London Interlude

London River

I'm behindhand with posts. Three international trips in six weeks, lots to do, not always friendly circumstances. (Six inches of snow in Denver in mid-May, flooding that closed the highway I needed to use, etc. etc.--no walking by the water here, the river wanted to eat you alive.) But I am finally back in Berlin and should have a couple of quiet months here now.

**

I had one short job to do in London in mid-April and another at the end of the month. So, over the Channel we go, in mid-month, and I seem to have fallen asleep somewhere over the Continent--but then I look down and we're headed straight up the Thames Estuary.

This is Heathrow, of course we're in a holding pattern, says the Lufthansa pilot, in a tone of resigned disapproval (the same tone in which the Lufthansa pilot says, This is Shanghai, of course we won't have an on-time departure). So we tilt and circle, and once or twice I can see a densely-bridged stretch of the river that must be in central London, though we're still fairly high up and the details are hazy.

Thames, Tower Bridge, London. Photo, Daniel J. Maxwell, Wiki Commons.

The underground train from the airport into central London is packed; I am squashed in beside a heavily perfumed pair of Royal Jordanian crew members. How beautiful they are, a man and a woman with faces like Achaemenid Persian sculptures in dark gold; they are reading the Daily Mirror in a desultory way, passing the paper back and forth. Aaagh, the British tabloid press. The headline on the page that laps over toward me is, "Perv Videos, Sex with Dog." (There'll always be an England, but is this a good thing?)

It's more than forty years now since the first time I was in London. Hitchhiked in from the West Country with a friend, then. Somewhere after the fruit-juice delivery man in Somerset, somewhere after the wait in a damp wind near Stonehenge, we picked up a long ride with a race-car driver. So we got across the south of England fast and bagged the last beds at the Bloomsbury YWCA, which no longer exists. And good riddance, in a sense: mein Gott, how that place smelled, you had to hold your breath in some parts of the building so as not to be overcome with nausea. I don't know where the smell came from; it wasn't the cooking, which took a strong stomach but had a different smell. Baked beans and chopped-up spaghetti for breakfast, horrible stuff. 

This was also the London where you could get wonderful theater seats for half a pound. I saw (twice) a young Ian McKellen as Hamlet (and how old McKellen is now, playing Gandalf in all those hobbit movies, how can so much time have passed?). The Hamlet was an almost uncut production that meant a mad run afterward to the Y, to make it in before the iron-hard curfew. I learned how to push in crowds, for the first time in my life (no real experience with such things in Colorado). This was probably as good for me as seeing a classy production of Hamlet.

The friend had to go back to the US before I did, and I stayed in the Y for another week (gasp, retch). I shared the room with Yorkshire shopgirls who might have been speaking Uzbek, for all I could understand of their talk. I sat in Russell Square on gray days, reading Henry James and eating ripe blackberries by the boxful, sharing space with the mad old women who fed the birds. 

I took the boats up and down the river. Down, somewhere east of Tower Bridge; up, all the way to Hampton Court and back on a perfect September day, through the boaty suburbs where people were getting home from work on a Friday evening and getting out on the river. Lawns that ran down to the water, with cream teas on the lawns. Little sailboats with red sails on the river. Messing about in boats. It seemed incredibly wonderful.

The Thames at Richmond, 1895. Wiki Commons.

Archangel and I were away from London for a long time after the 1970s. We finally came back in the early 90s and stayed with a friend in Richmond. The friend, who used to work on things like famine relief in Cambodia, was working for a big software firm by then. Everything had changed, the city had washed its face and had big money, and there were homeless young people sleeping on the sidewalks everywhere. 

**

How deep the London underground is, how complicated the passages from platform to platform, down little winding corridors lined with what looks like cracked bathroom tile. (How unlike Berlin--our neighborhood underground line is really only just underground: if you're at the station entrance and hear the train coming into the station, you can take a flying leap down the stairs and catch it--at least, you can do this if you're still young enough to take flying leaps, which I am not.) Here in London, the escalators go on forever--oh, I know it's not as deep as the metro in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but I still feel a bit like a Jules Verne character in Journey to the Center of the Earth, as I head for the surface again. 

Up up up we go on the escalators into central London, past endless theater posters. (Germany does not have this brilliant proliferation of private-sector theater.)  Out of the underground, into the maze of little medieval streets. Gate Street, Remnant Street. Two derelicts are arguing drunkenly at the turn of Gate Street.  I'm jollier than you are. You are not. I'm jollier. No I am ... See, I made you laugh! I'm jollier than you are!

Noise, crowds, auto exhaust. The streets going down toward LSE, where I have a long day of meetings tomorrow, are being torn to pieces; the sidewalks are ripped up, the facades are covered with scaffolding. (Part of this, I discover later, is work following an underground electrical fire early in April that was fed by a gas leak and burned under the street for two days, sending flames shooting up from the manholes.)

It's a lovely piece of the city all the same, there are always sweet, still places. This is the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields; I am being put up by my excellent hosts on the west side, somewhere among the deconstruction.

Lincoln's Inn Fields. My photo, April 2015.

There's nothing on my schedule this evening, and the spring evenings are long. Time to walk by the water. 

It isn't far to the river: I bumble through LSE, through the tiny lanes and steps, to the Strand. The street layout here comes from a world not only long before cars but even before horse-carriages, a world with no need for space in which to move large wheeled objects rapidly. The Strand is a fairly big street, but two of the great baroque churches that dot this part of the city, the so-called island churches of St.-Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, sit slap in the middle of the street, with the traffic dividing around them as best it can. 

The late afternoon has turned dark, with cloud off the sea. The street is shadowed and seems full of sound instead of light; they're change-ringing at St. Clement's, with a tremendous peal that multiplies itself in the tight-packed city, echoing from stone to stone.

     Oranges and lemons, 
     Say the bells of St. Clement's.

     You owe me five farthings,
     Say the bells of St. Martin's.

How wonderful they are, the Wren churches. I love the names: St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Lawrence Jewry, St. Peter Upon Cornhill, St. Martin Within Ludgate. I love the Portland stone: that white-gray limestone from which big things in London are built: the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Bank of England, the National Gallery, and this string of pale, chaste, Anglican-Baroque churches in the City and Westminster.  Wren built more than fifty churches here, in the desolation after the Great Fire. The exteriors must all have been black as sin in the days of coal fires, but they've been cleaned up since--and what a wonderful color the Portland stone is, what shall we call this color? Subtly different from my other favorite limestone city, Chicago, built of Blue Bedford stone from the Indiana quarries. This is cream-tea color, perhaps.

Looking down Fleet Street toward St. Clement Danes. Photo, Victor Grigas, Wiki Commons.

The dragon on the column in the picture above is one of about a dozen that guard the entrances to the City. The dragons aren't old, they're modern fantasy layered into the old city. The dragon in Fleet Street, in the picture above, is a late-Victorian creation (1880), and most of the boundary dragons date from the 1960s. The pair on Victoria Embankment, which I pass on my way downriver, are the oldest, from the mid-nineteenth century; they used to be decorations on the Coal Exchange building, over toward the Tower, where the massive coal shipments that kept the city heated and powered and lethally filthy were bought and sold and taxed. (The dragons were saved and moved over to the Embankment in the 1960s, when the Coal Exchange was torn down to widen the street. The London coal business was perhaps by then not what it used to be, after a murderous smog in the early fifties killed over four thousand people in a few days, and coal fires were subsequently restricted.) 

Boundary dragon, Victoria Embankment. My photo, April 2015.

The city tax on coal funded the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including the building of St. Paul's and the other Wren churches. The coal tax also funded the building of the Thames Embankment in the nineteenth century, which replaced marshy ground with the stone-foundation bank that I am strolling along at the moment.

Actually I am on the Thames Path, which opened in 1996: 184 miles of footpath from the river's source in the Cotswolds down to Greenwich. (Thank you, National Trails.) It's nice to see pedestrianism coming back; I don't know why our parents' generation was so fixated on cars, so determined to regard landscapes as drive-through experiences. 

The generation before them still walked. Often (and especially when I am back in England) I think of two old men I met at the beginning of the 1970s. One was a historian who had been a Rhodes scholar in the mid-1920s, a rural Kansas boy doing a year or two at Oxford that opened up the world for him. In the summer he and a couple of friends took a boat across the Channel and walked from the Low Countries to Italy. Along the roads that hardly had cars on them yet; just horses and wagons, summer dust, winding ways through the fields and towns. Roads still lined with trees to give shade to the travelers on foot or on horseback. 

Lost worlds. The trees are gone along the highways, cut down to widen the roads and reduce the number of objects against which out-of-control cars can crash. (There are still roads like this here and there, though, espeically in central Europe: if you're walking across the country, through the woods and fields in Brandenburg, or Meck-Pomm or any number of places, you can tell when you're coming to a road, because you can see a double line of trees on some relatively high stretch of ground, where the road would not be too muddy.) 

Sycamore allee near Kröpelin (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). Photo by C. Pagenkopf, Wiki Commons.

The other old man I think of was someone I met in Scotland, when he was having a look over the territory where he used to go walking on holidays. One more look, he said, before he went into hospital for a risky operation. 

He was full of memories, of course--and what were the memories that stuck with people like this, the things they would want to tell to a young person, chance-met or slight acquaintance?

It was all about World War I. They had lived through World War II as well, but it mattered less, it left less trace. You get in a rush later, your life leaves less impression on you. I remember the historian, who was still a boy during the first war, talking about seeing military parades in his little town in Kansas (parades that said, look what we're sending to Europe!). One parade included a primitive tank that got stuck in the pertinacious Kansas mud and had to be pulled out by horses. 

The great memory for the hiker in Scotland was of being a very junior British diplomat at the Versailles peace conference. Eager, frustrated, lost, exhilarated---what is so enthralling as to have a hand in making bad history? 

What would we talk about in twenty years, if some passing young person was inclined to listen? I have no idea. I met an old Frenchwoman on a long flight in the 70s, who told me about walking with her mother in the streets of a Paris suburb during the First World War, hearing the guns when the Germans were close. Her mother had a long lilac-colored dress that brushed the gravel path; brush, brush went the dress on the gravel in the September afternoon, and crump went the artillery. Perhaps the Germans would be in the city soom, perhaps everything would change; perhaps not. Brush brush. Crump. 

**

Well, things do change. The wars are past, for the time being. There's been a lot of building in London since the 70s, or even the 90s, and not everyone likes it. There was considerable opposition to the glassy tower here (by Renzo Piano), which was finished in 2012 and is popularly known as "the Shard." It's the tallest building in Europe, and it was being plunked down in what had stayed a pretty low-rise city for a long time. So I understand the hesitations about it, but what a lovely thing it is. Look how it shines in the clouded sea-light, how it changes, moment to moment, as the day dwindles into a gray April twilight.

Blackfriars Bridge and the Shard. My photo, April 2015.

I'm not sure it has turned out to be a very successful investment project; the office floors were slow to find occupants. But then, the state of Qatar owns a majority share of the building (it houses al-Jazeera's biggest operation outside Qatar), and presumably the state is in the investment for the long term.

**

The path is on the other side of the river from the Shard, in the financial district proper. I have not seen so many men in dark suits and ties--or such overwhelmingly male gatherings--since I do not know when. It's about half past five, and the young bankers and lawyers are having their afternoon pints, oblivious to the beginnings of a fine rain. A few of them are startlingly, incapably drunk; most not. 

Pub along the Thames. My photo, April 2015.

Relative to Berlin, that swampy tabletop, London is a hilly place: you go up from the river, up little steep streets or stairs. I can see Tower Bridge up ahead, which was about as far as I meant to go, and this rather secretive-looking set of steps going off to the left is tempting as a turnaround place. Where will this go? To one of the sweet places in the city.

The street sign says I am going up St. Dunstan's Hill, presumably there is a St. Dunstan's church somewhere up here--and so there is.  

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

What a great builder Christopher Wren was. This tower and needle-spire are his, added to the medieval church when it was patched up in the 1690s, after the Great Fire. The tower and spire still stood when all the rest of the church had to be taken down and rebuilt from the ground up in the eighteen-teens, because the roof was too heavy for the supporting walls. The walls had stood for a long time, but the roof had pushed them so far out of true that it was only a matter of time until they collapsed. 

The tower and spire still stood when most of the church was destroyed by a bomb hit in the 1940s. The interior, open to the sky, has been turned into a garden: there is a flowering cherry, a few palm trees, a green lawn, a lot of quiet in the April twilight.

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

But it's time to go back to drunken-banker-world and grab an early supper, and get back to the hotel to check through the presentation for tomorrow morning. So, let's take a more inland route, along Eastcheap, and see what the City looks like these days.

Lots of newer buildings, I haven't been here for an age. The building popularly called the Gherkin (by Norman Foster) is a bit intrusive but lively. --A certain penny finally drops as I catch glimpses of this building down various streets. "Gherkin" (British for pickling cucumber) always seemed an odd word to me--somehow it doesn't look English. It finally dawns: the German word for cucumbers is Gurken. The word comes from German through Dutch to English. Duh.

The Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) and St Andrew Undershaft Church.
Photo, Carlos Delgado, Wiki commons.

The church in front of the Gherkin has stood here looking like this, against various backgrounds, since the sixteenth century; it's one of the very few to have survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz. 

Other things have not survived. The reason that a new building like the Gherkin could be put here is that the building previously on the site, the Baltic Exchange, was badly damaged in a terrorist attack (Provisional IRA) in 1992, and after some consideration was deemed beyond rescue and torn down.

The Baltic Exchange as an institution (not building) still exists: it's an association of some six hundred companies that control a good deal of the shipping in the world. The job of the association itself is to provide freight market prices and shipping-cost indices that are used to set rates and settle freight derivative contracts around the world. All this information used to be exchanged on a trading floor, but these days it's on a screen on your desk, if you're in that business, so the Exchange doesn't need the building. 

London always had big business with the Baltic. In medieval and Renaissance London there was a substantial settlement of Hansa merchants--that is, merchants from the semi-independent cities along the North Sea and Baltic coasts and the rivers that emptied into those seas; merchants who handled the trade in grain and furs and timber and amber, all the stuff that came and went in North-world, so different from the Mediterranean trade in oil and wine and spices.  

The Baltic Exchange was founded in the mid-eighteenth century--but not, as it happens, by people from North-world.  By Greeks, rather--later added to by members of the so-called Chian diaspora, people who fled from the island of Chios after the 1822 massacre by the Turks. (Population of Chios before the event, 100,000-120,000; population after the event, maybe 20,000. Some were killed, some sold into slavery, some fled, never to return.)

The Chians (partly Greek, partly Genoese) were merchants from way back, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the successful merchant families had been making out like bandits, moving Ukrainian grain to Western Europe, and western manufactured goods back the other way. Those who weren't at home during the massacre, or managed to get away, moved out to cities where they had long had business: Odessa, Alexandria, Trieste, Marseilles, London. 

**

I wonder how often the big prestige projects, like the Gherkin and the Shard, actually make money--or rather, for whom they make money. Swiss Re used to own the Gherkin, and unloaded it early in 2007 for about twice what they paid for it. The buyers were a British investment firm and a German property company, IVG Immobilien. Eventually the new owners couldn't meet their mortgage payments, and the property went into receivership about a year ago. IVG is seeking compensation from some former managers who were responsible for the possibly excessive price of the deal; I don't know whether they've had any luck. [http://www.propertymall.com/property-news/article/34249-IVG-seeks-compensation-from-former-managers-over-Gherkin-deal] The building was sold about six months ago to the Safra Group. The Safras are billionaire Brazilian bankers with origins in Syria and Beirut; they got their start in banking under the Ottoman Empire, by financing trade between Aleppo, Alexandria, and Istanbul--picking up some of the business that used to belong the scattered Chians, perhaps? I don't know.) 

How many diasporas have scattered people into London over the years. The Chians in the early nineteenth century, Poles and Italians in political troubles in their home countries in the middle of the century, Central Europeans fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s, among many others. And what becomes of people, in these translations from one culture to another ...? What sort of Londoners do they all make?

On the way back to my hotel I pass another Wren church.

St. Bride's, 19th century engraving, Wiki Commons.

This is St. Bride's, the Fleet Street church, with many famous parishioners, ranging from John Milton to that offshoot of the Central European diaspora, Sir Clement Freud: British celebrity chef, member of Parliament, television personality, grandson of Sigmund Freud (who fled from Vienna to London in 1938).

**

Long work day the next day, and then just time for a shorter stroll upriver early the following morning, before I head back to Berlin. (It would have been a somewhat longer stroll if I had not been stopped along the Embankment by the police, who claimed to believe I was engaging in some kind of illicit currency transaction with the young Asian visitor whom in fact I was helping to get a picture of himself in front of the London Eye. I don't even know what kind of illicit currency transactions you can have in London--there isn't a black market in pounds, is there?)  It's a beautiful, beautiful April morning, the Portland stone is white in the spring sun, and the river is full of traffic.

On the Thames, looking toward Whitehall and Charing Cross station. My photo, April 2015.

I go as far as Lambeth Palace (the Archbp of Canterbury's London residence), and cut back through the Archbishop's Park (how well the English do gardens):

Archbishop's Park, Lambeth. My photo, April 2015.

Then back over Westminster Bridge, which is starting to fill up with tour groups. What did Wordsworth, that poet of lakes and mountains, think was the most beautiful view in the world?  The one from Westminster Bridge.

    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
    A sight so touching in its majesty:
    This City now doth, like a garment, wear

    The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
    Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
    All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

The bridge is packed with operators of shell games and their eager victims.

Then back to the hotel through Whitehall Gardens (ach, I do love English gardens, they're so lush with flowers):

Primroses in Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

I pick up my bag and take the underground back from Holborn to Heathrow. In the Holborn station there is a digital screen on the wall facing the platform, which shows a weather forecast sponsored by the Tate. In Berlin, which is literal-minded, the weather forecasts provided on public transit show a sunshine/cloud icon and a predicted temperature. Here the screen says something like, A warm golden glow: the forecast today resembles Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Woman in Yellow." And the screen shows the Rosetti watercolor from the Tate, which is indeed like a glow of sunshine in the underground. When I am back a few weeks later, on a day with heavy rain forecast, it says, "Pull out your waterproof jacket, you're going to need it! This afternoon's forecast resembles The Deluge, by J.M.W. Turner." And there is a reproduction of the Turner painting on the screen.

Dahme 2

Forest, River, Streetcar

It's a gray morning in a slow spring, a few days after Easter. Some cold weeks in March stalled the season, and then there was the big storm Niklas and its sodden, occasionally snowy, aftershocks. 

The shrubbery in center city is greening up, but here--on the way from the Grünau S-Bahn station to the river--the woods still look wintry, and often the only green thing visible is the moss on fallen logs.

Near Grünau S-Bahn. My photo, April 2015.

It isn't far to the river, which looks a little bleak here, heading up deeper into these not-yet-woken woods. 

Dahme, looking upriver in Grünau.  My photo, April 2015

The Dahme is big here, and it has a big voice, unlike the near-silent canals where I have been walking in the winter. The river is wide enough to be choppy on a morning like this, and the water makes heavy lop ... lop ... sounds against the bank. And hisss and slorpp and other surprisingly warm and mammalian noises.

I am not the only walker bound upriver. A couple of tottery old dears with tiny backpacks got off just ahead of me at the Grünau station, took the shortcut ahead of me through the trees to the water, and now they're turning south, up the Dahme. They are so ancient and wobbly-looking, I keep thinking I'm going to catch up and pass them. And I do, after about an hour; they're faster than they look.

As the tottery old dears and I march south, the river fills with rowers. The principle on which this stretch of Grünau is established is the one laid down by Water Rat early in The Wind in the Willows:  "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

The house where we meet the river, which has an immense vine-tracery on it, is a Bootsattlerei, a boat-saddlery, that makes canopies and tarps and awnings and seat covers for the boats here in boat-land. 

Bootsattlerei on the Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Many of the houses that follow, along Regattastrasse, are clubhouses for sailing clubs and rowing clubs, kayaking and canoeing clubs, clubs that promote Wasserwandern--"water hiking," boating along the endless back-country waterways of this flat wet northern world. 

The houses have a spacious, 1900-ish feel to them. (The Wind in the Willows came out in 1908, the year Kenneth Grahame left his job as Secretary of the Bank of England. He had started the book some years before, not long after an unsettling incident at the bank. A person referred to in the newspapers as a "socialist lunatic" had come into the bank and offered him a rolled-up manuscript, tied with a white ribbon at one end and a black ribbon at the other. The lunatic asked Grahame to pick one end; Grahame picked the black, and the other pulled a gun out of the manuscript roll and shot at Grahame three times, at close range, without managing to hit him. --This not the great age of specialist competence in Britain: amateur central bankers, amateur assassins.) 

Here's the house of the Academic Rowing Association, the first of the clubs to establish itself out here in Grünau, in 1902. (In English if you're an academic it usually means you're a professor, but in Germany it means you have a university degree; you're a person certified as having some clearly defined semi-abstract expertise, you're not an amateur. Not like England in 1900 or so, where having been to a university meant you were a cultivated gentleman, with better manners than to display semi-abstract expertise in public.)

Akademischer Ruderverein, Regattastrasse, Grünau. My photo, April 2015. 

The Academic Rowing Association (which perhaps would not have liked to describe its activities as "messing about in boats") split in two, like so many things, during the Cold War, with the eastern half here and the western half somewhere out along the Havel, on the other side of Berlin. And like so many things, it has been glued back together again in some fashion since the 1990s.

Along the street are posters for a water-sport-fest that will happen here early next month. The poster, like the houses, evokes the 1900-ish world (ah, people want to erase the twentieth century, put it out of mind like a bad dream ... but if we go back to 1902, do we have to do it all over again?).

Poster for Wassersportfest along Regattastrasse. My photo, April 2015.

Regattastrasse shrinks into Sportpromenade, which shrinks into a sort of bicycle path. (It appears on the map as a regular street for a long way, but beyond a certain point it's blessedly closed to cars.) The boathouses have come to an end, we're on the river--or perhaps on the Long Lake by now--the shoreline is beautifully open, and the day is getting finer:

Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

The water is on my left. On my right, where the grayness of the early day still lingers, is the streetcar line and a hefty stretch of the Berlin City Forest.

Along tramline 68, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Okay, so this is not exactly the wilderness here. Ding, ding, ding goes the trolley, the 68 tram, covered with ads for a discount grocery and going too fast for a clear shot:

Tram 68, along Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I do love the 68 tram, everyone loves the 68 tram--though there is some public debate about whether this or the 61, along the north shore of the Müggelsee, is the "most beautiful tramline in Berlin."  (Do I remember any public discussions about which is the most beautiful public transit line in Denver or Chicago? Nah, and this is not just memory failure on my part. Though there were things to be said for the 147, in Chicago, or even for the Jeffery Express when it was not packed with bodies in such a third-world way that you couldn't see out the windows to the lake.) 

In one place a little further up, before we get too deep among the trees, some praiseworthy citizen has planted pansies along the tracks. (It's pansy-planting season just now; all the florists have pansy-flats piled by their doors.)

Little thought-flowers. And there is pansies, says Ophelia, that's for thoughts. Pansy/ pensée. Very small blobs of thought along the streetcar line. Usually I bring something philosophical to read on the public transit, Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, but today it's just Die Zeit, with an article about the difficulties of creating an efficient mechanical asparagus harvester.

Along the 68 line, Grünau.  My photo, April 2015.

The German name for pansy is Stiefmütterchen, little step-mother. The flashy lower petals, the stepmother and her daughters, shoulder in front of the more simply dressed upper petals, the stepdaughters. (My mother explained this to me when I was small. We were on the side of the slighted stepdaughters.) 

The bike path--the old street--keeps fairly close to the tramline here, but if you're not in a rush you can veer off on little footpaths through the trees, even closer to the water. The last time I was out here, summers and summers ago, it was a hot weekend day, and every little cove was full of picnickers and swimmers, with their bicycles stacked against the trees. There are a couple of official swimming beaches along here, and a few reed patches that are fenced off to encourage them to regenerate themselves. But mostly it's open woods and innumerable little sandy coves where you can dangle your feet in the water and pick up Spree-mussel shells. (I kept one of the shells on the kitchen counter in Michigan for years, as sort of a talisman, a reminder or a hope that it would be possible to come back to this stretch of the river. The shell still sits on the kitchen counter here, by the espresso machine, and it still makes me happy to see it, evening after evening, as we do our after-dinner cleanup.)

It's not fast progress through the woods: the track is full of rocks and roots and sinkholes, and occasionally it veers out so directly onto the river's edge that the water has eaten away the edge of the path (ah, but here is a convenient tree limb to hang onto, for those of us who do not balance so well on narrow footways as we did years ago). The tottery old dears are mostly sticking to the bike path.


It's getting on for lunchtime, and I did pick up a sandwich at the Grünau station. Actually not a sandwich, as the rather dour woman behind the counter corrected me: not a belegtes Brot but a Laugeneck, a lye corner.... Where was it--in which German airport?--where I saw a sign on the pretzel stand advertising "lye pretzels"? This frank translation of Laugenbrezel might have put off the English-speaking customers. But in fact that distinctive smooth brown finish on German pretzels does come from dipping the formed pretzel into a lye solution before baking. (Anything with a very high pH will do the job; home bakers tend to use soda water, but it's less effective.) You can do the lye dip with regular rolls as well as with pretzels, and this particular bake-shop had a fine array of triangular, very dark-brown, pretzel-finish rolls stuffed with things like cucumber and salami, or tomato and gouda. 

So I keep an eye out for a cove with a good stone or fallen log in it, where I could sit and have my lunch. And here is one with a couple of nice logs ... a little awkward because there is no footing on the other side of the logs, just a steep pitch down to the water; but the main log is wedged well in place and isn't going to roll me suddenly into the river.

I open my little paper sandwich bag, and ... ach du meine, the rustling of paper is like ringing a dinner bell in the woods. Suddenly I have friends, looking for their share of the crumbs. A coot hurries across the water to my cove, bobbling its head at double speed; a pair of mallards circle behind him, and a crow hops up aggressively to my log. 

One of the few things that have made me feel alien in Berlin is that I don't know the native flora and fauna very well. My parents taught me animal and plant and mineral names at about the time they taught me not to walk in front of cars or fall in deep water, and here it simply feels bizarre to be a responsible adult in other respects and yet not to be able to recognize a common bird or streetside weed. It's like losing part of your speech, your ability to connect things and words.

I am learning, however. I know that the crow is a Nebelkrähe, a fog-crow (one of the gray-backed birds that swagger around the city like gangsters: hooded crow is the English name). I know that the little sparrow-size birds with yellow breasts and blue-black caps that whistle along the street behind our apartment house are Kohlmeisen ...  Let's see, what is this species called in English? We don't have them in America, but they're so ubiquitous on this side of the Atlantic, there must be an English name. Ah yes, the great tit. (Surely this wouldn't be a usable name in the US? Do even the British say, We have great tits in the back yard?)

Here is Herr Fog-crow (or possibly Frau Fog-Crow, as they look very much alike):

Hooded crow on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Deeper in the city there are signs along the waterways saying not to feed bread to the birds, it isn't good for them, so I don't feel too guilty about scarfing almost all of my sandwich. Sorry, my lye-corner. But the general air of anticipation around me is so intense, I do toss the last bit out. A coot gets it, the crow stamps and flaps and curses--and there are immediately more coots, conjured up from nothing by a tossed bread-crumb.

Coots on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I had never seen coots until we moved here, but I recognized them immediately. (At least with them I could still attach words to things.) I learned to read, when I was about three, from a book of very bad reproductions of Audubon's Birds of America, which my mother had won as a door-prize at some in-law's bridal shower. (I persecuted people to read me the names under the the pictures until I knew a lot of the names by heart, and at some point the print started turning into recognizable words on its own.) 

It's a great moment when you learn to read, it changes your life completely to have access to print. Even if the first printed words that make sense to you are Common Loon. 

The book started with water birds: common loon, American coot, pied-billed grebe, crested grebe--which I had about as much chance of seeing, in the high plains, as of seeing an emu. But the names and pictures did imprint themselves on my mind, and so I knew a coot in a moment when I finally saw one, sixty years later.

**

It's time to move on after lunch--the sun is really out now, the woods are bathed in light in this leafless season, and the pines start to give out a resiny fragrance in the infant heat of April. Shine out, fair sun, with all your heat./ Show all your thousand-colored light!  

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

This is a new season. I've hardly seen freight traffic on the waters all winter, but now here is a big barge flying a Polish flag, on its way up from the Oder-Spree canal through the Long Lake (which we are on by now) and westward to who knows where. 

Here would have been a more adventurous place to have lunch, out on the tree trunk ... But no, maybe I'm too old for this one.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

On we go through the lovely woods. Here is a little projecting corner of land, where the lake turns ... and this took a hit in the Niklas storm, I see. Two tall young pines are recently down, snapped off raggedly a dozen feet off the ground; the top of one is broken off and lodged halfway up in another tree. 

We must be getting closer to residential areas again; there is a civilized custom of putting benches in places where people might reasonably want to sit down.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Ah yes, here we come back closer to the streetcar tracks again, and then out of the woods and into Karolinenhof. Some farmer established a household--a Hof--here in the eighteenth century and named it for his wife Karoline. A hundred years later it was turned into lots for biggish houses, and there's obviously been more building down here recently.

Village pond, Karolinenhof. My photo, April 2015.

It's sleepy and suburban here; people haven't taken in the eggs from their Easter egg trees yet.

Easter egg tree, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Our Hausmeister has taken in the Easter eggs from our trees already, though I saw yesterday that he had forgotten a red one out by the stone seat where teenage couples meet for very serious private discussions, in the depths of the shrubbery in front of the house. 

The earliest-blooming fruit trees (what are these? I've lost my language again) have been bursting out in our neighborhood up on the Spree in the last few days, and they are bursting out here too.

In Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Shall I walk on into central Schmöckwitz? No, perhaps save that for next time. 

The streetcar stop in the middle of Karolinenhof is just on the other side of the fence from a playground, where the shed in back has been brightly painted with flora and fauna.  

At the streetcar stop, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

The style isn't exactly J. J. Audubon, but the picture is recognizable. That's a crested grebe, that is. 

**

Material on Kenneth Grahame is from an article in The Telegraph: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3671092/Kenneth-Grahame-Lost-in-the-wild-wood.html

Shine out, fair sun ... is from the Masque of the Twelve Months (1619), possibly by George Chapman; it provides the text of the opening to Britten's Spring Symphony.

Dahme 1

 On the Way to the Long Lake

What a tangle of waters this is in the southeast corner of the city, with lakes and rivers and canals, and old river-arms that no longer join their rivers, all losing themselves deep in the woods (which I hope I will not do myself). We need a map here.

Orientation time: green on the map means forest, grayish means built-up areas. The heavy broken line is the boundary between Berlin and Brandenburg. The Spree (see posts from last summer) runs from Erkner on the right-hand side of the map through the little Dämeritzsee, along the south edge of Rahnsdorf, through the Grosser Müggelsee, and on westward through Berlin. The Dahme comes up from the south, through Grünau and Adlershof, joining the Spree at Köpenick.

Spree, Dahme, and lakes. Map by Felix Hahn, Wiki commons. 

The stretch of the Dahme below the Müggelsee is also called the Long Lake, the Langer See. The Long Lake goes down as far as Schmöckwitz; the river runs on through the next north-south lake, the Zeuthener See (which looks entirely separate from other lakes on the map, but isn't). South of the Zeuthener See the Dahme keeps going, as a more modest little river, but still navigable. How far it is walkable for the unambitious hiker, we will see.

The mouth of the Dahme is familiar territory, from the Spree walk last summer: I take trains through the old Schöneweide industrial district (big electrical-industry establishments here in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; see Spree 7 post, June 2014) to Spindlersfeld and Köpenick (chemical works and vast commercial laundries; see Spree 8 post, July 2014). 

The last train runs east along a little tail stuck onto the Ringbahn long ago to carry workers out to the factories in Schöneweide and Spindlersfeld. Spindlersfeld is the end of the line, and the cars have pretty well emptied out by the time I get on. The old factories here are closed and either disintegrating or turned into apartments and shops; the train decants only a handful of people at the end of the line, in the gray March day.

There used to be a branch railroad, a freight line, that went direct to the Spindler works; but most of it was pulled up long ago, and the branch line ends in a patch of grass behind someone's house.

Branch railway to Spindler works. Photo, Christian Liebscher, Wiki Commons. 

Cold morning in the old East, in yellow-streetcar-world. (No streetcars in the old West, to speak of.) The new trams are sleek and long and low, but the old ones are short and fat and high-riding, looking like little blimps on rollerblades. You don't see the old ones in center city any more, but out here we drift into the past a bit.

It isn't far from here to the Dahme, maybe half a dozen streets.

**

The street signs in Berlin sometimes have little extra labels above the street name, to identify the person for whom the street is named. Physicist. Mayor. Poet. Entrepreneur. Here near the Spindlersfeld station, the label on a number of streets is Widerstandskämpfer. Resistance fighter.

We're in the Köpenick sub-district here, which used to be home to the people who worked in the chemical and electric works in Spindlersfeld and Schöneweide, and of course in the Köpenick laundries. It was a home of left-wing union activism and (sometimes armed) opposition to the Nazis, who made a serious attempt to root it out in early summer of 1933. Opposition parties had just been banned and labor unions dissolved; and one morning near the end of June, storm troopers headed for Köpenick, concealed in (what else would be inconspicuous in Köpenick?) laundry vans.

They picked up about two hundred people: union activists, opposition politicians, a (Jewish) company manager. In the course of what is called the Köpenick blood-week they tortured people (in back rooms of restaurants, in the pleasant boathouses along the Dahme). Some they let go afterward, to spread terror in the neighborhood; some they hanged (in the woods, in their own homes). Some were tied up in sacks and left to die deep in the woods (think of all that green on the map), or were thrown into the Dahme, where the bodies tended to drift to the Grünau ferry pier. (Why this semi-ritual urge to throw enemies into the water--as if to purify the land? Think of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered in 1919 by the right-wing paramilitary, bodies thrown into the water to drift to shore in mid-city.)

Many people were never accounted for. Estimates of the numbers of the dead in the Köpenick blood-week range from twenty-five to ninety. Probably some bodies were never found, in the deep waters and the deep woods; probably some people fled and were lost in the turmoil of the years that followed. 

The pastor of the Köpenick Schlosskirche (the palace church) and his wife hid some of the people the storm troopers were hunting for. Later, when it was needed, they hid Jews. The congregation belonged to what is called the confessing church, the protestant-religious opposition to the Nazis.

I realized, here, that I had always imagined the confessing congregations as being in the stern, mighty-fortress sorts of churches that one sees here and there around Berlin. But of course they were as likely to be in baroque creampuffs like the Schlosskirche in Köpenick, which sits on the half-island in the Dahme near the junction with the Spree.

Schlosskirche, Köpenick. Photo, Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki commons.

**

From the Spindlersfeld station it's a little walk to the river, past a rather forbidding building that turns out to be the Alexander-von-Humboldt School, designed by Bruno Taut's brother Max in the hopeful days of the late 1920s. (Hitler went after the artists even before he went after opposition politicians; the Tauts and their friends lost their jobs already in the early months of 1933, but they kept their lives, at least for a while [see Teltowkanal 7 post, February 2015].) 

Alexander von Humboldt Schule, Oberspreestrasse. Photo, Mazbin, Wiki Commons.

A little way past the school and we're at the Long Bridge, which crosses the Dahme right by the Schloss and has been there in various forms since the Middle Ages. A document from 1424 mentions the Köpenick bridges as being in bad condition. (Ah, Berlin! Everything changes, and some things don't.) 

The Long Bridge has been surprisingly durable, however. It was still a wooden structure in 1813, when Napoleon's army was backing out of northeastern Europe, trying to keep ahead of pursuing Russians and their allies. The French meant to burn the Long Bridge behind them. But in those days of simpler technology, how would you make sure that the whole bridge--which is moderately solid and in this climate probably damp--really burns? Just lighting a match isn't going to do the job. 

Long Bridge over the Dahme, old city and corner of Schloss, Köpenick.  
Photo, Lotse, Wiki Commons.

The French got dry hay from the neighboring fields and made balls of it that could be packed on the bridge and lit the next day, when all the troops were across. (Note to the non-agricultural: dry hay is terrifically flammable stuff.) The Köpenickers sneaked in during the night and soaked the hay-balls with water from the Dahme. The French didn't have time to start the bridge-burning project from scratch again the next day, so the Long Bridge survived.

By the time of World War II the wooden bridge had been replaced by a stone version, overburdened with traffic, with an extension that was supposed to be temporary until the city had time and money to do a proper renovation. The time and money had (unsurprisingly) not come along yet by April of 1945, when the Russians were (again) advancing on Berlin. A group of German soldiers with a small artillery piece took over the grounds of the church's parish house, near the river junction. The idea was to hold up the Russians by blowing up the Long Bridge and as many Russians as possible in the process, forcing some kind of fight in Köpenick that would probably destroy the city.

The pastor's wife, the one who hid the Communists and hid the Jews, went to the gun crew and persuaded them not to blow the bridge. Let them through, she said. Let the city live. 

If the gun crew had done their duty as prescribed, they would have shot her for spreading defeatism and aiding the enemy. In principle, if they didn't, some higher military authority could have come along and shot them for not doing their duty. But the odds of this were not so high in the fantastic chaos of the war's end. So no one shot anyone, the gun crew did not blow the bridge, the Russians passed through, and there is a little memorial tablet to the pastor's wife on the Long Bridge, honoring her for saving the old city. [source: http://www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de/uploads/tx_tafeln//Alide_Ratsch_
Berliner_Woche_Koepenick_21.12.2011.pdf]

Now the bridge is in the normal over-trafficked, in-need-of-renovation state, with an auxiliary bridge beside it. The auxiliary was supposed to have been used only until some date now several years past, by which time the main bridge would have been renovated. But it hasn't been, and by now the auxiliary bridge needs renovation, and it's all still on the city's construction calendar, somewhere.

By the bridge, in the sharp light-gray spring morning, rowing crews are setting out for a few hours' practice on the Dahme.

**

The Dahme is a handsome sheet of water, a big solid generous river in this stretch. It is not very pedestrian-accessible, however. I trudge down Grünauer Strasse in a rather cranky state of mind. Past hotels with private boat tie-ups, past stretches of new housing with private gardens on the water, behind high walls. Past things that really have no business on the river at all: parking lots, auto repair places, house painters' establishments, all with high walls. As if in frustration at lack of opportunities, my camera battery suddenly declares itself dead.

Of course some of what blocks the waterside does have business there. The boat-repair places, the boat rental places, the sailing schools. Up ahead I see something called the Ahab Academy, which for a moment I think is a slightly warped sailing school--let's go hunting white whales in the Spree! (But actually it's a place that teaches people to be aerobics instructors and fitness-center managers and the like.) 

I walked this stretch of the river on a hot summer day several years ago and found it dreary, but on a fresh edge-of-spring morning it has its pleasures.  Here is a little patch of Kleingärten on the water, with forsythia coming into bloom. You can see through the gardens to the broad gray river and an island with more Kleingärten, where people have been taking their garden tools and bedding plants and what-have-you across in rowboats. And of course you have to row your coffee and cake across too, but think how pleasant, on a summer afternoon, to drink your coffee under your little apple tree on your little island, with the sailboats scudding past.

Then here we are at a familiar spot, by the hulking cement works where the Teltowkanal comes into the river [see Teltowkanal 8 post, February 2015]. But good heavens, it looks different, a month later in the season. No, it is not warm, and no, the sun is not shining--but in February, all you could see from the bridge here was the river and a bit of southern Köpenick on the other side. And now the winter mists have lifted, and look, over to the east, there are the mountains! 

 Well, to be exact, there are the Müggelberge, which are what we have by way of mountains within the Berlin city limits ("the Berlin Alps," as Archangel's cousin calls them). Three hundred feet high! But really, in this table-flat landscape, they do look like something, heaving themselves up in the woods on the far side of the Dahme. 

Beyond the Teltowkanal things get more suburban. The street is called Regattastrasse now; the streetscape has the feel of late-nineteenth-century villa-land. No more cement works. There are boathouses and big solid old apartment blocks with tall trees beside them. Somewhere a little further along is the so-called Regatta-stretch, the part of the river where they run the boat-races in summer. There's a boat-storage place on the inland side of the street, where a couple of small cabin cruisers are just being hauled out for the spring. There's a street called Wassersportallee, with a ferry across the Dahme at the end of it. A couple of streets back from the river is a neo-this-and-that church, from around the turn of the last century, splodging together various medieval styles:

Friedenskirche, Grünau.  Photo, Cnbnsr, Wiki commons. 

 I turn the other way from the ferry, headed back to the S-Bahn ... and look! On the south side of the street the forest begins. The tremendous forest that will go on and on, with only a few patchy interruptions between here and the Saxon border. 

In the center of Berlin, which is warm with the breath of the city and the reflections off a thousand south-facing walls, the leaves are starting to come out. In another week perhaps the woods will be greening too.

[Later note: no, in another week the woods would be sodden with storm mess: Hurricane Niklas came through last Tuesday. Driving snow, wrecked trains, wrecked cars. (The Berlin news media advised, Don't park your car near a tree. Hello, there's nowhere in Berlin that is not near a tree. But then most of us don't have cars, so perhaps it's a moot point.) ... How loud a storm like this is: the trees roar, the highrise creaks, the wind screams in the ventilation shaft and bangs on the walls at a remarkable decibel level. Tuesday night I thought-- Can we sleep with this racket going on? Oh, yeah: like the proverbial logs. It rained and blew until about Friday, but we are emerging.]