Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 2

The Land of Moab

Along the Schiffahrtskanal, January 2014. My photo.

The days are very small in winter here, narrow gray-white slots in the hours around noon, between dark and dark. And then, as January passes into February and March, the light comes back in tremendous leaps and bounds, rushing toward spring.

The days are big and bright now. There are green leaves in the hedges, and blooming crocuses on the sunny slopes under the trees, along the water. Before the spring came, I was mostly sticking to the southeast end of the canal, which is more urban (less mud and ice and dead back gardens) than the northwest end.  So … past the Invalidenfriedhof (see last post), to Nordhafen (North Harbor, but not a harbor any more, port facilities taken out in the 1950s and 60s and replaced by park); and from Nordhafen the canal turns west and runs through an area heavy with industry and institutions.

We come to Westhafen, a busy poky little port where Henry Ford assembled Model T's in a warehouse back in the 1920s. One of my favorite power plants is here, the Moabiter Kraftwerk. (Don’t you love power-plant architecture?)

Kraftwerk Berlin-Moabit, January 2014. My photo.

The power plants here are usually on the water, where the fuel can be brought in by barge. (In the winter I saw a barge with a sign on the side saying, “This ship carries as much as 33 trucks”--the cabin in back was as big as a house, and the captain (pilot?) had his car parked on the house roof.) The fuel (coal and biomass) is unloaded by a somewhat Rube-Goldberg-looking device, which you see part of here. It’s one of those things that’s impossible not to stop and watch when it’s in operation. It’s like watching the boats locking through level changes on the canals, people must stop along the path and gawp …

Unloader, Moabiter Kraftwerk. January 2014, Photo M. Seadle.

The neighborhood on the north side of the canal is Wedding, which is a historically tough district: it was a main supplier of Communist street fighters in the interwar years when the Communists and Nazis were shooting it out in the streets. Now, much of it is a poor immigrant neighborhood where there are troubles with the schools. 

Along Nordufer in Wedding, Berlin, January 2014. My photo.

Berlin is an immigrant city, it has a long history of insufficient native population and plenty of room for new people to come in. Dutch settlers were brought in to help drain the swampy ground in early days, French Protestants came in the late seventeenth century, on the run from rising religious intolerance. Other religious refugees came, in quantity, then and in the eighteenth century. (Frederick the Great said, famously: If Moslems want to come to Berlin, I will build them mosques.)  Some of the French Protestants settled in the neighborhood that is now on the south bank of the canal and named it Moabit, after the Land of Moab in the Old Testament. Semi-alien territory, a sort of refuge, near but not in the promised land.

Archangel and I have been up on this stretch of the canal fairly often. The immigration authorities are up here in Moabit (just across from the apartments in the picture above), in a bleak sort of barrack next to a plastics factory, and we used to have to come up and renew our residence permits every year. Lucky us, we didn’t have huge problems, though we were spoken to sternly every now and then. Usually for doing something which the last official we talked to said we must do, but which struck the current official as highly improper. 

Coping with immigration authorities anywhere is tricky, and angst hangs in the corridors of the immigration office like fog. If you’re a refugee you have to report over and over, multiple times a year, and every time, there’s a possibility that you might be booted out, sent back to a home that the German authorities have decided is safe and perhaps your ex-neighbors tell you is not. Or you’ve been here so long, the children hardly speak anything but German, and what is there to go back to? (I think of a young Bosnian friend, telling about these semiannual immigration-office appointments, when she was a refugee in Germany with her family: And oh, none of us could sleep the night before we had to go, and our stomachs hurt … Every time might be the time they lost what was now their home; and eventually, one time, it was.)

The U-Bahn stop for the immigration office is at Westhafen, where the tiles on the wall in the platform area look like word-search puzzles but are actually passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the words run into each other, so that it takes some thought to decipher them.

 

ALLHUMANBEINGSAREBORNFREE

ANDEQUALINDIGNITYANDRIGHTS

THEYAREENDOWEDWITHREASON

ANDCONSCIENCEANDSHOULDACT

TOWARDSONEANOTHERINASPIRIT

OFBROTHERHOOD.

If you pay attention to the letters on the stairway walls on your way out, you read the poet Heinrich Heine’s account of how the French mangled his name when he settled in Paris in 1831 (escaping Prussian censorship, and full of enthusiasm for the French revolution of 1830). “Heinrich Heine” was unpronounceable to his Paris neighbors: they called him “Monsieur Henri Hein,” which, as pronounced by the French, sounded a lot like “Monsieur un rien.”  Monsieur a nothing. 

In the immigration office the waiting rooms have black circles on the wall behind the last row of seats, where the anxious—the Kurds, the Bosnians, the Ukrainians, the Congolese—have rested their heads year after year, waiting, being Monsieur a nothing in a foreign country, endowed with reason and conscience…. And hoping that the locals are so endowed also.

**

But now, along the canal, it is spring. The weather forecast on the video screen in the U-Bahn, coming down from Westhafen, says, "Increasing risk of sunburn."

Crocus near Plötzensee, March 2014