Winter storm season. It isn't all that cold, but the wind cries and hisses at the corner of the house; it beats its fists on the wall. Discarded Christmas trees go flying in the street. An S-Bahn derails in a storm near Tempelhof, when a tree falls on the tracks. (No one hurt.) Archangel comes in soaked one night, when the rain has been driving on the full-strength wind, and says, Just like walking into a fire hose. Sometimes there is hail; occasionally there is pure snow.
I was out along the canal for a bit before the storms set in, before it became unwise to walk under the trees. This piece of the canal neighborhood is a funny stretch of park and industrial territory, pinned between the canal on the south and the old Tempelhof airfield (and the freeway and the Ringbahn) on the north.
Tempelhof is so called because the Templars had a commandery here in the Middle Ages, close to the U-Bahn station where I start on this little stretch of the canal. The Tempelhof church is the biggest of the medieval village churches in Berlin, presumably because it served the Templar commandery as well as the village itself.
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| Dorfkirche Tempelhof. Bundesarchiv Photo, 1940. Wiki Commons. |
Not that this is the original church (not even the one in this 1940 photo, let alone the one that is there today). The original was built about 1200 or a little before; it probably burned down, and was replaced rather promptly by another church with the same ground plan. The new one burned again almost immediately, probably during the Teltow War of 1239-45. There doesn't seem to have been much saved from the fire either time. Start over again, begin at the beginning; there's a new church (not so different from the old) in place by the end of the thirteenth century. The church survives the Thirty Year's War but hardly anything else does, here; by the war's end there is only one peasant family left alive in Tempelhof, the Teile family (and there are the Rohdes also, the local official's family). But the church is still there, and the village grows back around it, slowly: we will be passing the intersection of Teilestrasse and Rohdestrasse as we walk east. The church burns again in 1943, 1944; not much saved from the fire, again. But it is rebuilt, stone on stone, much on the same pattern as before. Here we still are, it says.
And what was the Teltow War? Not a textbook staple. But since we are here, in Tempelhof, on the Teltow plateau, let's see what this was about.
In this war Heinrich the Illustrious, son of Dietrich the Harassed, battles against Otto the Pious and his brother Johann, grandsons of Albrecht the Bear (I am not making this up), for control over the plateaus above Berlin: the Teltow plateau to the south and the Barnim plateau to the north. [Barnim is where we were poking around last summer: see the Panke and Tegeler Fließ posts, April/May and August 2014.] Heinrich is the Margrave of Meissen (Saxony); Otto and Johann are Margraves of Brandenburg. The Brandenburgers win, passing the territory on to Johann's son, Otto-with-the-Arrow, so called because he got an arrow in the head in a battle and left it there for a long time, thinking that worse things might happen if he pulled it out.
Otto-with-the-Arrow was a poet, as was Heinrich the Illustrious. This is the thirteenth century, rulers are no longer just thugs who whack each other with broadswords, as they would have been a century or two before. They are thugs who whack each other with broadswords and also write romantic verse. Otto's is not very good, I believe; Heinrich's is rather better. (Here is Otto playing chess with a lady, in courtly fashion, in an early fourteenth-century manuscript.)
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| Otto-with-the-Arrow, Manessische Liederhandscrhift. Photo, Wiki Commons. |
But finally, with the industrialization of Berlin in the nineteenth century, Brandenburg-Prussia finally has money; and some big tectonic plates start shifting in the political economy of the world. (What if peaceable Saxony and not militaristic Prussia had been the principal German power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? ask the Saxon patriots, including the one at my dinner table. Wouldn't the world have been better off?)
Archangel's family is Saxon; I think his grandfather the actor was the first to come up to Berlin, around the turn of the last century, when Berlin was finally more of a happening place than Dresden or Leipzig. (And how conscious they are of being Saxon, and how they keep the Saxon things. The gold watch that was a gift from the king of Saxony. The Meissen desk set. The painted Nativity window from the nineteenth century that Cousin T, the old Berlin mathematician, keeps in his living room: almost all that was left of the big house on the Dresden marketplace where he was a child, all that was saved from the fire.)
Years ago, Archangel and I had to trek out to the inconvenient village in Switzerland where his grandfather had spent the last years of his life, in order to retrieve the Meissen desk set after his grandfather's last wife died. (There was rather a string of wives. The fact that the last movie he appeared in was called Every Night in a Different Bed prompts a certain amount of family hilarity.) It was a lovely summer day, the local lawyer and his wife fed us strawberries and cream in their garden, and we went through the last wife's papers. Reviews in provincial newspapers from her early acting career in Nazi Germany, mindless letters from the thirties and forties; hardly anything from more recent decades, as though nothing since had been worth saving. We had the Meissen desk set packed up for Archangel's father; the papers went into the fire.
The desk set is this sort of thing, approximately (these museum pieces are sauce-boats; but the inkwells and pen trays and such are in a similar spirit):
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| Meissen porcelain, ca. 1800-1850 (Porcelain Museum, Florence). Photo by Sailko, Wiki Commons. |
You can think of Meissen porcelain, if you like, as a little hinge of economic history. In the time of Otto-with-the-Arrow, and for a couple of hundred years after, Asia was still technologically and economically superior to Europe. But one by one the Asian inventions were taken over--replicated, stolen, improved, expanded--by the West. Commercial techniques, compass, gunpowder, paper-making, printing ... But even by 1700, the West still couldn't make real hard-paste porcelain, and this was not economically trivial; the West had been shipping a small fortune in hard currency to East Asia for porcelain for a long time.
European-made porcelain is a Saxon invention. But it's the beginning of the end of the world in which Saxony is rich and Brandenburg is poor just because Saxony has mountains full of silver mines and Brandenburg has sand dunes full of, well ... sand. It's the beginning of the world in which, if your science is good enough, you can plant massive, wealth-producing industry anywhere--here in Tempelhof, for example, where you don't have resources, but you can make your own.
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In Berlin, at the opening of the eighteenth century, there is a pharmacist's assistant named Johann Friedrich Böttger, who is dabbling in alchemy with teenage enthusiasm, annoying his boss, who does not think it a good use of his time. When he is eighteen Böttger causes a little sensation in Berlin by making gold out of inexpensive materials. He does it multiple times, before witnesses; perhaps not in very good light.
It's a bad moment to pull a trick like this. It's 1701, and the King of Prussia needs money--he has only just declared himself King of Prussia in addition to being Elector of Brandenburg, and being a king is a more expensive business than just being an Elector and Margrave. So the King wants to lay hands on the young gold-maker, perhaps to take advantage of the gold-making, perhaps to suppress it. (Is alchemy a righteous thing? And what a hash it would make of the money supply.) Böttger is not eager to be caught and makes a run for the Saxon border--supposedly, and perhaps really, with the intent of studying medicine at the University of Wittenberg.
The King of Prussia wants the Saxons to hand him over: Böttger is a Prussian subject, after all. But the Elector of Saxony, who has recently got himself elected King of Poland, needs money also. (Being King of Poland is a very expensive business, worse than being King of Prussia: you have to buy the Polish electors, there are a lot of them, and they don't always stay bought.) So the Saxon authorities bring young Böttger to Dresden, in protective custody.
And he does make gold for the Saxons, out of inexpensive materials. Not exactly as planned.
And not by himself, of course; science is a team sport. The project really belongs to Baron von Tschirnhaus, scientific advisor at the court of Saxony. And what a pair these two are: difficult, talented, fraudulent. Out of this wrangle of wrongheads comes a small miracle.
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| Ehrenfried Walter von Tschirnhaus, engraving by Martin Bernigeroth. Kupferstichkabinett, Dresden. Photo, Wiki Commons. |
The Baron is one of the better mathematicians in Europe, but not as good as Newton and Leibniz and not entirely willing to believe this. He doesn't think that Newton's and Leibniz's new invention, calculus, is all it's cracked up to be. (He's wrong.) He thinks he has found a method for solving all polynomial equations. (He's wrong; Tschirnhaus tranformations provide exact solutions for cubics, not higher-order polynomials.) He tries to get a foothold in Paris, that earthly Paradise of early German scientists (Leibniz's big project in life is to find a way to stay in Paris, Alexander von Humboldt's big project in life, after American exploration, is to stay in Paris). But it doesn't work. People find errors in Tschirnhaus's math, and he tries to cover up and bluster past them, he tries to take credit for other people's work, in ways that do his reputation no good.
He shifts attention to more technological and industrial matters. Optics, lenses, mirrors. He travels to Italy, which is a world of superior technology and fine instrument-making, and then brings what he has learned back to Saxony. He has hopes of making a fortune in instrument production and founding a natural-science academy at his estate near Görlitz, since the academies in London and Paris have not taken him in. (If you've seen the movie Grand Budapest Hotel you've seen Görlitz--at least the old department store there, which I believe served as the set for the hotel.) The economics don't work out somehow, though the Baron makes beautiful, high-quality scientific instruments (lenses, mirrors). He induces a glass furnace in Dresden to make an interesting new kind of glass and to do largely unsuccessful experiments with ceramics. (Ah, this isn't going anywhere: it's local achievement, but it's not fortune-making, it's not Paris.)
The Baron is not really a fraud. He's just trying to do very difficult things and cannot always do them, and cannot always even tell whether he has done them or not. (Actually, as someone finally proved in the nineteenth century, Tschirnhaus transformations do work pretty well to approximate solutions to higher-degree polynomials, even if they don't provide exact solutions; and this is not such a trivial accomplishment.)
Böttger is not entirely a fraud either; in his way, he is a very talented experimental chemist. But his attempts to make gold with the Saxons are going nowhere, and in 1703 he flees to Austria. The Austrians politely extradite him, and King Augustus of Saxony (who is not having a good time with his Polish venture, and is annoyed) locks him up in Königstein, which was the standard Saxon lock-up spot from medieval times until the mid-twentieth century (POW camp in the world wars, juvenile detention center afterward). Fifty years after Böttger's time here, when King Augustus has made Dresden one of the most beautiful cities in Europe, Canaletto comes from Venice to paint Dresden, and makes some detours into the countryside, as we see here:
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| Canaletto, Königstein Fortress. National Gallery of Art. Photo, Wiki commons. |
Baron Tschirnhaus has an idea, however, after his glass project loses traction. Maybe we can make porcelain, like the Chinese. Not stoneware, not faience, such as Europe can already make; but real, hard-paste porcelain--translucent, tough, worth its weight in gold. Saxony has a good supply of minerals (including the key ingredient, kaolin), and Saxon metallurgy is probably the most advanced in Europe. Tschirnhaus's concave mirrors will help to bring glass-furnace temperatures up to the 2500 degrees F. needed to fire porcelain, and the Saxon metallurgists will make furnaces that will stand up to this heat for extended periods. (Can anyone else in Europe do this? Perhaps not.) We just need to get the mixture of materials right. No one outside of East Asia knows what the right mix is; but there is an excellent experimental chemist going to waste in Königstein Fortress.
So Böttger is brought back to Dresden for a bit, and then set up in a quasi-secret lab in the Albrechtsburg in Meissen, the ancestral castle of the rulers of Saxony. (King Augustus, who likes Italian Baroque, doesn't care for it.) There are two other labs going simultaneously, one in Dresden under Tschirnhaus and one in Freiberg (the mining-technology center), each working out its own set of problems. (The Freiberg people deal with furnace-building.) Everyone is being paid well except Böttger, who, as a prisoner of the King, is not being paid anything.
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| Albrechtsburg, Meissen. Photo, Adam Kumiszcza, Wiki Commons. |
Tschirnhaus is ruined; his property is in the path of the Swedes. The porcelain team flees to Königstein (prisons and refuges are hardly distinguishable, in hard times) and cannot resume work until 1707, when the Swedes leave. (The Swedes are heading east to conquer Russia, where they will have the usual success that such projects have had.) The porcelain team moves back to Dresden in September of that year, and by mid-January, one of Böttger's experiments yields the first true European hard-paste porcelain.
The King rushes them to start large-scale production and names Tschirnhaus as head of the new manufactory. (it is to be at Meissen: technical secrets better protected there, in the old fortress, than in the more public and porous world of Dresden.) But there are substantial technical problems still to be solved, especially with glazing, and perhaps they are insoluble; Tschirnhaus is afraid of falling into a trap and says, no, wait, don't give me any titles until we're sure we can actually produce.
But in a few more months Tschirnhaus is dead, fallen victim to a passing infection. He is no longer young; what he has wanted in life--to live in Paris where science is really happening, to be a great mathematician, to make a fortune--has never happened.
Böttger solves the remaining technical problems quickly and is put in charge of the manufactory in Meissen, which is soon up and running and coining money for King Augustus. Böttger is still a prisoner; technically, he will be released in 1714, but he will never be allowed to leave Saxony. In a few more years he too will be dead, at 37, accidentally poisoned by the materials of an experiment. And what had he wanted in life? On the one hand a really good lab, perhaps, and on the other hand, freedom. But the two never went together.
**
So many of these things end badly. The Templar commandery here is a reminder that the medieval courtly poets and their verse end badly also, in a way. The Templar order is founded to protect pilgrims to Jerusalem, after the conquests of the (somewhat backwoodsy) Seljuk Turks have unsettled the civilized Middle East, and the responding Crusades from the West have unsettled it more. The courtly-love poetry of Heinrich the Illustrious and the rest, which owes something to the courtly-love poetry of the Islamic world, grew out of a time of of more civil East-West relations.
Love had mostly not been so romantic in Greece and Rome. In the classical western world, love was an itch that needed to be scratched; it didn't have high moral implications. In Roman literature there is great poetry of sexual obsession (Catullus) and sexual gamesmanship (Ovid); there is great poetry of renouncing scratching in order to do your civic duty (Virgil); but there isn't exactly romance.
Arabic literature contributes to notions of romantic love as something exalted, humanly (even morally) valuable, even if it's unrequited. The love-poetry conventions of the medieval West appear early in Provence, which gets them from Muslim Spain, which got them from Perso-Arabic courtly poetry. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, a Provencal troubador, says, Love makes the best man better, and lends value even to the worst.
Love may make the best man better, as Raimbaut said, but crusading tended not to. Raimbaut and his lord were killed in the process of plundering (Christian) Byzantine territory in the Fourth Crusade. (The Crusaders had turned aside to loot Constantinople, on the grounds that it was very rich and eminently lootable.)
The German poets had mixed feelings about the crusades. Friedrich von Hausen wrote, "My heart and body have gone together for a long time, but now they want to split up. My body wants to go and fight the heathen, but my heart has chosen a lady ..." He was killed in a battle in Syria. Walther von der Vogelweide, perhaps the greatest of the German medieval poets, called on to provide PR for a late, inglorious, politically manipulative crusade, captures the uneasy feelings as the period goes rancid:
Where have all my years vanished?...
Country and people that I grew up with,
Everything is strange to me, as if it were all a lie.
My childhood companions are aging and apathetic,
The green meadow has been plowed up and the greenwood cut down.
Yes, if the water didn't flow any more as it used to flow,
My unhappiness would be too great.
So the best thing to do, Walther concludes, is to go on crusade. Get out, go bash someone overseas.
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Heinrich the Illustrious, the poet and the loser in the Teltow war, had a brief taste of crusading--not in the Middle East but against the (pagan, non-Germanic) Prussians--but he didn't repeat it. When he was quite young he tried to take a Prussian fortress near what is now Kaliningrad, in Russia, but failed. A few years later, a different set of Germans succeeded, with support from the brother-in-law of Heinrich's enemies, the Margraves Johann and Otto of Brandenburg. (Eventually, centuries later, the territory around this fortress would fall completely into Brandenburg hands. This was the Prussia in which the Margraves of Brandenburg eventually became Kings.)
Things ended badly for Heinrich: he won territory and lost it; there were family troubles, war among his sons, the oldest of whom is known to history as Albrecht the Degenerate. But here Heinrich appears as he might have in better times, even a little further cleaned up for 1900-ish taste, in the Dresden Princes' Procession. This is a hundred-yard long representation of Saxon rulers from 1127 to 1904, all done in Meissen porcelain tiles, along an outer wall of the Dresden palace complex.
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| Heinrich the Illustrious, from the Princes' Procession in Dresden. Photo, Wiki Commons. |
Much of the palace complex is recent reconstruction, but the Princes' Procession is the original; it came through the firestorm of the Dresden bombing without much harm. Hey, it's porcelain, it's been fired already.
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Here along the edge of Tempelhof, as Walther von der Vogelweide would have said, the green meadow has been plowed up and the greenwood cut down; and these days, not even the waters flow as they used to. The Tempelhof church was originally set between four little lakes, only two of which remain. There used to be another of these kettle lakes--dead-ice lakes, one says in German, made when the retreating glaciers left a block of ice behind--down at the bottom of Franckepark, the next in the chain of pleasant parks that starts by the Templar church. Most of the Franckepark lake disappeared when the construction of the Teltowkanal drained water out of the neighborhoods. (Though who knows, it may come back. The water table is rising again in Berlin, as less water is pumped out for the city systems: the thirsty old heavy industry has been replaced by things like media firms and software developers and government offices that don't do much with water except fill their coffee machines and flush their low-flow toilets.)
There's a little deer park in the hollow where the kettle lake in Franckepark used to be. (Deer are not such suburban vermin in Germany as in the US, I think; it is still thought charming to see them in parks.)
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| Deer in Franckepark, December 2014. My photo. |
There are two big industrial streets along here past the deer park. One is Oberlandstrasse, where the UFA film studios were (think movies like Metropolis and Blue Angel, and rafts of forgettables like the ones that Archangel's grandfather played in). There were German television studios and archives still here until fairly recently, but they seem to have moved away after a disastrous fire in 1999 took out the archives (nothing saved, to speak of; irreplaceable losses of older video footage).
The other big industrial street, which is part of my close-to-the-canal route, is Teilestrasse (named for the tough local folks who survived the Thirty Years' War in Tempelhof). The buildings that front on Teilestrasse also back on the Teltowkanal, and you can't actually get down to the water. Even the Teilestrasse fronts are not always so accessible: lots of wall and fence along here, grown up wild in silver lace vine:
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| Along Teilestrasse, December 2014. My photo. |
Not all these buildings are occupied now, though some of them are flourishing. Building materials, metal-bending work, that sort of thing. In the length of Teilestrasse I meet exactly one other woman, everyone else on the street is male, mostly of the big-guy-in-blue-overall type.
Somewhere back along this stretch of the canal and Teilestrasse is an enormous chocolate factory, built just before World War I. That is, the original was built then; it burnt down in a spectacular blaze in 1922 that lasted three days and two nights and left nothing. What a truly terrible time to lose your plant, even if it was adequately insured: hyperinflation is just taking off, the French are about to occupy the main industrial district in Germany, resulting in a general strike, and how can you get foreign exchange to pay for your raw materials when the German currency is essentially worthless? By late 1923 the exchange rate is four trillion marks to a dollar. But by late 1923 the new factory is also up and running, on the ashes of the old along the Teltowkanal. Ach, the persistence, the work, the force of character ... The heroism of managers is underrated. And then in another twenty years the place burns again, though only partially this time. What may be worse in 1945 is that the raw material inventory and much of the machinery are taken away by the occupying forces. But by the late forties the plant is running again. We are still here, as the Teile family might have said. Now the building waits for new renters, since the chocolate production was consolidated in a plant a couple of neighborhoods to the south--the village that was the last outpost of the Templar commandery, as it happens.
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And then there is the great object on Teilestrasse, the gantry crane of the United Berlin Coal Dealers (Vaubeka, die Vereinigte Berliner Kohlenhändler). What a fantastic thing this is, a crouching animal along the wintry street:
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| Vaubeka crane, Teilestrasse, December 2014. My photo. |
Then we come to a bit of a park under a freeway ramp, and then back to the water at last, at Tempelhofer Weg. There's a fine industrial view back along the canal to the west:
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| Along Teltowkanal at Tempelhofer Weg, December 2014. My photo. |
... and here is the water at last, the canal looking much like itself again, to the east of the bridge.
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| Teltowkanal at Tempelhofer Weg, December 2015. My photo. |
And here's a very decent sort of footpath along the south bank, in a little park strip where the winter trees show their structure.
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| Tree along Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo. |
But mein Gott, what is that smell that has been in the air ever since the bridge and becomes more intense as we go along here? It is something like scorched, rotting coffee grounds. Bad coffee gone bad, so to speak. Possibly it is time to head for the transit and go home.
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Information on Tschirnhaus (also called Tschirnhausen) transformations from http://mathworld.wolfram.com/TschirnhausenTransformation.html
Other sources: German Wikipedia articles on Böttger, Tschirnhaus, Tempelhof, Oberlandstrasse, Teilestrasse.
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