Panke 2

A Few Words of Polabian

How fresh the mornings are now. Mist over the sun until late morning; sweet air in mid-city--new leaves, daffodils, primroses, forsythia. A little waft of currywurst in the air by midday. (Signature Berlin street food, awful stuff.)

Forsythia along the Panke, April 2014. My photo.

This is the first time I have lived in a place where the spring was so generous. In the mid-to-northern US, autumn is fabulously beautiful, but spring includes a lot of raw winds, pelting icy rains, and maybe snow on May Day. But here it is the autumn that is inhumane, and spring is so charming you can hardly believe it’s honest. 

When I walk to the S-Bahn in the morning, rabbits hop softly through the shrubbery and across the neighborhood lawns.... Though when I say rabbit, the image that comes to mind is different from what I see now by my back door. Where I grew up in Colorado we had big tough high-plains jackrabbits with a kick like the kick of a rifle. If you caught one and tried to hang onto it, it could break your arm. What we have here in central Berlin are bunnies. Little soft lolloping fertility-symbol rabbits like the ones in Renaissance paintings.

**

The S-Bahn takes us back (almost) to the river Panke. Here we go through the grove of cherry trees by the station, over the ex-border from old West Berlin into old East Berlin, from Wedding into Pankow. 

When I was first in Berlin, place-names like Pankow and Treptow and Gatow and Kladow puzzled me. German pronunciation is terrifically rule-following, and according to the rules these places ought to be pronounced Pankoff and Treptoff and so on, but they aren’t. They’re Pank-oh, Trep-toe, etc.

It’s a reminder of how non-German Berlin is. The oldest layer of population here is ethnically and linguistically Slavic, not German. The original inhabitants were Sorbian-speakers and Polabian-speakers--German-speakers came later--and these names ending in -ow are Slavic names that have never been fully Germanized. (Polabian is an extinct language, but Sorbian is not; you can still hear a little Sorbian programming on the radio, and we know people from the area whose grandparents were Sorbian-speakers not German-speakers.)

The name of the river, in fact, the Panke, comes from a Polabian word. The linguists are uncertain which Polabian word, however. So who knows what this looked like to the namers of the river and what they meant to say about it--how long ago, fourteen hundred years? A long time.

                                   Along the Panke in Pankow, April 2014. My photo.

And now we are sauntering through pleasant park stretches in the old East--which is not so very different from old West Berlin any more, but you can still sort of tell which side of the vanished Wall you're on. On this side there are yellow streetcars humming and nattering along the streets. (The old West is mostly not streetcar territory; it has more fast light rail.) The streets are sometimes very small. (Aaaugh, this is a one-car-wide underpass under the train tracks, and that means one car, not one car plus a pedestrian). It is quiet. The besetting local crime is vandalism. (Our old-West neighborhood, by contrast, is the bicycle-theft champion of Berlin.) 

**
Pankow is where the leaders of the occupying Russian army set up housekeeping after World War II--ah, nice villas, somehow the bombs missed them!--and the East German government leaders followed suit. (This had not been a tough poor area like Wedding before the war, it had been a neighborhood of big industrialists' villas and factories.) So "Pankow" came to be a figure of speech designating the Communist government. The Polabians--whatever they may have meant by the "Pank-" root--would have been surprised. 

Konrad Adenauer, who was the chancellor of Germany forever when we were children (it's as if Eisenhower had been President for fifteen years) never referred to the East German government as "the East German government." He always called them "the bosses in Pankow." Or, to be exact, he called them "the bosses in Pankoff"--meaning (a) they are not a legitimate government, and (b) they are not legitimate Germans because they can't even pronounce their own neighborhood correctly. (Adenauer was a Rhinelander, and probably like other Rhinelanders we know, had doubts that Berlin should ever have been included in Germany in the first place--at least, in any Germany that included the Rhine. It was a great mistake in the nineteenth century, says an elderly Rhenish acquaintance. We should never have joined up with Berlin. It's out on the border of Siberia.)

**
Linguistic-cultural-ethnic allegiances are complex things, and people's lives take strange courses through the traps and the shelters that these allegiances offer. From college days, when I studied medieval England, I dimly remember a standard reader for medieval English literature that was put together by a professor at the University of Michigan. (A moderately distinguished Chaucer scholar, now dead.) I find, here, that his family had owned one of the grander villas in Pankow, some way back from the river.

Villa Garbaty, Pankow. Photo by Dguendel, Wiki commons.

So someone of White-Russian-German-Jewish background finds refuge in Chaucer. The elderly Japanese Chaucer scholar I met in the early 70s found refuge in English poetry when, as a patriotic Japanese, he was overwhelmed by distress and depression at the Japanese defeat in 1945. The great German literary patriots of the early nineteenth century (Wm. von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin, and A. W. Schlegel, one of the prime creators of German Romanticism) had a passion for Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures: nineteenth-century German literary culture, in spite of its often German-nationalist flavor, owes significant debts to the Bhagavad-Gita. Literature is a forest, the roots interlock over long distances and hold the world together, like the tree roots holding the bank in place on the Landwehrkanal.

The family in the villa made their money from a big cigarette factory, a block or so from the villa. In the 1930s, of course, they lost the property to the Nazis with their crazed fantasies of ethnic-national purity. Sensibly, like my father-in-law in similar circumstances, most of the family fled to the US. The Michigan Chaucer scholar might have put in a claim for the East Berlin property after reunification--some people in similar situations did--but he did not. Let it find a good use, he said. Let the past be past. He donated some money for the restoration.

The villa is now the Lebanese embassy. The old cigarette factory is now luxury apartments. 

A no-smoking building, I believe.

**

We come to the Panke Basin, where the water backs up in pleasant lagoons and is drained off to the Havel (and perhaps elsewhere) when there is danger of high water. 

Along the Panke Basin. April 2014, my photo.

This bike path along the Panke is part of a long cross-country path, a fine summer run from Berlin to Usedom (a part-German part-Polish island just off the Baltic coast). In another month or so the path will be busier. Now there are just local travelers: bicyclists with briefcases, bicyclists with groceries, older couples spreading out picnic lunches, their bicycles leaned against the trees. A few riders are perhaps heading farther; a young man spins by with serious luggage in the saddle-bags and a guitar on his back.

**

The river is a little bigger north of here, before the water is split up and sent off into drains. It has more of a voice, chuckling and bubbling over the occasional stone or fallen branch. Soon we will be out in the country.

Panke 1

Stinky River

It’s spring! and we’re going upriver. Following the little river Panke from central Berlin up to the northern border and into the Brandenburg countryside, where we will probably get lost trying to find the source of the river. (This is a longer trip than the two canals in the previous posts; the Panke is about 29 km.)

The idea of walking upriver instead of down is that the river-mouth is easier to find, and if you just keep going you should get to the source. Doesn't necessarily work, because sometimes you get forced away from the waterside (walls, highways, etc.) and have a hard time getting back. I've been almost at the source of the Panke before, but the time I came closest, I got off track because some joker out in Brandenburg had turned a crossroad sign around so it pointed the wrong way. The wrong direction turned out to be at least as interesting as the right one, but I've never made it to the beginning of the river yet. 

Have I even made it to the river-mouth? What you see in the picture below is often called the Panke mouth, but strictly speaking it isn't.  The last stretch of the river, where it goes into the Spree, was closed off and paved over in the nineteenth century (when it stank like a sewer--it was popularly called the Stinkepanke--and hence it was not a very welcome landscape feature in center city). The water was diverted to the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrftskanal here at Nordhafen (see March post, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 2). 

Panke mouth at Nordhafen. Photo, Axel Mauruszat. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pankemuendung_Nordhafen.jpg

Much of the original course of the the south end of the Panke has been opened up again, but the last bit, where it goes into the Spree, is still down in the sewers. This is not a sewer tour, so.... no photo of the alternative mouth.

**

The late winter and early spring have been warm and dry, and the water in the Panke--which rarely amounts to much--is very low. The river is trashy in the stretch north of Nordhafen, almost as much trash as water in some places. It gets a bit more respectable-looking here where the banks have been walled with brick and the water doesn't seep away so much.

Along the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

We're going up through Wedding (including, for purposes of discussion,  Gesundbrunnen, which is the eastern half of the old Wedding district, given a separate existence when the Berlin districts were shuffled and re-cut in 2001). Wedding enjoys the distinction of being one of the two worst neighborhoods in Berlin, according to the latest edition of the Berlin Social Structure Atlas (a city project that collects and analyzes demographic data, micro-neighborhood by micro-neighborhood; the new edition has just appeared).

I like Wedding. A lot. I'm up here fairly often; and I don't mean to underplay the difficulties of life here--the neighborhood has plenty of problems. But for those of us who have lived in more dysfunctional places, it's one of the marvels of Berlin that it doesn't get any worse than this. In the worst place you could end up living here, you can still walk alone in the parks. The neighborhood isn't full of burned-out housing, the residents aren't mostly huddling behind locked doors. The streets are full of people, there is lively commerce, shop after shop spilling fifth-hand goods out onto the sidewalk or setting out a few rickety battered tables and chairs where the elders of the neighborhood can nurse a cup of coffee and supervise the passersby. There is some degree to which society still works here; it's seriously troubled but it's not mortally pathological. The likelihood that you will be held up at gunpoint is really quite low. (And people do not even find this remarkable.)

 Having said this, let us invoke charms against the Evil Eye.

Along the Panke in Gesundbrunnen, March 2014. My photo.

This is graffiti-artist territory. Here on the river-wall is a sad blue dinosaur that looks like a child's painting, and beside it some Germanic Bartleby has written in neat black script:

     "My day does not have as many seconds in it as I would 
      need to say no. No. No." 

Here is the back wall of an apartment house along the river.  

Along the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

Which raises questions, of course. This is bright and interesting for passers-by, but if I were living in this building, would I want all the graffiti on my back wall? Nah, not all that much. Our Hausmeister scrubs off the tags when they appear. (Some neighborhood wit sprayed on a building down the street from us: Graffiti are not art. Architecture is art.)  

But even if I don't want it on house walls--and I really wish people wouldn't deface the trains--I think I'd as soon have this on an underpass as have nothing but bare concrete:

Along the Panke.  March 2014, my photo.

What's so great about bare concrete? I'm not in love with bare concrete. 

**

Especially where the city is dense and various, the past dozes in the back courtyards, or the sun catches it now and then at a street corner--and so for a moment, at a turn of the river, we are not so far from the eighteenth century when this was all countryside and the king and his court rode here to hunt. (All right, the river would have slopped around in a less engineered-looking way then, but still--this is pretty countrified for being in the most populous sub-district of center city. Only the disembowelled shopping cart at the bottom of the picture reminds us where we are now.)

The Panke in Gesundbrunnen. March 2014, my photo.

One warm day, as the story goes, the king was riding out here on the hunt and stopped to ask for a glass of water at a mill along the Panke. The water was extraordinarily refreshing, he said. The court apothecary investigated and found (allegedly) healthful minerals in it, and so a little spa grew up here along the river late in the eighteenth century. Gesundbrunnen, the spring of health. (What did the miller's wife do with the glass? What became of the mill?)

The spa flourished for a while, it was never a big place. Not the sort of spa where the whole European nobility came to stroll and gamble, like Baden-Baden or Karlsbad, but a pleasant spot for the local upper classes to de-stress. I would guess the specimens of fancy brick-work that cluster near Badstrasse belong to the later days of the spa.

On Badstrasse near the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

The spring itself (the health spring, the Gesundbrunnen) was accidentally choked in the process of sewer-building in the 1880s, and so the spa came to an end. The neighborhood was already going downhill. Cheap beer-gardens, cheap gambling, cheap prostitution. (But shouldn't there be cheap pleasures as well as expensive ones?) Then came disastrously crammed, insanitary workers' housing, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis. Gesundbrunnen.

It makes you think of one of those terrifying cold sonnets from Rilke's Paris years--which are more terrifying in the German (see end of post): the unobtrusive rhyme and meter in the German move the lines forward like Fate wearing socks, walking up behind you so quietly that you don't know it's there until the sestet, and you don't know it has a weapon until the last line or two. 

As a king on the hunt might take a glass
to drink from, any glass--
and as, afterwards, whoever owned it
would put it away and keep it safe, as if it were not just any glass, 

so perhaps thirsty Fate raised 
this woman to his mouth and drank,
and a cramped small life, too fearful of 
breaking her, set her aside from use,

set her back in the anxious vitrine
where it kept its treasures
(or the things it thought were such).

There she stood, alien, like something lent away,
and she grew old and blind
and was no treasure and was never rare.

Cherry trees in bloom, Wollankstrasse, March 2014. My photo.

We come to the S-Bahn tracks, and it's time to call it a day and pick up the path again later. The cherries are in bloom now by the Wollankstrasse station. The Berlin Wall used to run along here, after it turned east at the end of the Invalidenfriedhof (see March post, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 1) and then turned north again.

Land use planning question (suitable for exams in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses): What do you do with a disused border between formerly hostile states, after the walls and the watchtowers have been knocked down and the barbed wire has been rolled up and taken away? Suggest a use for the space. Justify your answer. 

Model answer: Lay out a good bicycle path and plant ten thousand cherry trees. Justification (as given for certain land-use provisions in the Berlin legal code): Because it is beautiful.

Cherry trees in bloom, Wollankstrasse, March 2014. My photo.

**

So wie der König auf der Jagd ein Glas
ergreift, daraus zu trinken, irgendeines,--
and wie hernach der welcher es besaß
es fortstellt und verwahrt als war es keines:

so hob vielleicht das Schicksal, durstig auch,
bisweilen Eine an den Mund und trank,
die dann ein kleines Leben, viel zu bang,
sie zu verbrechen, abseits vom Gebrauch

hinstellte in die ängsliche Vitrine,
in welcher seine Kostbarkeiten sind
(oder die Dinge, die für kostbar gelten).

Da stand sie fremd wie eine Fortgeliehne,
und wurde einfach alt und wurde blind
und war nicht kostbar und war niemals selten.

   Rilke, "Ein Frauen-Schicksal," Neue Gedichte

Academic Questions 4: Career paths

The German for “career path” is “Laufbahn,” but the English and German terms don’t give exactly the same picture of your course through life. A path can wind around in the woods, you can lose it and find it. A Laufbahn is not like this. In German, the Bahn is the railroad. A Rennbahn is a race track; a speed-skating raceway is an Eisschnelllaufbahn. Your way along a Bahn doesn’t wander, you can’t find it and lose it and find it again.

In the US you can wander casually into and out of many kinds of work, in a way that is not so possible in Germany. Let’s say that in the US you want to set up a shoe-repair shop. According to various online recommendations, you should hunt around to find someone who will show how to do the work, or maybe you can find a course somewhere. Then you figure out, by whatever means you can, how to produce some sort of business plan. and figure out, by whatever means you can, what sort of government paperwork is required before you open your doors. Stumble along, find your path through the woods.

In Germany there is a standard formal apprenticeship and licensing process. If you’re going to put new heels on people’s shoes you have to pass a theoretical exam that includes knowledge of the anatomy of the human foot, as well as knowledge of relevant regulations and business practices. You also have to pass a practical exam after doing your apprenticeship. It’s like getting on a train that goes down a track that is already laid out, it’s not like finding your way through the woods.

The track that takes you through an academic career in Germany has some problems: it’s been under attack recently, because the early stages of the academic Laufbahn are not attractive here; it’s a reason why talented young German researchers leave the country and talented young non-German researchers don’t come. So Germany has been starting to re-lay the tracks on this particular railroad. But it's difficult.

Of course money is part of the problem: especially in professional fields (business, law, medicine), the pay is not as high in German universities as it is in the US. But I think other problems—independence and uncertainty for young scholars—loom as large as the differences in expected salaries.

Promising young scholars are often eager to be independent when they finish their Ph.D.s. They want to escape the bossiness of their dissertation committees. They want to pursue their own questions by their own means. But they are usually not completely ready to do this yet: they need advice and assistance. So how does the system cope with these contradictory demands for independence and help?

American culture has a strong independence myth, and so young scholars are officially independent. Their actual dependence is dealt with informally on the side. As an Assistant Professor, in theory, you’re on your own: no one supervises your research or (except for purposes of coordinating multi-section courses) your teaching. In practice, if you’re not too unlucky or socially incompetent, various senior people will adopt you and forward you and sacrifice their time to help with your projects.

German culture, in contrast, has a strong myth of order and hierarchy; and so, at least in the past, the theory has been that young scholars are firmly supervised. Independent action exists informally, on the side. German society has loosened up in this respect in the last generation or two but I can remember, in Bavaria in the 1970s, when the hierarchical myth was so strong that it seemed shocking to respectable society for a group of students to rent an apartment together, just as a group of equals. Communists! Anarchists! No one is in charge! The right thing was for students to live in properly organized dormitories or in spare rooms in grown-ups’ houses or apartments, where someone was in charge. (There were actually cases of people being booted out of civil service jobs because it was discovered that, as students, they had lived in roommate groups. I know what having roommates is all about, said my Munich landlord. No private property. Group sex. Don’t try to tell me anything different.) So when you finish a Ph.D. in Germany, the traditional expectation was, not that you would be independent, but that you would be working for a senior scholar who would employ you on his or her projects. This is not attractive to young scholars who have projects of their own in mind. 

In the last several years in Germany, a number of positions called Junior Professor (untenured) have been created. If you're very good, you might be able to get one of these soon after you finish your Ph.D., instead of working for years as some senior professor’s slave. The tricky thing about this, however, is that you can come to the end of your untenured Junior Professorship with an excellent record, but you can be dead meat because there isn’t a full professorship open in your field at the right moment. The tracks may not connect in the right way to move you along in your personal Laufbahn.

Let’s suppose that in the US you are an ambitious young person trained in a good Ph.D. program, and you get an excellent first job. If you do spectacularly well, you can simply stay at the the excellent university, becoming an Associate Prof and then a full Prof. In Germany you can’t stay where you’ve been; you typically have to move to become a tenured Prof, and you have to wait until a position opens somewhere. It’s not a question of how good you are, it’s a question of when a relevant senior person retires or drops dead. (This is true for Assistant Profs in the US in fields where supply significantly exceeds demand; but once you're an Assistant you have a chance at continuity.) Or possibly a senior person will move, but they don’t do that so often in Germany. There isn’t much of a senior labor market. (See end of post for a little more on this.)

There’s plenty of insecurity in US academic career paths as well, but the nature of it is different. Of course the likelihood is that you won’t do spectacularly well when you start out. If you begin as an Assistant Prof at a very good US school you probably won’t get tenure there. So you move on to an Assistant Prof or Associate Prof position at another school; and here is where the US career path starts to look like one of those tracks through the woods that fades and divides. (I recently wrote an evaluation letter for someone’s fourth attempt at tenure. That makes a good twenty-five years of being an Assistant Prof, at four different schools.) If the research career doesn’t work out at all, you can move down to a non-research school. 

In Germany I think it’s easier to fall right off the tracks of the Laufbahn like a derailed train. For one thing, you can’t go on and on getting new Junior Professorships; you may not even be able to go on and on getting new positions as a WiMi (wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter, the traditional post-Ph.D. position, in which you work for a senior Prof). Moreover, many of the German Ph.D. programs like to bring students in straight from their previous degree program, without sending them out into the world for work experience first, because there’s too much fear the students won’t come back once they leave. But if you don’t have the work experience, then you aren’t legally qualified to teach in the non-research universities in Germany (Fachhochschulen). If you fall off the research-university track, there’s nowhere in academia to go.

At least one German university recently converted to the American system (Assistant, Associate, and Full Professors). It will be interesting to see how this works and whether the practice spreads.

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Two footnotes

About the academic labor market: Why is there not as active a senior-faculty labor market in Germany as in the US? One reason is that salaries are greatly constrained by the national civil-service grades, and teaching loads are constrained by state laws. A university cannot go very far in tempting some big name away from another university by offering him or her a lot more money or different working conditions. The other reason is that, compared to US universities, German universities do not conceive of themselves so strongly as competing with one another. In the absence of such competition, why would a university want to nab an established professor from another university? Even if you could do it, what would be the point, as long as you have competent people in the fields that you need to cover? When you hire a Professor in the first place, you want to get the best person you can, of course. After that … is it the best use of the universities’ time and money to engage in bidding wars for senior talent? Does it add to social welfare and total scholarly achievement? Not a lot, so why should it be encouraged? And there are not so many professional administrators trying to build careers by raiding other schools. (This has its good and bad side; more on the lack of professional administrators later.)

About language: Life in different languages feels different, partly because the meanings that are available, the things you can pin down in words, are not the same from one language to another. But also, even when the meanings in a strict definitional sense are the same, the feeling around the meanings, the pictures that cluster around the meanings of words, are different. Laufbahn and career path are somewhat like this. Another example: the German phrase for “it occurred to me” is “es ist mir eingefallen.” The two phrases mean the same thing, but they make different pictures.  “Occur,” in the Latin root, means “to run up to,” and einfallen means (among other things) “to fall in or on.” So as you walk through the woods of the world in English, ideas run up to you like little furry animals. If you’re walking through the woods in German the ideas fall on you like ripe fruit.