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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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?) ...
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| 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.
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| Dernburgplatz looking toward Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo. |
But of course it is vornehm to clean up after your dog. (Pull yourself together!)
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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.
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| 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?
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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/
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