What this blog is about

Water is what you see when you fly into Berlin: slow disorderly rivers and die-straight canals and splodges of lake everywhere. Mostly water in the woods, reflecting the trees.

Trees reflected in the Spree, Berlin (Photo, M. Seadle, 2013)

The Berlin waterside is undramatic, and the countryside where the rivers come from is not spectacular. Berlin itself is not old and mellow-beautiful. A lot of it is scruffy and gray and looks like Chicago with less sunshine.

      Along the Spree 
Photo-composite, M. Seadle, 2013

But how human and walkable the city is, from top to bottom and end to end. Every summer in the last several years I have come here and celebrated by walking the Tegeler Fließ, the little river that marks the city limit in the northwest. I start at the end of the U-Bahn line, following the water through woods with cuckoos in them, past little lakes and village churches, across meadows and rye fields. There are wild strawberries in the woods.

 Tegeler Fließ (My photo)

In the winter I have walked the canals, picking my way through the slush-soaked fireworks-litter at New Year’s, watching the coal barges from Poland unload at the power plants, watching old women tie birdseed packets to the waterside bushes.

This has all been piecemeal and incomplete, and now that I am in Berlin for a longer time my project is to walk all the waterways systematically, one by one, end to end.

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This is also the occasion for some observations about Germany and the US, particularly urban and academic life.

Berlin is an extraordinarily livable city, and—particularly for someone who has been within range of that remarkable urban disaster, Detroit—it is natural to ask why urban life works as well as it does here.

The German universities are in an interesting transition, trying to become more internationally competitive, which means becoming more like the best US universities but on a different economic model. How do you create first-class universities without charging any significant tuition, in a country that has no culture of alumni donation, where the state spends less than the developed-world average on education?  The answer may be that you don’t, but it remains to be seen.

For friends who need some geographic orientation (aaaugh, what are all these strange place-names?), see the post, “A little geography.”  University matters appear under the label, "Academic Questions."