It's high summer, and the city is shrouded and lost in unkempt green. Until I moved here and saw the contrast I never realized how repressed Midwestern greenery is. Most of the flora in a respectable Midwestern neighborhood is trimmed and mowed and edged within an inch of its life. But the principle behind a lot of Berlin landscaping is to let nature take its course and to go in with a chainsaw once a year so that you can still find your front door. (Actually, there's enough concrete to provide free passage between the messes of green; but still, when I walk down our street, I think: isn't someone going to clean up these big hedges, strangled with vines and stuck full of volunteer maple trees? Not in my lifetime, probably.)
There are, of course, some tidier places in the urban jungle as well. Formal beds in the neighborhood park:
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| In Tiergarten. July 2016, my photo. |
Roses everywhere at this time of year ... This is one by the Kladow (southwest Berlin) ferry pier (see last post), which I went back to because I didn't get nearly as far as I intended here last time.
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| Rose by Kladow ferry pier. July 2016, my photo. |
There's a path I mean to take from Kladow today, southwest approximately along the water, along the Havel, out of Berlin into Brandenburg. It turns out to be more suburby than I had expected; there's been a lot of new building out here in recent years. (A lot of repression of the greenery, too, where the new building is extensive.)
Ah, I'm out of sympathy with places like this. A limitation on my part, surely; I don't suppose that we're morally superior in slobby, ratty center city. But there's something off-putting about all the righteous not-in-my-backyard signs, all the panic about possible disturbances to the terrarium in which people have enclosed themselves here. The current fuss is about noise from the new airport--which, if it ever gets finished, will have a flight path going over Kladow.
But people, you're thirty kilometers out from the airport here, how low are these planes going to be? In Chicago we used to live right under the flight path to O'Hare, about twenty kilometers out, and I don't think we even heard the planes. (Though we could see them, a string of lights across the evening sky, sailing past the dining-room window at three-minute intervals.)
A big banner hung on someone's fence here says: "Get rid of the flight routes! A region defends itself! Your family-friendly community, Kladow." Ah yes, and to whose families are we being friendly here? Not the ones who will get the noise--if any--under an alternative flight path. ("Me first and to hell with everybody else" is a natural human attitude, but naked displays of it are unseemly, surely?)
Somewhere along here, in a stretch of new houses, a well-dressed older woman's large dog has a go at taking a piece out of my leg. He is unsuccessful; she is unapologetic. (A neighborhood defends itself!) They aren't so used to strange pedestrians here, perhaps.
The path wanders along, past the built-up areas, by the water, through the trees; past a farm-ish house or two.
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| Along the Havel, Kladow. July 2016, my photo. |
I know there's a newly restored country-house garden from the 1920s out here, probably worth a sidetrack .... Yes, here's the garden wall, with a couple of porthole-like windows tempting you inside.
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| Window into Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fränkel. My photo, July 2016. |
Ah, this is nice, this is delightful (restoration supported by the personal funds, organizational skills, and sometimes sweaty labor of the same people who put silly signs on their fences and let their dogs go after strangers. Credit where credit is due).
Max Fränkel, who built a house out here in the 1920s, was a Berlin banker; he hired the designer of many pleasant Berlin parks and squares, Erwin Barth, to make a garden for him running down to the water.
(Here, a good deal of honor is given to major landscape architects: if you're an educated person you know who was responsible for your big neighborhood park. If you're in the US, are you likely to know who designed your big neighborhood park, unless it's Frederick Law Olmsted? (Or is the park such that you would be especially inclined to honor the designer?) I was asking myself this, and thought I would try to find out who designed Washington Park and Cheesman Park in Denver, where I spent many pleasant summer days a long time ago.... Aaagh, I should have guessed: both parks were designed by a German trained here at the complex of palace gardens along the Havel. (It figures.) A man named Reinhard Schuetze, who emigrated to the US late in the nineteenth century and became Denver's first official landscape architect. Maybe half a generation older than Erwin Barth, who did the garden out here.)
What will we find if we go into Max Fränkel's garden? Roses, at this time of year: roses and roses.
Fränkel and Barth started on the garden in 1927, but it wasn't finished until 1933.
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| Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fränkel. July 2016, my photo |
Ah, such bad luck, such a bad time to live: the dragon of history sweeps its tail across the landscape and destroys it. Fränkel emigrated (no more place for Jewish bankers in Berlin after '33); Barth, who was profoundly discouraged by the rise of the Nazis and his own failing eyesight, killed himself. The war didn't do much for the roses, one presumes.
Over the decades, after World War II, the place decayed. Fränkel's house was torn down in the 1960s. In Cold War days, this side of the river was East Berlin; the other side was West Berlin. Therefore, presumably, there was barbed wire and such in the places where the roses used to be. In the 90s, when people started digging out the garden, it was meters deep in mess, and the rehab project has been slow.
The elderly bicyclists whose path I keep crossing today haul their bicycles up to the top of the pine-crowned hill in the garden to have lunch with a view; I settle down close to the water for mine.
It's a pleasant garden; there's a lot to be said for Barth's work. It's not magic, it's not heart-stopping, like Lenné's at its best, but it's fine. I'm fond of the squares and little parks in Charlottenburg that Barth designed, on the edges of which Archangel and I have sat at cafe tables for years now. I'm fond of Barth's Volkspark Rehberge, the big sand-dune park that I see from my study window, five or six kilometers away, with its near-black line of evergreens on the top of the long dune. I like to trudge around Rehberge in the early spring, when the broadleaf woods on the dune-sides are open to the light and there are snowdrops and aconite and little fluttery seas of blue-stars (squills) bursting out among last year's fallen leaves. (But how mournful it is in the winter, that long line of dark trees like a graveyard avenue, leading to the memorial at the top of the dune for Walter Rathenau, whose murder in the 20s probably unsettled people like Fränkel and Barth (see Grunewald Lakes 2 post, March 2016).)
Well, let's go on, along the water for a bit, along the lovely summertime Havel.
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| By the River Havel. July 2016, my photo. |
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| Along the Havel. July 2016, my photo. |
And then, after a bit, we are at Schloss Sacrow, a down-at-heel country house in an overgrown park.
The day is gray and damp. Paint is peeling from the exterior of the Schloss, which has run into some difficulties with its restoration plans and has a semi- abandoned look about it.
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| Schloss Sacrow. July 2016, my photo. |
How thickly scattered the country is with medieval churches whose walls sag out of true, and baroque palaces whose roofs let in the rain. There doesn't begin to be enough money to fix up and maintain all of these (and should it be done, anyway?). Here at Sacrow, in the 90s, they got as far as fixing the roof and installing central heating, with a view to using the place as a museum, but it hasn't really worked out. The house is closed much of the time; the paint flakes off morosely around the door, and if you step back a little further than this picture, the grass grows thigh-high, tangled with weeds.
The place was livelier once. Young Felix Mendelssohn did some composing here, as the Magnuses, the Berlin banking family who owned the house in the early nineteenth century (and intermarried with the Fränkels upriver) were family friends of the Mendelssohns--yet another solid Berlin banking family--and invited them out for long visits.
Friedrich Wilhelm IV bought the house from the Magnuses in 1840 and expanded it a bit. He had Lenné work on the Schlosspark, and he designed a fantasy-church for the edge of the park, not very near to where anyone lived. He meant to incorporate it into his Prussian Arcadia, the fantasy-palace-and-garden complex along the river where our Denver landscape architect learned his trade.
A poisoned stretch of Arcadia, this turned out to be. One of the reasons that restoration has been slow here is that the house and much of the grounds turned out to be thick with lead dust. Back in the days when the Mendelssohns visited, the Magnuses ran a production facility for white lead and lead acetate more or less in the backyard, and the toxics built up.
The place was successfully decontaminated a couple of years ago, however. It was a big job, digging out all the earth a couple of meters deep and carrying it away. The original earth was sent to a sort of earth laundry [a Bodenwaschanlage--I didn't know there were such things] to clean out the lead. The decontaminated earth was then used for an "unobjectionable purpose" elsewhere, and the Schlosspark got fresh earth from some uncontaminated source. (Doesn't this sound solemn and thorough and German? Well done, all.) (http://www.info-potsdam.de/beginn-der-dekontaminierungsarbeiten-im-schlosspark-sacrow-9910n.html)
Parts of the garden had to be torn up and replanted, of course, but the basic design wasn't much changed. Here are the long straight lines of sight that characterize the older garden design in these parts: broad paths cut through the trees and the hip-high summer grass, from the house to the river, from the house to Friedrich Wilhelm's fantasy church, from the house toward a view of Peacock Island [Havel 6 post, November 2015], and toward views of other, grander palaces.
In some places the grass and reeds are so high that you can hardly see the river, close though it is. Sails move past through the green tangle as if the boats were on wheels in the overgrown lawns.
Let us go down one of these mown paths toward the church. It's a Romanesque-Italian thing plunked down in cold damp Brandenburg, without a human habitation in sight. The river laps against it. (In the photo it looks as though there's a bit of lawn and shrubbery in front of the colonnade, but there isn't; the east end of the church shoves into the water like the front of a boat, and the greenery is growing in the river.)
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| Heilandskirche, Sacrow. July 2016, my photo. |
In Cold War days the East Germans put sharpshooters in the church tower to pick off possible border-crossers.
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How dark the day is getting. There's no one here except me and the pair of elderly bicyclists I keep meeting; and after a bit they move on. It's very slightly alarming, walking around the colonnade in this deserted spot: the colonnade is right on the water--no railing or anything like that between you and the Havel, out where the colonnade takes its turn around the apse of the church. The afternoon is thinking about storm, and it's damp: maybe the wind is kicking up the river, or maybe there are little sprays of rain driving sideways into the half-shelter of the colonnade.
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| Heilandskirche, Sacrow. July 2016, my photo. |
Ach du meine, it's remote out here. The S-Bahn is nowhere near, the infrequent Brandenburg bus is quite a way back: transit is generally thin on the ground.
But the Potsdam water-taxi does stop here. It doesn't run very often, but ... ah, here it comes, looking a bit like a Checker cab that's been flattened by a steamroller and left to float on the water.
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| Water-taxi on the Havel. July 2016, my photo. |
I get out of the water-taxi a few stops later, at the bottom of Glienicke Bridge, the old spy-exchange bridge. Then it's a fine stroll across the river, high above the water, with a view across to the monumentally silly Schloss Babelsberg [see Havel 8 post, January 2016]:
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| Schloss Babelsberg from Glienicker Brücke. July 2016, my photo. |
It's a longish wait for the bus over on the Berlin side, but who can complain about the view? Here we are in front of Schloss Glienicke (yet another outpost of Prussian Arcadia), with its golden griffin guarding the entrance, and the lion fountains spouting in the summer afternoon.
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| Schloss Glienicke. July 2016, my photos. |
When I get back to my admittedly scuzzy neighborhood, my comfortable-old-shoe neighborhood (absolutely no golden lions), I stop to pick up a few groceries. Our little shopping center--supermarket, drugstore, bakery, dry-cleaner, post office, florist, etc.--has a parking lot by the supermarket. Room for eight cars, or nine if they're small and well parked. The lot is hardly ever full; this is pedestrian and bicycle territory. As I come along I see that there is one parking space left, and an SUV is edging toward the space but then stopping. (Good God, what is an SUV doing in our street? We aren't that kind of neighborhood.)
Ah, I see the problem now: one of the local derelicts is sprawled across the last available parking space, dead drunk. Well, well ... it isn't Prussian Arcadia, it's just Berlin.
