His successor solved the debt problem in part by plundering the Jews in Brandenburg, expelling them and keeping their property.)

It's all clean and pretty in the mosaic, and we can grumble about that if we want to.  But the mosaic is appealing as another example of the exuberant technical skills of 1900-ish Berlin. The mosaic was executed (not designed) by the firm of Puhl and Wagner in 1910, which had been busy putting an end to the millennium-long Italian lock on technically-high-quality mosaic production.

Mosaics were used to decorate the Berlin bridges in those days.  A few of the bridge mosaics are still in situ, for example on the Oberbaumbrücke that crosses the Spree to link Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain [see Spree 5 post, June 2014]--this is also Puhl and Wagner work.

Puhl & Wagner mosaic, Oberbaumbrücke.
Photo, Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons.

The Departure for the Hunt mosaic at the bus stop used to be on a bridge in the neighborhood here (specifically, the Hohenzollerndammbrücke--which is a bit of a mouthful). The hunting scene was on one side of the bridge, and the Surrender of the City of Teltow was on the other side. (Perhaps a scene from the thirteenth-century Teltow War between Otto-with-the-Arrow and Heinrich the Illustrious? [see Teltowkanal 5 post, January 2015].) When the bridge on Hohenzollerndamm was replaced in the 1950s, the Teltow mosaic was destroyed, but the hunting scene was saved and slapped onto the side of the old folks' home here by the bus stop.

**

We're into big-villa territory here. Farther down Koenigsallee, early in the last century, was the home of Walter Rathenau, a big man in the German economy before and during World War I, and then a political figure--mostly a diplomat, trying to work down the international tensions that were still rocking the world off-balance for years after the war. 

The Rathenaus ran AEG, the German equivalent of General Electric. Franz Schwechten, the historicist with the big mustache, did some building for AEG: this is the gateway to the AEG works in north-central Berlin:

Gate to AEG works, Berlin.  Photo by Ansgar Koreng, Wiki Commons.

But Walter Rathenau's personal tastes ran in a different direction: his villa--which he designed himself, for the most part--is soberly classical, in the tradition of early nineteenth-century Prussia. (No turrets, no gold, no mosaics: Rathenau was an admirer of the coolness, the spareness, the moderation of Schinkel's aristocratic Prussian country houses.)  

Not everyone saw Rathenau as a legitimate inheritor of Prussian tradition, however. Just here, past the bus stop, there's a marker at the awkward intersection on Koenigsallee where Rathenau's chauffeur slowed down to make the turn one morning, and the car behind sped up, one of the occupants firing a machine gun into Rathenau's car and another tossing a grenade.  

This was 1922, so this was the work of old-line right-wing extremists, not Nazis yet. The assassins' organization didn't like Jewish industrialists and was also hoping to prey on the country's fears, to set off a civil war, to pave the way for a military dictatorship. It didn't happen, not yet; the country kept its nerve, more or less, and got another ten years or so of quasi-peace. There's a street-side marker here at the site of the assassination; it looks stern in the wintry afternoon, and desolate, with moss eating away at the stone.

Walther-Rathenau-Denkmal, Koenigsallee.  February 2016, my photo.

A little further down Koenigsallee, and we're at a bridge over the little canal that links the Herthasee and the Koenigssee. These aren't natural lakes, they were made for decoration and drainage when this area--once called the Round Fen--was drained for real estate development in the 1880s.

Koenigssee.  February 2016, my photo.

Just past the bridge is a massive piece of eclectic historicism, the Villa Walter (named for its otherwise-forgotten architect, Wilhelm Walter). This comes from a time and place much given to overfed architecture, and the Villa Walter is a great big lump of a building.

Villa Walter. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons.

It's bursting with garlands and mythological figures and symbolic representations in stone: crowds of naked angels hold up the building's protrusions. 

Villa Walter. February 2016, my photo.

Latin mottos are everywhere, mostly in stone .... but there are some in gold at the bottom of this slather of mosaic in the gable. Architecture the mother of the arts is on the right.  On the left is a line from Horace: Nil sine magno vita labore dedit mortalibus.  Life gives nothing to mortals without great labor.

Villa Walter. February 2016, my photo.

These mottos sound a little self-advertising, and they were probably so intended. Allegedly--I don't know how true these tales are--the house was commissioned by a Russian aristocrat around 1912, but it wasn't yet finished when WW I broke out and the commission went south.  Walter decided to finish up the house, to live there himself and use it as a kind of calling card: see what I can do! 

But then the world that cared for this kind of thing fell into slaughter and bankruptcy. When Walter finished the house in 1917, he had hopelessly overextended himself financially and saw no usable future. Even with great labor, life may not give you so much. He is said to have hanged himself in the tower. 

These days the house belongs to the Rumanian Cultural Institute. You can come out here to learn Rumanian, if this task is high on your agenda, or to see Rumanian art, hear readings from Rumanian literature, and so on. 

Farther down Koenigsallee there's a useful footpath called the Hasensprung that takes us back down to the water. 

Hasensprung.  February 2016, my photo.

Hasensprung (like other place-names in this corner of the city) is a vineyard in the Rheingau. But literally the word means rabbit-leap, and there are a couple of rather defaced stone rabbits on the bridge that takes us across the water.  Koenigssee on one side, demented-looking rabbits in the middle, Dianasee on the other side, in the silver-dark of the winter afternoon. 

Koenigssee from Hasensprung bridge. February 2016, my photo.

Hasensprung bridge.  February 2016, my photo.

Dianasee from Hasensprung bridge. February 2016, my photo.

Then up we go, out of this little tributary tunnel-valley, to another street named after a Hessian vineyard, which will eventually take us round to the Grunewald S-Bahn station. 

It's a nice walk, the villas have their charm. Mostly it's very well-kept along here, but at one point there's a startling derelict, fenced off and apparently abandoned. This is the Villa Noelle, built around 1900 in vaguely German-Renaissance style for Ernst Noelle, a trader in steel back in the boom times of German steel-making. After Noelle died in 1916, the property changed hands a number of times, more than once by foreclosure sales; in the latter part of the 1930s someone turned it into biggish upscale apartments.  

Villa Noelle. February 2016, my photo.

The apartments were still occupied ten or twelve years ago, and perhaps more recently. There are still names on the doorbell-plate at the gate, but the gate is padlocked. The place has a scraggy haunted look, and the clock over the door has been stuck at 10:00 for years. Perhaps the property has fallen into some legal dispute or financial mess that the participants choose not to air in public; although there's a lot of information available on the past of the house from local websites and newspapers, there's a dead silence about the present.

At the side of the locked gateway there is a decorative iron plate let into the now moss-eaten stone, in the German tradition of putting proverbs on the walls. (I like this: why don't we paint or carve big proverbs on our houses in the US?) This one says, Wägen, wagen.  Weigh--that is, consider--and then dare. 

Gate relief on Winkler Strasse. February 2016, my photo.

Think ... and then have the courage of your opinions, as the graffito near Heidelberger Platz says.

Another of the relief plates on the locked gate says, if I remember correctly, Entscheidung ist alles. Decision is everything. 

Well, I don't know; the dereliction here gives an ironic surround to this kind of chest-thumping. But maybe in another ten years some oligarch will come along and restore the place and polish up the proverbs--like Herr Noelle, fancying his success as the result of his own thinking and daring and decision, and forgetting that it helps when history tosses you some softballs.

Grunewald lakes 1

Glacial Channel to the Greenwood

Late February. The winter rain patters on the windows all night, sometimes soft, sometimes hard; and the wind kicks and moans against the building. The winter is getting old, and you can feel the natural world -- the whole out-there, the whole not-us --stirring in its sleep. It isn't nice outdoors. 

It's not that portions of your anatomy would freeze off quickly if exposed; the temperature hovers around freezing. But the wet and the wind--the rawness of the air, the occasional furious ice-pellet assaults--are not inviting. 

Still. The winter aconite is in buttery bloom in Tiergarten; the witch-hazel and the snowdrops are in bloom. The daffodils are up, cautiously. The light's been turned up to normal levels in the sky, but the days are mostly clouded and weepy.

So we aren't going on any big woodland ventures just now, but we are going out along the water again. The idea is to work along a couple of tunnel valleys in western Berlin--mostly in the city, in reach of cafes if warm-up stops are needed. 

Tunnel valleys are glacial-landscape features, long narrow valleys scooped out by meltwater under the ice at the edge of the continental ice sheets. They're often full of water--the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, for example, are tunnel valleys. Here in western Berlin there are a couple of long shallow scoops of lake and fen--the Grunewaldseenketten, the Big Greenwood Lake Chain and the Little Greenwood Lake Chain and a very little side-tributary--that run roughly southwest-northeast on the city side of the Havel. 

So: Suppose you started at the Brandenburg Gate and took the big street that runs west from there, through Tiergarten, through the Charlottenburg Gate (with Friedrich I and Sophie Charlotte watching the traffic in baroque splendor under their anti-pigeon netting), then on west to the highway and Ringbahn that demarcate Inner from Outer Berlin. (East of the Brandenburger Tor the street is Unter den Linden; but then once you get through the gate you get thrown into the violently political street-naming of more modern times. In Tiergarten the street is called the Street of the 17th of June, for the East German workers' uprising in 1953. (I can remember banners on the Charlottenburg Gate advertising an outdoor Christmas concert, saying: It's Christmas on the 17th of June!) Further west it becomes Bismarckstrasse and then Kaiserdamm and then Heerstrasse (army street), commemorating the aggressive new German empire of the late nineteenth century as a joint work of Bismarck and the army. The street-name flavor is a little rancid here; but I think if you get far enough out, into Brandenburg, the street abandons political statement again and becomes the Hamburger Chaussee.)

If you looked left just before you got to the Ringbahn (and if you were high enough up), you would see the Lietzensee, the northeast-most component of the lake chain. Further north, the tunnel valley fades out in soggy spots toward the Spree, which is maybe a mile and a half away.

Lietzensee (north half), from Funkturm. Photo, ©  A. Savin, Wiki Commons.

Charlottenburg--before Sophie Charlotte planted herself here and before Friedrich renamed the place for her--was called Lietzow; and oh, it's been here, as a settlement, a long long time. There were people living here in the Stone Age, there was a substantial settlement in the Bronze Age--a bit north of the lake, I think, closer to the Spree. 

As someone who grew up in a trash-it-and-move-on culture, I'm bemused by these places where the generations have piled on top of each other for millennia, doing on-site fix-ups of whatever the previous generations trashed. Religious wars and real-estate developers and the like come roaring through like rivers in spate, and then the city patches itself up and limps along down the same old streets. 

**

The "Lietz-" root in names like Lietzow and Lietzensee comes from a Slavic word meaning marsh or puddle. (So typical of Berlin-area place names, which are likely to be traceable to words meaning mud, swamp, drizzle, and other dank February phenomena.) The lake is a little below street level here, not much. We're at the north end of the valley, where it's shallow.  

North end of Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

Actually, although there have been people out here near the Lietzensee for a long time, there haven't been many people until comparatively recently. In the 1820s a General von Witzleben, the Prussian Minister of War, acquired land here and tidied it up, turning this west side of the lake from swampy forest into park.  --Ah, these are funny people, these military families in eastern Germany. This particular General von Witzleben was the son and brother of Prussian generals, the father and father-in-law of Prussian generals, and also a violinist of considerable distinction. Rossini, who had no great need to flatter Prussian generals, told him it was a shame he was a soldier, he could have done something serious as a musician.

Music is a bigger part of life here than in many places, I think. (Do any distinguished-violinist generals come to mind from early nineteenth-century US history? Nah.) When German political candidates are interviewed during a big election campaign, and the interviewers have got past the policy questions about how to deal with shaky banks or Vladimir Putin or imperfectly integrated immigrants (or, for that matter, imperfectly integrated locals)--when the interviewers turn to questions that are supposed to tell us what the candidate is like as a person, they ask things like, "Mozart or Wagner?" (We may amuse ourselves--or perhaps not--by imagining the likely responses of US presidential candidates to this question.)

Because music, here, is thought to be an important way of knowing, musicians get more opportunities to raise their voices in public matters. Kurt Masur is said to have been influential in keeping the downfall of the East German regime peaceful in 1989, for example. And you're a bit more likely here than elsewhere to hear a professional musician holding forth about current issues on the talk shows along with the journalists and politicians. (My favorite talk-show example was a discussion of bankruptcy law several years ago, where the musician of choice was a guy who did quasi-US-style country music. --You know, debt themes: they repossessed my pickup, they repossessed my dog, etc.)

It's also noticeable how much more intensely people listen at classical concerts here than in much of the US. When the music is going on at the Philharmonie, people do not cough or read their programs (Do you even need a program? Surely you know the music!) or shift in their seats. They listen, with an intensity that communicates itself like a smell, like fear, like silent laughter. You can feel people following the development of the themes in a string quartet; you can feel, like silent warmth or chill in the air, the general approval or disapproval of the way the performers are treating particular passages. 

A German friend says, of this quasi-religious communal intensity, "Oh, that's just the Philharmonie. That's the old West Berlin Bürgertum, the old traditions. Some of those people still have their Hausmusik." Home concerts, the family string quartet. "But it's dying out."  

Not dead yet, however. I was at the Philharmonie on a weekend afternoon several years ago, for a kind of open house at which multiple chamber ensembles, mostly ad hoc, mostly members of the Berlin Philharmonic, were playing. You could wander around between the ensembles, and the wandering was sometimes a bit chaotic. The woman sitting ahead of me to listen to the Philharmonic's string trio was fed up with the event. I heard her say to the friend next to her, "I wouldn't have come if I had known it was going to be this way. We could have done as well as this making music ourselves at home."  Well, perhaps. 

She was--oh, of a certain type, fifty-five-ish, with expensively tended hair and good pearls and well-polished disapproval skills. One imagined a family villa out in Grunewald or Dahlem--in the Nobelviertel, the noble quarters, as one says here. I wouldn't have wanted her to turn her critical scrutiny on me. (It would make me think about how long it's been since I got a haircut. Lack of self-discipline! Pull yourself together! the villa owner would say. But getting haircuts is so boring, I would whine. It seems like such a waste of time! No, no, says the villa owner. Ordnung muss sein. Pull yourself together!)

We aren't quite out to the Nobelviertel yet, though we will be when we get farther along the valley. We're still in Charlottenburg, which is not nobel, but is in its best parts quite vornehm--like these apartments at the south end of Lietzensee, by Dernburgplatz with its pollarded plane trees and its long cascade leading down through a garden to the water.

Dernburgplatz. February 2016, my photo.

Ah, this is very handsome stuff, I like this. Vornehm is "noble" or "courtly" in the dictionary, but at least in real-estate-speak it's a little step down from nobel. It's different from "luxurious," too: it's cultured high-bourgeois. (A Luxuswohnung could possibly be crass; a vornehme Wohnung had better not be.)  

When General von Witzleben cleared the forest and swamp out here on the west edge of Charlottenburg in the 1820s, he built a big house on the western shore of the Lietzensee. Probably quite nobel; but (unlike some more recent property owners in the area) he seems to have been a good sport about giving the public access to the park, including the little swimming beach he put in along the water. He wanted to put an artificial island in the lake, too: the water wasn't deep, just a couple of meters, so it shouldn't have been hard to build up from the lake-bed to the water's surface. But it wouldn't build up: the material sank into the bottomless mud of this glacial marshland, almost without trace. 

So, no island; and presently no general--he died youngish, mid-50s, after a long illness--and no house; the family sold it as soon as he was dead, and at some point it vanishes from the historical scene. Not much of anyone else built out here along the lake until around around 1900, and meanwhile--for a while--the public got some enjoyment out of the park and the beach.

It didn't last, though. (We do get in so much trouble when we start messing with the water.) By the end of the nineteenth century the lake had almost completely silted up, and what good is a swimming-beach when the water is only halfway up to your knees?  Maybe the island-material was partly at fault? Or the runoff of soil from the slowly encroaching city, or the reeds, which had almost entirely taken over the lake by the end of the century?

By then Berlin was booming, and the better addresses had been drifting west for a good while, out along Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse (which in those days dead-ended somewhat short of the lake). So it was worth someone's while to clean up the area and start building something vornehm for the new industrialists and upper civil servants and the like who made up the westward drift. 

The land around Lietzensee was acquired by a real estate developer named Werner Eichmann, head of an outfit called the Witzleben Land Co. (Nothing to do with the general, I think, but--such a respectable name! Very vornehm!) The official who approved Eichmann's development plans (in those days, the Polizeipräsident) cut the plans back to leave a big chunk of public park on the west side. (Sound man: this is kind of thing that gave the Prussian civil service a good reputation.)

Eichmann did pretty well with the development, even on the reduced scale forced by the city authorities. He built himself a house here on the east side of the lake. (Too bad about the weather in this photo; the house doesn't really look so Draculoid when the sun is shining.) 

Haus See-Eck on Lietzensee, February 2016. My photo.

The idea was that Eichmann and his family would live on the best floor and sell off or rent the other floors to other wealthy folks, thus financing Eichmann's retirement. But a single floor in this place is really big, and (how very Berlin!) Eichmann overestimated the demand for very expensive housing and had trouble moving the properties. (If you look at real-estate websites now, you see more million-dollar apartments under construction here than the city is likely to absorb with any speed. The folks in our not-at-all-vornehm neighborhood have been pointing and snickering at a local example that advertises Luxus! on the fences around the construction site and is said to be poorly designed. But who knows? Maybe they will find buyers.) Eichmann had to cut up the other floors of his place into smaller apartments. His great-great-grandson runs a handsome-looking little private hotel on the floor that the developer kept for his family ...

Eichmann's company had the lake dredged, to make it a proper lake again and enhance the property values. And we do get in such trouble when we start messing with the water. All these lakes in the northern part of the Grunewald chain have had water quality problems. They're smallish, shallow lakes and  often don't have clear flow-throughs. They fill with rainwater and with seepage from the surrounding land, and some of the water seeps out again vaguely; but a lot of it just sits there heading for eutrophication--the problem of excess algae and plants in the water, sucking up all the oxygen as they decay, killing whatever fish are left in the shallows. 

The water-quality problems aren't helped by runoff from the city, which brings additional undesirable substances into the water. (In the US we tend to think of the runoff problem as being mainly lawn fertilizer and weedkiller, but Berlin is not lawn country. I remember seeing a sign somewhere along the water hereabouts (Germans love technical information, the city is slathered with technical information) saying that the worst sources of runoff pollution were (1) automobile tire residue from the streets (apparently as your tires wear down they leave nasty stuff behind) and (2) dog droppings.) 

So although the dredging turned Lietzensee back from a reed-marsh to a lake, it wasn't such an attractive lake when the dead fish started to smell. Hence it was the site of an early--possibly the world's first--project to reverse eutrophication. The lake's been better since then, but it's an ongoing challenge keeping the water sweet. There is extensive technical information about the history and current prospects of the lake-oxygenation projects, on information boards at the south end of the lake; but it wasn't a great day for standing around reading extensive technical information outdoors, so I don't know much about the latest patch-up. 

I really must come back here with Archangel some day in good weather. The Germans have such sound ideas about using the waterside as a place for drinks and pieces of cake. At the north end of the lake, the old boathouse has been turned into a cafe/ beer garden with a terrace that stretches out into the water. On the east side of the lake the Hotel Seehof (the building with the flag on top, and with Eichmann's home just to the left of it) has a big cafe terrace a story or two above the lake. 

Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

The highrise over on the right is a place where we thought a little about buying when we were apartment-hunting ten years ago, but it seemed kind of far from center city. (The real estate ads' emphasis on the nearness of nature was off-putting to Archangel, who likes to keep his feet firmly on the concrete.) 

Well, some summer day we will come out here and have a drink on the water and imagine what it would have been like if we had moved to Lietzensee.

**

The lake is long enough that it was awkward to get around, so when Eichmann's Witzleben Land Company started developing out here, just after 1900, they extended Kantstrasse on a causeway that effectively divided the lake in two. 

The footpath goes under the causeway to the south half of the lake, but I go back up to street-level to see what's up there.  This is good, this is mildly entertaining. The locals are much given to painting kitschy pictures on the boxes that contain electrical-transmission machinery at intervals around the city. (Much more fun than leaving them blank.) Here, where the box somewhat interferes with the view down to the lake, it's painted to look like a stone arch with a view through it.

On Herbartstrasse. February 2016, my photo.

On the other side of the box, the lake side, there pretends to be a view up to the street. 

On Herbartstrasse. February 2016, my photo.

(The electrical box in front of our building isn't painted, but there is good reason for that. There's a rosebush twice my height that grows around it, like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle. The lower part is pruned away to let the electricians get at the equipment, but (a) at least in June the rosebush would dominate any kitschy painting--it's an astonishing mass of pink--and (b) it looks as if it would commit some serious assault and battery--slashed face and hands --on any human getting close enough to paint.) 

The lake and the park go on nicely here, on the south side of the bridge. But (sigh) it's so relentlessly wintry still. There are spots here and there in the city--the tangle of bushes that face south to the sun along the S-Bahn viaduct, for example--where little tiny green leaves are starting to show ....  But nothing here.  Just the bare, bare plane trees marching along with their moss-streaks and their age-lumps.

Plane trees in park on Lietzensee.  February 2016, my photo.

There is something interesting across the water, something that looks very klinkerexpressionistisch  (isn't that a good word?) ... 

Lietzensee, Kuno-Fischer-Strasse 8.  February 2016, my photo.

Klinker (clinker auf Englisch) are those dark, almost purplish bricks fired at a very high temperature so that they're almost glazed: popular material for expressionist architects in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially up towards the North Sea: Hamburg and Hannover and Bremen have some great clinker buildings. There are a couple of fine clinker churches in the neighborhood here also, which we will probably run into if we muddle around in the area long enough.

But what is this place? Doesn't look like anyone's villa on the water. It turns out to be one of those solid office buildings through which all sorts of small pacifying social processes have run. 

It was built at the end of the 1920s as an administration building for the Knappschaft-Berufsgenossenschaft, that is, the miners' accident insurance fund. (Different worlds: universal accident insurance for workers was introduced in Germany in 1884; in the US it started early in the 20th century in some states but didn't cover the whole country until 1949.)

By the early 1950s the miners' insurance fund had moved on, probably out to the west German mainland. The house became a kind of emergency shelter for the stream of refugees flowing in from (not-yet-walled-up) East Germany. Then later the place was used by a variety of government agencies, including the Berlin police. So the building has its role: Here we house the offices for coping with all the little bad stuff that happens in society.

Then along come the 1990s, and a burst of dizzy optimism that empties the building. The optimism throws much too much commercial (and residential) real estate on the market--and in these heady days, who wants to think about the
 persistence of little bad stuff? The end of history and all that. So the building stands vacant for some years. Somebody cleaned it up about 2000, and now it's supposed to be a home for media firms--filmmakers and such. There may not be quite enough of these to fill the place, and the German Cancer Society also occupies part of the house. (The little bad stuff is sort of back.)

Then here we are at the south end of the lake. Up the steps to the white pergola that overlooks the lake, up the steps by the Great Cascade--the long stone-step waterfall that was built to boost the Vornehmheit of the place early in the last century, and is now part of some water-recirculation plan to freshen up the lake. It's farther up to the Charlottenburg street level at this end of the lake than at the other. (The tunnel valley's getting deeper here.)

Dernburgplatz, at this end of the lake, is really quite grand (see photo near beginning of this entry), though the view back from the Platz to the lake is more utilitarian than vornehm: the big visual marker is the doggy-doo bag dispenser provided by Berlin Streets and San. 

Dernburgplatz looking toward Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

But of course it is vornehm to clean up after your dog. (Pull yourself together!)

**

We're pretty near the Stadtbahn here, the east-west line of the S-Bahn, which will take me straight home. I sort of know my way around here, it isn't so far from where my father-in-law was born, and where Archangel and I used to stay when we were touristing here years ago. Here we go: Suarezstrasse, then Rönnestrasse right by the tracks  ... ah, they're sad, some of these Charlottenburg streets. 

These big solid bürgerlich apartment houses were meant to have--did have--decoration. Garlands arcing across the balcony fronts, perhaps held up by fat putti; perhaps a satyr-head leering over door, perhaps a noble god- or goddess-head in the top gable. All this sort of thing was ill-seen after the war, during one of these periodic purify-society-by-killing-the-old-architecture campaigns that infect societies. This kind of ornament was seen as characteristic of a 
hierarchical, authoritarian society, a posing, dishonest society--the ornament is fake, after all, it's usually just plaster (Stuck) trying to look like stone. So there was an official program of de-plastering (Entstuckung) in Berlin, which paid landlords a bit of money to knock the decorations off their houses. And thus some of what looks as though it might be stark ornament-free postwar building is really Kaiserzeit architecture that's been morally cleansed of its gods and garlands. 

Along Rönnestrasse, Charlottenburg.  February 2016, my photo.

Ah well. Too bad, perhaps. Our own place is strictly Bauhaus and I like it, but I'm not convinced that Stuck ever made anyone a fascist. Still--the city is what it is, patched and limping as always--and who knows what Rönnestrasse will look like in a hundred years' time? 

**

Information about Werner Eichmann's Haus See-Eck is from:  http://willkommen-in-berlin.com/geschichte/

Information about the house on Kuno-Fischer-Strasse is from https://inzuam.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/vergangen-aber-unvergessen-notaufnahmelager-kuno-fischer-strasse/