Teltowkanal 4

Winter greens, safe harbors

Here is the winter at last. Fine sunsets come at half past three. (Oh, the sun sets later than that, officially, but the twilight starts practically after lunch at this latitude.) Hours later, in the long dark, the wind and sleet bang on the outside of the bedroom wall. The winter isn't serious here, not yet, the snow won't stick; but the inside of a well-warmed featherbed is a good place to be.

Late-afternoon view from living room. My photo.

Most days the clouds trail in the streets, gray and close, almost scraping the pavement. But one day when I get up in the black morning, I can see the moon burning like a fat candle in the sky over the bend of the Spree. A clear day coming! 

I go out about nine in the morning, when the eastern sky is still yellow from the sunrise--and how bright the day is, sunny as can be, with scarfy bits of white cloud appearing and dissolving in the astonishing blue to the west. Rain in the night has washed all the auto exhaust out of the air and it is fresh and mild--at least, above freezing. Fine walking weather.

In the US people go out in the winter to do something particular and vigorous, like skiing, but I don't think they like the winter fresh air in general, in the way that Germans do. Archangel has a running battle with one of his assistants who wants to fling the office windows open every day of the year. We have friends here who sleep with their bedroom skylight open all year round and think it's amusing to wake with a layer of snow on their bedcovers, if the wind has been in the right direction to drive the snow through the tilted-open skylight. 

And people do eat and drink outdoors here through much of the winter. As the autumn fades, big red blankets appear over the chairs at the cafe tables, so that people can huddle in comfort over a sandwich and a coffee, or a not-too-cold beer or a bowl of soup, when it's only a few degrees above freezing. 

Now, of course, people are outdoors en masse at the Advent markets, shopping for trinkets and guzzling hot spiced wine and eating gingerbread or roast chestnuts or sausages. All these things taste better in the outdoor cold than they would otherwise. (I have never mastered the technique of outdoor sausage-eating, however, I always end up with mustard on my coat-sleeve.)

Christmas market, Breitscheidplatz, Berlin, November 2013. Photo, Arild Vagen, Wiki Commons.

I am not so good at the technique of getting out the door in the morning with everything I meant to take, either. When I am on the S-Bahn on the way to the Teltowkanal I realize that I have left my maps behind. Maybe the cat had settled on them. 
    
    The cat sat on the maps 
                          (perhaps).

Agh. But this is such a straightforward stretch I hardly need a map with me, I think. Just take the S-Bahn south, walk about half a mile farther south from the relevant station to get to the canal, and head eastwards along the near bank. 

And this works, sort of. My first choice of a southbound street isn't right, it angles off to the east after a little bit. Then the first southerly cross-street dead-ends in an unpromising way. The second southerly cross-street also dead-ends--and is this even southerly any more, Ms. Misdirection? Ah, but let us examine this dead-end more closely. There's a set of stairs going downward between the houses, and ... Yes, definitely, this is the way to go. Follow your nose. I can smell the wet leaves ahead, the masses of wet leaves that must lie along the canal and not up here among the houses. Here is the water.

Teltowkanal near Südende, December 2014. My photo.

How low the sun is, shining horizontally from the edge of the sky in midmorning. And how much green there is still at this time of year. Ivy, mahonia, boxwood, creeper, the occasional rhododendron, all still have their leaves.

**

There are small harbors along the canal here. Mariendorf harbor, which used to handle fuel before the Mariendorf gasworks closed and was replaced by the biggest solar-power facility in Berlin. Lankwitz harbor, where heating oil comes in and is stored and redistributed.

The oil tanks sleep placidly in the sun, on and on along the water. Like fat white candles or fat white cocoons.

Oil tanks along Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo.

Somewhere around here, as we walk east, we are changing neighborhoods. We've been in Steglitz on the north bank of the canal, where the path is, looking across to Lankwitz on the south. Now it's Tempelhof on the north bank and Mariendorf on the south. Little natural waterways have been absorbed into the canal: the Lanke brook that gave Lankwitz its name, then the chain of pools--glacial meltwater along the edge of a moraine--that formed the medieval boundary between Tempelhof and Mariendorf.

Here is the first street bridge we come to in Tempelhof. Built about 1905, Art-nouveau time, when all the architectural ornament turned to flowers and leafage. Blown up in 1945, rebuilt a few years later. 

Teubertbrücke on Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo.

There are Christmas decorations, corny and otherwise, on the balconies of the apartments along the way.

Along the Teltowkanal, December 2014. My photo.

The canal lies far below street-level. Long stairways run down the canal bank from the residential streets to the water, in case you should want to step down from your apartment to catch a boat, catch a fish ... 

Along Teltowkanal in Tempelhof, December 2014. My photo.

And then suddenly we're at Tempelhof Harbor, and everything is different. The city is a book and the page has just turned. (How wonderful it is to leaf through the book, say from the upper deck of a bus on one of those routes that arc through the city along improbable lines (east here and south there, and why have we suddenly turned down this street?). And wonderful too, of course, to go paragraph by paragraph, street by street, on foot. Densely written pages here, almost every one different. US cities are not quite like this: the pages are less written-on, more alike; sometimes, as it were, stuck together with spilled Coke and french-fry grease.) Though the pages are about to be stuck together here, too: there's a stretch east of the harbor where we can't get close to the water and will have to trudge along some streets that don't look very promising. But meanwhile, there is the harbor ....

Tempelhof Harbor used to look like this (it still does sort of, but not quite): 

Tempelhof Harbor, 2006. Photo, IHenseke, Wiki Commons.

There's Ullsteinhaus with its clock tower in the lower left of the picture, and a big warehouse-clump with the red roofs on the other side of the harbor. The city as a book, books in the city: Ullstein is a pubisher, now broken up and moved.  

Do you remember how it feels, the first time you can really read another language--not just plod along with a dictionary, but understand, glide through the looking-glass into an alternative world? (Life in other languages, like life on other planets.) I think the first full-length German novel I ever read was an Ullstein book; not anything particularly good, but I remember the Ullstein owl logo happily. And the fish logo on Fischer books and the sailing ship on Insel books (on my somewhat kicked-around Rilke paperbacks, on my father-in-law's incredibly battered, beautiful Rilke hardcovers from the 1920s--did he take the Sonnets to Orpheus with him to Lisbon and New York when he fled, in 1938, or did he recover them after the war? I don't know.)

One of the new-language-world pleasures is the pleasure of getting to know new publishers. Pleasant memories come to mind, of rooming with a French major, admiring the beautiful Pleiade editions, or feeling the thick coarse paper of the books where you still had to cut the pages yourself--and the books didn't come with hard covers because if you were a proper bourgeois you had the books bound yourself, in a style suitable to your library. I don't know if French books still come this way ...  It's certainly not the case any more, as it used to be, that German bookstores are organized by publisher rather than by subject matter and author. German bookstores used to have one section of shelves for the Ullstein books, one section for Rowohlt, one section for Fischer, and so on; and you sort of knew what you would find in each place. 

German bookstores don't do this any more--although the Reclam books are usually off by themselves still, probably just because they're so small that they need a different size of shelves. Reclams are wonderful little yellow paperbacks of the German classics, that used to cost next to nothing and fit even in a very small pocket, perfect for walks. (And the Reclam books have held up surprisingly well; so many of my paperbacks from the 1970s are falling apart, but the Reclams are not. The corners have sort of rubbed off Hölderlin's Gedichte, which is a book that has had a lot of use; but it is still reliable company on the S-Bahn, the pages will not fall out. O drink the airs of morning! and name what is before your face, says Hölderlin, as the express trains blow past.) 

The Ullstein owl still perches over the entrance of the building, which now houses a disco, a bank call center, and various other operations.

Owl, Ullsteinhaus. Photo, Dirk Ingo Franke, Wiki Commons.

The midcentury troubles of central Europe lurk a bit around here. The Ullsteins were Jews, the firm was "Aryanized" and the building renamed "Deutsches Haus" in the 30s. The Ullsteins got the company back after the war, but didn't keep it very long; it was gradually sold off to Springer and other firms. 

Also, we aren't so far from Tempelhof field here, where supplies were flown in during the 1948-49 blockade, when the Soviet Union cut off all the roads, railways, and waterways into West Berlin. No food, no fuel, no medications, no anything coming in without the airlift. A cargo plane every three minutes, half an hour on the ground to unload, back again in the air, thousands of tons a day, hardly enough for the city to live on. The warehouses at Tempelhof Harbor were one of the redistribution points for the airlifted supplies.

Tempelhof Harbor, warehouses, December 2014. My photo.

From the end of the 1940s until the 90s, these warehouses were also one of the places where the so-called Senate Reserves were stored. The Reserves were a six-month supply of coal, food, medications, and other daily necessities, sufficient to keep the city going in case of another blockade.

The list of what was kept in the Senate Reserves is curious. Of course there was coal, gasoline, grain, canned foods in great quantity. Also:

            96 tons of mustard

            380 tons of rubber soles and heels for shoe repair

            18 million rolls of toilet paper

            25.8 million cigars [surely we could manage without these?]

            10,000 chamber pots 

            5,000 bicycles

            19 live cows

The Senate Reserves are long gone, of course. After the Wall came down, the coal stockpile went to the power plants bit by bit, in the normal course of events. The food and medications were donated as aid to the Soviet Union.

Ah, but what to do with the storage buildings, like the big warehouse at Tempelhof?  Major renovation in recent years: offices, shopping center, bits of new building, not all of it attractive. Near the shopping-center entrance is a low building covered with thin metal plates pierced in seagull-shapes, which you can see if the light is right.

At Tempelhofer Hafen, December 2014. My photo.

The light is not so generous at this season, even on a day as bright as today. As you walk up into the neighborhood on the north bank of the canal, you see streets--broad enough streets, two lanes of traffic and a line of parked cars on each side--where the sunlight doesn't come for weeks (months?) in the winter. The sun is too low, even on this bright noon: the house-shadows lie over the streets all day, every day.  It's only if you face south over a big open space that you get the light ..

On Wenkebachstrasse, Tempelhof, December 2014. My photo.

How tremendous the vine is that rambles over the lower stories of this house, greening in the sun. ... And across the street, the light is generous at the end of the big hospital complex that stands here:

Hospital, Wenkebachstrasse, December 2014. My photo.

Other parts of the complex lie more in the winter dimness; this end is the hospice. Sunlight for the dying, on the days when the sunlight comes. 

Teltowkanal 3

The Light Goes Away

The last time I was on this stretch of the canal was a late-December afternoon a few years ago. I was in Lichterfelde, in mid-south Berlin, for some now-forgotten reason, and I came to the canal and thought it would be interesting to follow the water westward. It looked fine on the map (a sentence which suggests bad things are about to happen).

What happens in this stretch of the canal is that you're locked into the path for a longish way. On one side of the path is the water, with no bridges, and on the other side is high fence, guarding hostile establishments that (through the fence, on a dim winter afternoon) look like junkyards, complete with junkyard dogs. The establishments are actually things like recycling-processing centers and body shops (complete with recycling and body-shop dogs, who are no more mellow than their junkyard colleagues). 

I was just in Berlin for a Christmas visit that time, and, having been in Michigan until a couple of days before, I had forgotten how lightless the winter afternoons are here. It's not that it really starts to get dark before three--the sky is the same pale pewter color all day until four or so, it isn't black. But it's as if someone's taken the light out of the day, someone's shoved the dimmer switch all the way down, you see things indistinctly in the dimness. 

I was still trapped between the junkyards and the water when it started to get really dark. An occasional homeward-bound bicyclist bounced past, headlamp reflecting on the fluorescent-painted rocks and roots in the path, marked so that cyclists wouldn't hit them too fast in the dark and go tail over teakettle into the canal. On the map, it looked as though you could probably get off the path and into the streets where transit was available, but actually you were stuck between water and fence, without a very good idea of whether the nearest exit was ahead or behind. 

The remains of the day got dimmer and dimmer, and it was more and more solitary. The path ran through a strange doorway from nowhere to nowhere--so what happens if I go through the doorway? It takes me into some sort of body-snatcher realm? Nah, just more path, full of roots and rocks painted day-glo lemon and chartreuse and magenta, with the black water on one side and the high solid fences on the other. I didn't find a way off the path until I was almost in Kleinmachnow [see Teltowkanal 2 post] and it really was dark. 

But it all looks different on a bright mild afternoon. (I walked this little stretch of the canal from west to east at the end of October, before getting sidetracked by the Prague trip and stacks of work to do; hence this delayed post.) The bank rises enough on the junkyard side that the path is very sheltered, and on a sunny day it was warm as summer here, although it was coat-and-hat weather up in the city, beyond the recycling places and body shops.

Teltowkanal near Teltower Damm, October 2014. My photo.

The fluorescent paint on the roots and rocks had worn off and not been replaced, though also I think the path had been upgraded since the last time I was here--there are not so many hazards now for the fast-moving cyclist.

The doorway in the woods was still there, still slightly unnerving even in the October sunlight. 

Doorway along the Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

It's strange and ruinous, a way through a wall that doesn't exist any more, a doorway standing there without a function and therefore looking as though it ought to have a meaning. (It made me think of an abandoned town I came across once out on the Colorado plains: the houses were gone, the streets were gone, and all that was left, besides a crumbling schoolhouse wall, was a set of fire hydrants lost in the dry grass that hissed and rattled in the wind. How ruins affect us--even a ruined fire hydrant is a dreamy, melancholy thing.)

**

The overgrown solitude here is a fine thing on a sunny late fall day. Here's the footbridge over the Stichkanal--a side branch of the canal, like an exit off a freeway, that the water traffic once took into the industrial district to the north.

Footbridge, Zehlendorfer Stichkanal, October 2014. My photo.

There was a big Zeiss camera plant here, and a Telefunken plant (telegraph and radio equipment) before the Second World War. Then there was a big US Army establishment here after the war. Some industrial and commercial stuff still exists up along the Stichkanal, but it depends on truck not barge transport now, so the little side waterway is drifting back to nature.

The path has definitely been upgraded ...

Along the Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

On the other side of the water, after a bit, is the fine sculptural mass of the Lichterfelde power plant. I do love power plants. We can see three of them from the windows of our apartment, and they serve as useful weather indicators--for example, it looks clear out there this morning, but you can't see the Reuter plant in the west at all, so there's moisture gathering. It's going to rain before the end of the day. (Our apartment is on the wrong side of the building to have the "good view" the neighborhood offers, over the immense tree-fleece of Tiergarten, with Gold-Else the angel floating above the trees on the Victory Column on one end of the park, and the jagged glassy mass of the Potsdamer Platz buildings at the other end. Instead we see power plants and harbor facilities and jumbles of housing; distant woods and a nearby jail and the rail lines with their little bright trains going past twelve stories down. It's like having a tremendous model railroad set, with the square-nosed red-and-yellow S-Bahns going by every couple of minutes, and the green-and-silver ODEGs (the Ostdeutsche Eisenbahn Gesellschaft, the East German Railroad company, which I believe is half owned by the Italian state railroad and runs very well), and the big red double-decker regionals screeching their brakes on the Bellevue curve, on their way to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder or Brandenburg-an-der-Havel or who knows where.)

Lichterfelde power plant, October 2014. My photo.

I am not the only person who finds the Berlin power plants handsome and poetic. The Lichterfelde plant was on a German postage stamp once, in a very muscular, stylized representation, and here is someone else's romantic photo of the plant. (And no, the cooling towers don't mean it's a nuclear plant; it's natural-gas-fired cogeneration.)

Lichterfelde power plant. Photo, Claas Augner, Wiki Commons. 

There's a small industrial harbor by the plant, and then we're back in the woods for a bit. (How long the leaves stay green here. Now, as I write, in the first week of December, the willows are still half-green along the Spree, although most of the other leaves have fallen.)

Teltowkanal near Lichterfelde Harbor, October 2014. My photo.

Then there's a crossroad sign along the path saying that Schlosspark Lichterfelde is off to the left--so perhaps this is the place to leave the water and look for transit home. 

The bus stop is by the old village green in Lichterfelde. This is not the village church in the picture, however, it's something like an electrical substation.

Lichterfelde Dorfanger, October 2014. My photo.

**

That was the last of the sunny days. I came back about two weeks later to do another short stretch of the canal, starting where I had left off, at Schlosspark 
Lichterfelde. 

So here we go down the garden path to the water in the gray November day (already there's less light, already the city is pulling back into itself in the dimness, getting ready to wait out the winter).

Schlosspark Lichterfelde, November 2014. My photo.

A friend who has lived all over the world says: There are three ways you can have seasons: hot and cold (continental climates like mid-America), wet and dry (parts of Asia and Africa), or light and dark (northern Europe). It's tempting to imagine that these different ways of experiencing the year give people different inner lives and make for different societies. (Oh, let's not get too deep into geographic determinism here. But still ... would southern California have the character it does if it had the climate of Buffalo, New York. Nah, I doubt it.)

Summer as endless heat is one thing, summer as endless light and a lot of 65 degrees F. is something else. And similarly, winter as three feet of snow and temperatures that will remove the more salient parts of your face is something different from this mild withdrawal into dimness. The tourists I pass in a December mid-afternoon, on my way to pick up groceries, are holding their maps up to their faces, struggling to read them in the daylight. The daylight is there, but it just doesn't amount to much, muffled by the endless trailing street-level cloud of early winter. 

**
It isn't beautiful here, exactly, along the canal. But it's very Berlin, this mix of green space and imposing industrial plant gone a bit scruffy, wrapped in November mists.

These gaunt brick buildings have a kind of unbeautiful distinction--unbeautiful like distinguished long-faced 1930-ish Englishwomen: think of Edith Sitwell, think of Viriginia Woolf and her sister. Horse-faces, one and all.

Along Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.

Bust of V. Woolf, Tavistock Square, London. Photo, Stu's Images, WikiCommons.

We're getting out of Lichterfelde, which is worth a good deal more exploration than it's getting on this trip. Lichterfelde, like a number of other sub-districts down in these parts, was a Rittergut--a manor--until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then an entrepreneur got a good deal on the property from the lord of the manor (who was sinking under his debts) and developed it as a big-house neighborhood for high-level civil servants and military officers.

Ah, the silly houses these people built. They displaced the lord of the manor and wanted to live in castles. 

Villa by Gustav Lilienthal, Lichterfelde. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Actually, this one is moderate enough; it's one of the "Lilienthal castles" in Lichterfelde. Good Gustav Lilienthal--one of those turn-of-the-last-century utopians who made some money on big-villa commissions for the rich but spent a lot of time developing better housing for mid- to lower-income people. These Lichterfelde castles were meant for folks with moderate income. Lilienthal also founded a housing co-op for the non-rich (Free Soil, the enormous co-op that backs on the Tegeler Fließ), developed low-cost construction methods to provide solid buildings for a vegetarian colony and a church-based settlement for the homeless and handicapped north of Berlin. He created educational toys and helped brother Otto develop flying machines. (Otto built a hill--an unnatural object in table-flat Lichterfelde--to fly from. Otto eventually crashed, but the aerodynamic principles he worked out were what the Wright brothers used later. The settlement for the homeless and handicapped managed to hold off the euthanizing Nazis and nationalizing Communists and go its own way in peace, decade after decade. For a few months in 1990 it took in Eric Honecker, the ex-head of the East German state, who had lost his job and his Party housing and found he couldn't live anywhere without being driven out by hostile demonstrators.) 

Upright, determined people who went their own way, the Lilienthals and their friends. Gustav's daughter Olga and her husband Gerhard stuck with Jewish friends in the 1930s and made public protests against Nazi policies; Gerhard lost his job; later he refused military service and was lucky to live to tell the tale. When the Russian army came through at the end of the war, killing and plundering, Gerhard took a chance and played welcoming host to the soldiers that burst into the house, trying to get them drunk fast enough that unconsciousness would win the race against rising violence. Sort of worked; everyone lived to tell the tale. Olga told it to Archangel, at any rate, when he stayed with her for a few days in the house in the 70s, on a research trip. It was one of old Gustav's castles, of course.

We're getting out of Lichterfelde and into the next sub-district, Steglitz. There are still handsome compositions of autumn and industry:

Along Teltowkanal near Hannemannbrücke, November 2014. My photo.

There are terraces here and there along the water, buried in fallen leaves.

Along Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.

It will be a while before the winter cold, such as it is here, really comes. The geraniums are still in full bloom on the balconies, and may be until Christmas, if we're lucky.

In Steglitz, near Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.

Czech Interlude: Sunday Morning River

It's a fine day by November standards, dim and veiled but not drenching. Even when the clouds lighten, the air is hazy, like a backlit scrim curtain in front of the landscape. The sky is a sort of polished silver, and the river is unpolished silver, dark and streaky. 

River Vltava (Moldau), looking toward Charles Bridge, November 2014. My photo.

This is not Berlin--Archangel has a couple of days of business in Prague, and I am tagging along.

**

In East Lansing (which begins to seem remote and fantastical) we used to linger over Sunday breakfasts with NPR playing in the background--and oh dear, playing the same things in the background, week after week, month after month. Recycling the same slightly eccentric Sunday-morning repertoire, behind the Sunday-newspaper rustle and the hiss of the waffle iron. An overload of late-Romantic pieces, tone-painting the European landscape. 

How many Sundays did we hear The Lark Ascending (subject: English meadows, summer mornings)? Lots; but not as often as we heard The Moldau (subject: river flowing through Czech countryside). This is the second movement of Bedrich Smetana’s patriotic tone-poem cycle, Má Vlast (Czech for “my fatherland”). Other movements of Má Vlast recurred moderately often as well. It became a sort of family joke: we haven't for years been able to hear the (unmistakable) opening notes without moaning. Aaaugh, not The Moldau again, not Má Vlast again! (Though it's a perfectly nice piece of music. Here's a pretty Youtube version of the second movement, if you like.) 

So, after all these years of hearing about it, I am happy to see our Sunday morning river, the Moldau, at last. 

Island in the Vltava, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

But what shall we call the river? (Ach, these battles over central European names and languages and identities.) We shouldn't call it the Moldau. The Czech name Vltava is on the map; the German name Moldau has been booted out, along with other German names. I believe that Smetana, as an ardent Czech patriot, called it the Vltava. (Being an ardent Czech patriot--thus anti-Austrian--was a complicated business. He manned the barricades against the Austrians in the (failed) revolution in Prague in 1848, like a proper romantic composer--like Wagner making hand grenades for the (failed) revolution in Dresden in 1849--but Smetana only learned proper Czech in middle age, having grown up as a German speaker.) 

What shall we even call the country--what's the proper name of Smetana's vlast? The country isn't Czechoslovakia any more, since the Slovaks split off. The official name in English is the Czech Republic, but this is an awkward mouthful. English speakers sometimes say Czechia, and there is a movement in the Czech Republic to encourage the use of this name; fervid websites exist to promote it. But it's politically fraught. Names are not innocent.

According to a poll in the 1990s, two-thirds of the people in the country wouldn't use the name Czechia, and Vaclav Havel, of blessed memory, is quoted as saying, "Slugs crawl over my skin a little when I hear that word." For some people the name has bad historical associations--it sounds too like the Nazi term for the country, Tschechei. Also, some people see it as only meaning Bohemia (this is the part of the country that includes Prague) and ignoring the rest of the country, that is, Moravia and the Czech part of (mostly Polish) Silesia. After all, the word Čechy (Czech-y) means Bohemia, but the word for Moravia is Morava; and of course Silesia is something else again (see previous post for some material on Silesia). 
[http://www.expats.cz/prague/article/czech-language/whats-in-name-czech-vs-czechia/] 

Sigh. This is why mono-ethnic nationalism, which is enjoying a somewhat creepy revival in Europe in recent years, is senseless. What--to take an example--is it to be Austrian? Who is really Austrian, is there an Austrian culture? (There is, but it isn't coterminous with anyone's ethnicity.) The (anti-immigrant, anti-Europe) nationalist party in Austria has said, "the overwhelming majority of Austrians belong to the German ethnic and cultural community." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Party_of_Austria]  And it's easy, from the distance of the English-speaking world, to think of the achievements of Vienna around 1900 as something Germanic. But then, Mahler, the master of Vienna's music at the time, was from Moravia--and is it fair to call Moravia, in the eastern end of the Czech Republic, "Austria"? Freud (one of the best writers of German prose at the time, regardless of the doctrinaire silliness of some of his analysis) was also from Moravia. Is there a better German poet in 1920 or so than Rilke, who came from Prague? Or a more inventive fiction-writer in German than Kafka, who came from Prague (and spoke noticeably Czech-accented German but not terribly good Czech)? 

Kafka monument, Prague. Photo, Ferran Cornellà, Wiki Commons. 

Of course all these people "came from," and didn't mostly stay in, the Czech lands. The big time was elsewhere, and they went elsewhere when they could (Berlin, Vienna, Paris, New York). It doesn't exactly make sense to call Mahler or Freud or Rilke "Czechs" (or even Moravians, in the first two cases). But to call them Germans or even Austrians (especially if Austria is defined as culturally German) is missing something too--it's Germanic cultural imperialism gone much too far. 

If you wanted to declare yourself an ardent patriot of the (mono-ethnic) nation to which Rilke and Mahler and Kafka belonged, what nation would that be? 

**

Prague has great charm for outsiders. Archangel was last here in 1970 and recalls it fondly, in spite of the dilapidation and the overbearing Russian presence at the time. What did you like about it? I ask. 

It was lively, it was bright, he says. The girls wore miniskirts. They didn't in East Germany. (He was nineteen.) There's some kind of Romance-country, non-Germanic, fluidity and sparkle here. 

On the right bank of the Vltava, near National Theater, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

And it's no wonder if there's a faintly Italianate flavor to the place. In the Renaissance there were important trade routes, with clots of Italian merchants settled at main stops along the way, between northern Italy and Eastern Europe. Start in Venice, go north to Nürnberg (think of Dürer coming and going to Venice; it was a well-traveled route), turn right for Prague and Cracow and Lviv. All beautiful, rich, ornate places, where people brought in Italian architects when they needed a good palace.

In fact the main theme of Smetana's The Moldau is an adaptation of an Italian Renaissance tune called The Woman from Mantua (a sort of lilting, flirty tune, a 1607 version of The Girl from Ipanema), which spread all over Eastern Europe in the seventeenth century; popular songs moved on trade routes the way stupid jokes move on the internet.  It was adopted as a tune for folk songs in Poland and Romania and the Ukraine--and for a few other purposes also, as we shall see.

**

Our Berlin acquaintance Herr B. grew up in Prague and had a "somewhat adventurous escape" (his description) in 1970 or so, after giving life under the Russian occupation a try and deciding it wouldn't work. The rest of his family had cleared out to Switzerland without giving life under the Russians a try, but ...  When he was in his teens, the height of ambition for a young man who thought he was a hotshot was to study philosophy at Charles University. In the summer of 1968, when the Russian tanks moved in, young Herr B. had just succeeded in the (very competitive) admission process at the philosophy department and didn't want to waste the chance. He had gone to Switzerland with his family but went back to Prague in the fall of 1968 to start the semester. ("It's hard to understand why," he says, looking back, considering. His wife laughs, and says very tenderly, "Weil du jung und doof warst." Because you were young and dopey.) 

Herr B. is not particularly enthusiastic about present-day Prague. The goal of young hotshots now, he says, is not truth but profit; it's not to understand the human condition but to develop a successful business model. Herr B. does not regard this as an improvement.

**

A lot of the successful business models must have to do with tourism, it seems. Not that there isn't a substantial non-tourism economy here also (food processing, electrial engineering, pharmaceuticals ...) But how crammed with travelers the city is, even in November; summer must be intolerable. 

One wonders how much the successful business-model developers in the tourism business credit their success to their own talents and efforts and how much to the fabulous inheritance that has fallen into their laps. All this beauty. 

And oh, to be sure, the current owners and managers have worked hard on their buildings and their services, and they pay their taxes to keep the place maintained. But you have to pay to maintain ugly cities as well. The fabulous beauty is a free gift from the past, an inheritance from the dead.

Detail, Old Town Hall, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

I wandered around for a while collecting examples of these very Prague-like hooked or horned towers, with the little extra pinnacles on the corners. They exist elsewhere as well, but they seem particularly numerous and salient here.

Church, Our Lady Before Tyn, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

This design seems to have been picked up by illustrators of fantasy tales as a model for sinister towers: this is more or less what the dark wizard's tower looks like. The white wizard's tower looks different (probably more west-European). Especially on a dark day, the towers give center city a faintly sorcerous air, which is not entirely ahistorical. 

**

What do you think of, when you think of a city that you barely know, let's say Prague?  It had miniskirts in 1970, says Archangel. It looks like a cross between Rome and Salzburg, says our friend the diplomat, who grew up on the German-Austrian border an hour or so from Salzburg. (In unfamiliar places we see reflections of ourselves.) I think of sitting in the fairground stands in Colorado, playing in the band that provided background music for the rodeos in the summer of 1968. One afternoon between the bull riding and the barrel racing someone came clumping down the stands and said, There are Russian tanks in the streets of Prague (which, in rural Colorado, we pronounced to rhyme with "plague"). We were doubtful that this could be true. 

Or I think of a history-of-science course in college, taught by one of those disappointed intellectuals who were bounced by history from the stimulating and disastrous environment of central Europe to the cornfield and cow-town universities of the interior US. 

He was born an hour west of Cracow, in Silesia, on that road the Italian merchants took from Prague. He grew up in Berlin, studied physics at the U of Berlin with Schrödinger, had a recommendation from Einstein, got his PhD at 24 ... while being busy with many things. There was theater; he worked as an assistant to some director in the ebullient Berlin theater scene. There was politics, lots of left-wing, anti-Nazi politics. But his side lost, and the Nazis took over the year after he got his PhD. This was the end of any career hopes for a Jew, and the storm troopers beat him up for his political activity, so he took the hint and cleared out to Israel. More politics, journalism, a little science on the side. Then university positions in South Africa and the US, more science again, and history of science. A handful of books with mostly second-tier publishers. Some attempts, with decreasing energy and interest, to teach the massively clueless mid-American young, who thought he was vain and boring when he talked about his past. In a few more years he would be dead.

He had us read Arthur Koestler's The Sleepwalkers, which leaves a vivid impression of scientific life in Renaissance Prague. Here is Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer at Rudolf II's court. (Prague is the capital of the Holy Roman Empire under Rudolf, who does not much like Vienna.) Brahe is an observation and measurement maniac: "the first competent mind in modern astronomy to feel ardently the passion for exact empirical facts," says one historian. [Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science.]  

Portrait of Tycho Brahe. From Wiki Commons.

You can't really tell from the portrait that Brahe has a false nose. (He lost part of his own in a duel and wore a metal replacement. The duel was over the correctness of a mathematical formulation. Apparently neither Brahe nor his opponent could come up with an adequate proof--and under these circumstances, if you're a sixteenth-century nobleman who cares about math, what are you going to do?)

Brahe does not do great things with his measurements; he just likes to measure. He still believes that the sun orbits the earth. But Kepler, Brahe's assistant and successor as court astronomer in Prague, is able to show decisively, No it doesn't, using Brahe's fantastically abundant and exact measurements. And, on the same basis, Kepler can deduce the laws of planetary motion that will provide the foundations for Newton. 

Kepler also hopes, through mathematical analysis, to capture the harmony of the music made by the souls of the stars and the planets. (Koestler's point, in The Sleepwalkers, is that the process of scientific discovery is not nearly so sanitized and rational as some science-zealots claim. When Kepler makes great strides in physics, he thinks of them as steps along the way toward hearing the songs that the stars sing to each other. (Songs presumably not resembling themes from Má Vlast?))

As Kepler believes this music is in harmony also with the music of human souls-- that is, there is an influence of stars on souls--Kepler is kept busy casting horoscopes for Emperor Rudolf. Then, later, casting horoscopes for the players in the Thirty Years War, which starts in Prague when Rudolf and his successor are dead, and tears Central Europe to pieces. 

So when I have thought of Prague I have thought of Rudolf's court, with its extraordinary gathering of artists and scientists and magicians. And Rudolf in the middle: withdrawn, depressive, a political failure, an alchemist of some reputation. 

Mala Strana and Judith towers, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

**

Besides wicked-wizard towers there are plenty of 1900-ish art-nouveau-ish buildings in Prague. As I walk up and down the riverside neighborhoods I start collecting caryatids and atlantes (this is the plural of atlas)--those female or male figures that support a portal or a cornice or a roof. Some are just willowy young persons holding up architectural decorations (such lightweight decorations in the picture below that the ladies probably do not count as caryatids). 

Caryatids on building near National Theater, Prague, November 2014. My photo.

The atlantes are often more more heavy-duty, more obviously carrying the weight of the turn-of the century world.

**

I am happy to get my ear attuned to the sound of Czech here; in Berlin it sometimes bothers me that I can't tell one Slavic language from another in the street (and there are a lot of Slavic languages in the street in Berlin). But in Prague I could hear the difference. There were a lot of Russian tourists (the free maps at our hotel had text mostly in Russian), and of course the general stream of talk in the street was Czech, so you could hear the languages side by side. The Russian was clear and open and hard like cold water, and the Czech somehow thicker and sweeter, like poured honey. 

**

Czech is one of those languages like Dutch or Danish that is spoken by too few people to make it practicable as the only language a non-backwoods-dweller speaks. If you're a native Czech (Dutch, Danish, etc.) speaker, you need to have a serious second language. And here, you can more or less tell someone's age by their second language. For the oldest it's German, for the middle aged it's Russian; for the young it's English. And all these languages have brought cultural influences with them.

Ethnic nationalists worry that letting in too many different sorts of people into a country will dilute everyone's culture to nothing, to some dreary lowest common denominator. Eastern Europe makes it obvious that this is not so. You can have a distinctive culture that is not mono-ethnic. Bohemia and Moravia and Silesia used to be wonderful mixed forests of culture--Slavic and Jewish and Germanic and even a bit Mediterranean. The twentieth century laid waste to these mixed forests, in ways that probably cannot be mended. The Prague that was twenty-five percent Jewish, in the eighteenth century, is not a version of the city that will return.

The Jews are mostly gone, and the Germans are mostly gone from Prague. There was a wish, at the end of World War II, to clear the murk of Central European ethnicity, to have the Czechs on one side of the line and the non-Czechs on the other. 

This worked about as well as you would expect. Other people always come, and Prague is full of immigrants. A Czech acquaintance who lives in a heavily Vietnamese neighborhood was telling us that the Vietnamese children are often very culturally Czech. Their parents work such long hours at their businesses that they don’t have much time for the children. They hire old Czech women as nannies, so the children grow up with Czech language and songs and fairytales and (somewhat old-fashioned) attitudes, and not so much Vietnamese.  Banana children, they say, yellow on the outside, white on the inside, and a bit uneasy about it. But this is life, we are all more mixed in our identities than the identity-politicians would like to admit. 

What is má vlast, what is someone's native country? Our acquaintance Herr B, the would-be Prague philosophy student, found when he arrived in Germany in the early 1970s (having rejected Switzerland as hopelessly philistine) that he could be counted as a German (automatic citizenship, stipend at the university, etc.) because his father’s education had been at the German gymnasium (college-prep school) in Prague, not the Czech gymnasium. This counted as an indicator of cultural identity and probable ethnicity. But the only reason Herr B.’s father got a German education was that in the 1930s the German school in Prague accepted Jews and the Czech school didn’t. So, being a Jew, he ended up counting as ethnic German. 

Go figure.

**

When we set out to return to Berlin, we had to stand around a longish time in the train station waiting for the track announcement of our delayed and strike-truncated train. The trains are very frequent at the Prague station and the announcements flowed endlessly over us in uncomprehended Czech.

And what was driving me crazy was the set of tones indicating that a major announcement was coming. It was the four-note opening theme from the first movement of Má Vlast. It was absolutely insane-making, like having an announcement every minute preceded by the four opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth. (Music used this way is not exactly Kepler's harmony of the universe.)

**

But it's hard to get away from these tunes. Hanns Eisler, the composer of the now-unused East German national anthem, adapted the Moldau theme to provide a tune for Brecht's Song of the Moldau, a fine rabble-rousing piece that was meant to say, during Nazi times, Things change, oppression doesn't last forever:

     Am Grunde der Moldau wandern die Steine,

     Es liegen drei Kaiser begraben im Prag.

     Das Große bleibt groß nicht, und klein nicht das Kleine,

     Die Nacht hat zwölf Stunden, dann kommt schon der Tag.

 The stones in the bed of the Moldau roll onward,

 The bones of three Kaisers lie buried in Prague,

 The great don’t stay great nor the little stay little,

 The darkness has twelve hours but then comes the day.

(Of course in English you lose the sound that carries so much of the verse here: those grinding, growling, gr and dr sounds with long ahs and ees between them (Es liegen drei Kaiser begraben in Prag--Rudolf the alchemist and who else?). It sounds like wind on a rocky hillside, like water rolling stones.)

**

Also, the Moldau theme--that classic expression of Czech nationalism, that Italian Polish Ukrainian Moldovan folk tune--is, with a few  modifications, the tune of the Israeli national anthem.