Landwehrkanal 3

Brother Man and Brother Tree

It was good to find the Landwehrkanal banks so accessible this winter. Long stretches were fenced off in recent years, because of an uproar about trees.

In Tiergarten, on the way to the canal. January 2014, My photo.

Trees are to Berlin somewhat as cows are to Delhi. To kill a tree is an impious and thuggish act. Hence, when the city started cutting down trees along the Landwehrkanal in 2007, the relatively genteel local equivalent of all merry hell broke loose.

The trouble was that a retaining wall at one of the excursion-boat stops along the canal fell in during mid-April, and then two weeks later, not so far away, a long stretch of the canal bank slid into the water. Divers investigated and brought back bad news about the general state of the canal banks. Nightmare scenarios arose in the minds of responsible authorities. One of those three-ton willows leaning over the water is going to come down on an excursion boat and squash tourists like flies. A stretch of bank covered in sunbathers is going to slide into the water right into the path of a big boat, and some decorative innocent is going to be chopped up by the propeller. So they banned the boats and fenced the banks to keep sunbathers off and started cutting trees. 

People grumbled about the fences and left rude notes on them or even knocked them down. (Rude public notes are part of the Berlin streetscape.  E.g.,  neighbor-to-neighbor note in an apartment entryway: “Please close this door quietly, even when drunk.”)

The excursion boats, confined to the (overcrowded) Spree, faced with disastrous loss of business, started carrying bedsheet-size banners saying, “Save our jobs!” Don’t just close the canal, do what you have to do to make it usable again. Meanwhile, people chained themselves to the trees and perched in the branches to prevent the tree-cutting.

Excursion boats parked on the Spree in the winter. Building in the background is our neighborhood high school (old and new wings). Photo, Angela Arnold

So where do we go from here? The relevant regulatory authority picks the winners and losers in this fight? Some kind of attempt is made at a market solution--given the money involved in the tourism business and the miles of property value along the canal--and we see who bids higher? 

Nonono. Not in the land that invented the PhD seminar and the theory of communicative action. We talk about it in a well-ordered way, gathering information and writing papers about it that we present to each other in formal sessions under the guidance of professional mediators. For a very long time.

The agreed-on goal was to work out a consensus solution to the problems of the canal that would be “technically workable, sustainable economically, ecologically, and in terms of social welfare, as well as consistent with historic preservation regulations, and would address both the current situation and the future.”  

Oh, right, this is going to happen. Waterways and Shipping was estimating a price tag of 180 million euros to make the canal safe, and if we have to save the trees and social welfare and all the rest of it, what are the costs likely to be, and where is the money going to come from, in a city with perpetual budget troubles? And what a nightmare multiplicity of interests to mediate: at least three districts of the city (each with its own mayor and council), two state-government departments, the various excursion-boat companies, the Waterways and Shipping Authority, the Chamber of Commerce, and twenty-some environmental and other citizens’ groups with probably incompatible interests and varying competence.

The price tag for the mediation process alone, not counting the cost of any actual repair work that resulted, was something like a million and a half euros, and it lasted for years. Bad idea? 

The mediation finally wrapped up just before Christmas of 2013 (some exhausted parties having dropped out along the way). Temporary fixes had got the excursion boats back in the canal, and got most of the fences down, long before the end of the process. No trees had fallen on anyone. Given enough people with enough different viewpoints digging out scientific information (and the locals have a hearty appetite for technical data), it was possible to establish that most of the trees were not a threat to the stability of the banks after all—on the contrary, they were a help—and long-term, there were ways to stabilize the banks that were more environmentally friendly and less expensive than the original plan. The price tag for the revised, mediated, socially and environmentally benevolent, talked-to-death consensus plan was 70 million euros instead of the 180 million that was originally forecast.

So, 110 million savings on an investment of about a million and a half ... Well, let's get reckless and call it an investment of four or five million, to include the costs of unpaid citizen time and annoyance, and it's still a whopper of a financial return. (Not the kind we are likely to see in our retirement plans.) Chalk one up for communicative action, in a sufficiently patient world.

**

The Landwehrkanal has also been the site of other kinds of political action. Two notorious political murders were committed along the canal in 1919, in the chaotic months that followed World War I. You can read the memorial plaque as you pass the spot:

On the evening of the 15^th of January 1919, Dr. Karl Liebknecht and Dr. Rosa Luxemburg were mishandled and murdered by soldiers and officers of the Guard-Cavalry-Sharpshooter Division [an army division in the process of degenerating into a death squad]. Rosa Luxemburg, mortally wounded or dead, was thrown into the Landwehrkanal by her murderers here. Karl Liebknecht was shot a little later at the New Lake, a few hundred meters north of here. In a battle against oppression, militarism, and war, the dedicated socialist Rosa Luxemburg died as the victim of a treacherous political murder. This contempt for life and brutality against human beings show man’s capacity for inhumanity. Inhumanity cannot be and must not be a means of conflict resolution.

In January there are always roses here, and red carnations.

Rosa Luxemburg memorial, Landwehrkanal, 2014.  My photo.

The killings were tolerated, or perhaps suggested or ordered, by the center-left government in Berlin. The resulting split between center left and far left (Liebknecht's and Luxemburg's followers) weakened the opposition to the Nazis in the years to come, with bloody consequences.

**

Long ago, when the water-traffic patterns were different, there was a turnaround basin about a kilometer south of the Landwehrkanal. The basin was later filled in to make a square that anchors a pleasant Charlottenburg neighborhood, where Archangel’s father lived back in the 1920s and 30s. In the days before he had to flee for his life. First to Portugal, then to the US, which was how A. came to be born in Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit.

Now the square is a pleasant place again, with restaurants and bookstores round about. Not always very good restaurants. But a nice place to be on summer evenings under the trees, in a possibly temporary oasis of less murderous politics. Long live the trees, long live communicative action.

**

On the wall along the S-Bahn platform at this square is a plaque that says:

         Brother Man has often let us down.

         Brother Tree, never.

Landwehrkanal in the summer, Kreuzberg.  Photo, Lienhard Schulz

Landwehrkanal 2

Bad neighborhoods

Reflections on the Landwehrkanal, winter afternoon (Photo: M. Seadle)

We were out walking on New Year’s Day, when Berlin looks its worst. Big (very big) private fireworks are legal here, unlike the US, and people set them off everywhere, though by preference along the waterways. The weather was so mild this year, it was even more tempting than usual to stand out on the bridges, shooting off large fireworks and getting sozzled on Little Red Riding Hood* all through the small hours, ending up too drunk to pick up after yourself.

So on New Year’s Day, always, the city is heaped with firework-litter and bottles; and because it is a holiday, no one will start picking up the trash until the next day. The cafes are open on New Year’s Day, it’s a good day for a family walk, and people pick their way placidly through the mess, content to wait until tomorrow for the cleanup, grumbling only mildly.

**

The day that Archangel and I walked the Kreuzberg (eastern) stretch of the Landwehrkanal, we could hardly get along the path, it was so packed with people out for a walk in the fine winter afternoon. At Urbanhafen, where the canal widens out a bit (and there was once an industrial harbor) the swans were begging shamelessly, fluffing their feathers in the sun and wagging their tails.

Swan on the Landwehrkanal, Urbanhafen, December 2013.  (Photo, M. Seadle)

East Kreuzberg is, by Berlin standards, a bad neighborhood. During the Cold War it was the bit of West Berlin that stuck out farthest into the east; it was a peninsula with the Wall glowering around it on three sides, and thus not regarded as an attractive place to live. (Also, in the late 60s and 70s, the city planned to bulldoze portions of east Kreuzberg to put in a freeway, which made the housing even less desirable.) The undesirable space filled up with squatters, artists, Turkish immigrants, homegrown political radicals, poor students, welfare recipients, and so on. It became a center of what the Germans call “the alternative scene:” the site of anarchist communes, quirky bars, famous battles with the police over occupied houses.

The neighborhood has quieted down a bit since the 70s and 80s—since, for example, an armed group called Commando Against the Terrorism of Consumption robbed the till of one of the popular clubs as a protest against the management’s taste in music and the rising entrance prices. But all sorts of people live here still. Disproportionately young, disproportionately Middle Eastern, disproportionately social-welfare recipients; but also prosperous older professionals who are unlikely to be frequenters of clubs like the one that was robbed years ago (and has been very successfully run by a collective for the last twenty years, partly as a concert and dance venue, partly as a home for political and social movement work). On the sidewalk we run into one of Archangel’s colleagues, with his wife, who live in East Kreuzberg and are of the prosperous older professional type.

Their living here does not mean what it would mean in the US. They are not urban pioneers in a quasi-hazardous neighborhood, rehabbing an old place on which they will eventually make a killing in the real estate market. The neighborhood is not particularly hazardous, and the German residential real estate market is not a place where you are likely to make a killing by selling your own home. (German housing prices went down about 2% in the financial crisis and back up 2% afterwards, according to The Economist.) The place you live is the place you live, not a speculative asset. [Gentrification is a problem here, however; more on this in a later post.]

**

I remember a long summer evening under the trees at a Middle Eastern restaurant in some mildly scruffy corner of Kreuzberg a few years ago (no clue where, I have a terrible sense of direction), with a couple of young German friends: she in publishing, he in big-time corporate sales.  One of these endless, drifting summer evenings, when it’s still light at half-past ten, and people linger at the tables under the trees until the small summer dark comes down. The young friends live down the street from the restaurant; they are very late, they are not used to organizing around their (still fairly new) baby.

Eventually they arrive, everything stops while the restaurant owner and staff coo over the baby. Everyone at the restaurant knows the couple—she waits tables there occasionally if she’s short on cash, or to help out the owner if he is short-handed on a busy weekend.

We talk about the neighborhood. The corporate salesman does not live in Berlin, he comes here when he can. His company (like many champion German exporters) is headquartered in a small city in the south, and he lives mostly in the business-class section of airplanes between Europe and China and India. She would like him to move to Berlin, he would like her to move to the south.

He, campaigning against Berlin, says something about what a bad neighborhood Kreuzberg is. She, who is a small, slight woman, says, “There’s nowhere here that I wouldn’t walk alone. There were neighborhoods in English cities where I wouldn’t go [she lived in England for a number of years], but it isn’t like that here.”

He says, “But I thought you told me it wasn’t a good idea to go to X-strasse,” nearby. He is a big imposing confident man in the classic corporate-salesman mode.

She smiles sweetly up at him.  “I said, it wasn’t a good idea for you to go there, love. It’s fine for me to go there.”

Insofar as there is a potential for violence here, much of it comes from young men wanting to prove their manliness. And knocking down small women does not count as Class I evidence of manliness in these parts.  Or even Class II or Class III evidence. Knocking down Mr. Business Class, on the other hand, would count.

Along the Landwehrkanal, Kreuzberg (Photo, M. Seadle)