I was grabbing at little bits of the spring as it flew past, as March became May in the blink of an eye. I missed a biggish chunk of April, being in the US, where it blizzarded on me at the end of the month in what I thought was an unnecessary fashion. Late, belated flight home from Denver, wait and wait for de-icing on the tarmac in the sleety dark. Dinner of soggy pasta and stale bread at midnight, five miles or so above Newfoundland; then a few hours' dozing, interrupted by the tallish young man in the next seat hitting me every time he turned in his sleep.... Well, well, mustn't complain. At least he didn't spill anything. The nice Italian mathematician next to me on the outbound flight, working on a presentation, struggling to get her laptop open in the few inches of available space, struggling to get her big equations into Powerpoint, tipped her coffee onto me. (She was mortified, poor woman, but it didn't matter; I dress for spills on long-distance flights.)
So here was March in Berlin, when I headed south along the main line of the Grunewald lake chain again. (How much we needed days like this, after the lightless, colorless winter.)
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| Crocuses, Bismarckplatz. My photo, March 2016. |
Bismarckplatz, where (approximately) I started out, was thick with crocuses. A statue of Bismarck presides over the little flower-field--not an over-life-size allegory of the militarist state, like the steel-helmeted Bismarck in the colossal monument in our neighborhood, but more of a country gentleman taking his dog for a walk. It's a very doggy and unallegorical dog (unlike the accompanying animal on our neighborhood Bismarck monument, which is the Leopard of Discord Being Subdued by the Power of the State).
The Bismarckplatz Bismarck and his dog got melted down for war materiel in one of the twentieth century's ugly disputes (serve him right, arguably), and they were gone for a long time from this miscellaneous little Platz just west of the Ringbahn. (Urban inner Berlin on the other side of the tracks, not-so-urban outer Berlin on this side.)
A wave of old-Prussian patriotism that emerged after reunification led to the recasting of this statue, as well as to the re-erection of another Bismarck monument, a colossal marble bust, further on down the Havel at Wannsee. (The Wannsee monument, like our neighborhood monstrosity, is by Reinhold Begas, who was responsible for many over-muscled objects in the landscape of Imperial Berlin.) Being marble, the Wannsee Bismarck couldn't be melted down; but it was removed after WW II by the American occupying forces, who possibly couldn't tell Bismarck's view of the world from Adolf Hitler's.
The district authorities squirreled the bust away somewhere and hauled it out again recently, which provoked some unease in the Wannsee neighborhood. A resolution was put forward in the district council, demanding that an information board be put up next to the monument. The information board should say (among other things) that Bismarck despised democracy, that he persecuted both the Social Democratic Party and the Catholic Church, that the veneration of Bismarck was used by the right as a historical-political weapon [do we have historical-political weapons in the US? I don't think the Defense Dept stocks up much] against the Weimar Republic and against democracy in general. On the other hand, B. did introduce social insurance to Germany (health insurance, accident insurance, pensions) well before the rest of the world got it, and practiced an international diplomacy that avoided big wars. A divisive historical figure, the information board was supposed say. (http://www.spd-fraktion-steglitz-zehlendorf.de/anfragen-antraege/850-aufstellung-einer-hinweistafel-zur-bismarck-bueste-in-der-gruenanlage-am-bahnhof-wannsee-drs-0997-iv.html)
The resolution didn't pass.
And nothing of all this is the dog's fault ... but ah, this friendly doggy non-colossal monument at Bismarckplatz is a little uneasy-making, all the same. I would guess that the statue was sponsored by grateful real estate developers, to whom Bismarck had engineered the sale of four or five hundred acres of the Grunewald. Deutsche Bank was a major party in the deal, which was made more or less over the dead bodies of the Berlin city government and the forest administration. Big project: destroy the forest--formerly public property--and build luxury housing. Exclusive addresses, presumably fat profits for the developers and Deutsche Bank.
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If we go over a couple of streets, we're at the top of the Halensee, which is one of the biggest of the lakes in the Grunewald Lake Chain. We aren't out in the woods yet, or quite in Bismarck's friends' luxury villa development either: this is still pretty urban. Big classicizing turn-of-the-century apartment houses where you half expect to hear piano practice drifting down from a window as you pass (Chopin? Schubert?). They have their little private landing-stage on the lake, I see.
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| Halensee, looking across to Margaretenstrasse. March 2016, my photo. |
I don't see a boat at the landing, though there may be one pulled up in the garden somewhere behind the reeds. Suitable for rowing along to the island further down the water ...
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| Island in Halensee. March 2016, my photo. |
Ah, there is someone out on a rowboat in the lake, just beyond the island.
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After a bit we go back to the street, because we get into villa-land: the shores on the south end of Halensee are all private property. Down we go past Koenigsee and Dianasee, the next lakes to the south, also private--you just get views from bridges here and there:
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| Koenigssee. March 2016, my photo. |
And then we're getting out toward the edge of the woods, at Hundekehlesee ("Dog Pack Lake," presumably named in the days when this was big hunting territory).
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| Hundekehlesee. March 2016, my photo. |
There are still some very big villas out here, too big for anything but institutional use these days--or for splitting up into apartments, which I think is what has happened to the Villa Konschewski here, which we can see across the water.
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| Villa Konschewski on Hundekehlesee. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons. |
I wandered a few streets over and had a look at the truly enormous Villa Harteneck, which now houses an upscale interior design firm:
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| Villa Harteneck. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons. |
But not everything in the old Villenkolonie has made it to modern times. Just around the corner the wrecking ball is working (and having to work fairly hard, I think), on some unprofitable piece of old grandeur.
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| Demolition on Douglasstrasse. My photo, March 2016. |
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Another day, a little later. South of the Dog-pack Lake is the Dog Pack Fen, a protected marsh area. Too protected and too marshy really to walk in: one goes along the side.
Ah, but we're sort of in the woods now, where the beech trees are spreading their toes in the spring sun. I love beech trees; a good beech grove is a thrill. And a temptation, in the city: the bark is so carvable, the carving stands out so well. Our neighborhood beech trees proclaim the love of Bogdan and Nikola, or CZ and TM, or occasionally some historical-political-weapon word. (Freiheit!) The beeches out here in Grunewald are relatively uninscribed.
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| Beech roots, Grunewald. My photo, April 2016. |
There's a Graben, a little canal, that links Dog-pack Lake with the Grunewaldsee and carries the spring sky along at the bottom of the little valley (ah, the sky never looks like this in winter, not for months on end).
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| Hundekehlegraben. April 2016, my photo. |
Blue sky, white clouds. Blue sky, white birch trees misted with tiny leaves--and then here we are at the Grunewaldsee, which is a somewhat more serious body of water than the little drainage basins further north in the lake chain.
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| Grunewaldsee, north end. April 2016, my photo. |
Much of this area around the Grunewaldsee and further south is a Hundeauslaufgebiet--a dog free-running zone--and the dogs lollop joyfully uphill and down, and splash in the water. (Now and then I misread the word on the signs as Hundeauflaufgebiet--dog-casserole zone--and am momentarily puzzled.)
I did say I was going to come down here on a non-Monday, but it turned out that the free day with fine weather that made itself available before I had to go off to the US was a Monday. So the collection of Renaissance paintings here at the Jagdschloss (hunting lodge) Grunewald, which I would like to see, was closed. But--another day, another day. The time to come back, I thought, would be when the apple orchard by the Schloss is in bloom, white flower-puffs to match the white cloud-puffs over the lake. But i missed it. Another year, perhaps.
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| Jagdschloss Grunewald. April 2017, my photo. |
They did really hunt at the hunting lodge, until the end of the monarchy. (It's extraordinary how much of the nineteenth-century ruling class's time was spent exterminating deer and foxes and partridges and pheasants. I remember years ago, wandering through the Schloss of a side branch of the Hohenzollerns down in southern Germany, and being bemused by the quantity of wall space taken up with the skulls of animals they had slaughtered: all very neatly labeled in black ink with the date and location of the relevant hunt.) Here's Wilhelm I, eighty-nine-years old, at the start of a deer hunt from Jagdschloss Grunewald in the 1880s (not on horseback any more, just following along on the side in an open carriage, but still).
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| "The Arrival of Kaiser Wilhelm for a Red-Deer Hunt at Jagdschloss Grunewald," painting by Hermann Schnee (landscape) and Carl Johann Arnold (figures). Wiki Commons. |
Then here we are at the end of the lake, and there's a long strip of wooded wetland, the Langes Luch, that takes us on south. The path is unmistakable here, almost a little street through the greening woods:
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| South of Grunewaldsee. April 2016, my photo. |
Later things get more entangled, however, and I miss the path I meant to take next, along the Fenngraben, the little canal that links the lakes. I end up on the high west side of the dune ridge that guards the wetland here, far above the water. I can see the Fenngraben down below, but you sort of can't get there from here (or at least I can't: the way down the forest ridge is too steep, and there are no bridges over the Graben here). Still, the route I have ended up on should work, I should come out at public transit at the end of all this, and meanwhile it's a good stretch of forest, greening up nicely.
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| In the Langes Luch. April 2017, my photo. |
Then I do come out to a street, rather suddenly.
And yes, the sign in the middle of the woods does say Subway Station Uncle Tom's Cabin.
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| Sign to the U-Bahn, along Onkel-Tom-Strasse. April 2016, my photo. |
In the late nineteenth century there was a beer garden down here run by a man whose first name was Thomas; people called the shelter in the beer garden "Toms Hütte," Tom's hut or cabin. Since Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel was still--a couple of decades after the American Civil War--highly popular in Germany, people took to calling the beer garden Uncle Tom's Cabin. The name has stayed, though the beer garden is gone.
So, on we go: down Uncle Tom Street to the Uncle Tom mall and underground station (Germans are, or at least used to be, unaware of the negative connotations of the name, of its potential to be a historical-political weapon).
And then home. The forest will be massively in leaf, everything buried in green too thick to see through, before I get back here to have a look at the last couple of lakes in the chain.
