Panke 4

Down the Garden Path, Past the Day of Judgment

When you come through Buch along the river (end of last post) and head for the S-Bahn station, you pass a wall with a slightly battered mural showing the park and church that belonged to the local manor house.

Mural, Buch, April 2014. My photo.

The Schlosspark (the old manor-house park) is a favorite place, and I was curious to see what it would look like in the spring. I’ve only been here in late summer before, when much of the green space in Berlin is weedy and overgrown, and the Schlosspark is sort of exponentially overgrown, or was a few years ago. The late summer in the inner part of the city, with its non-herbicidal naturalness, has a (literally) seedy charm. Out here, where the grass can be up to your elbows in August, and the nettles too, it's something else again: Sleeping Beauty's gardens, enchanted and slightly sinister.

In the US, it’s likely that the last fringes of the city will be newly settled areas, places where they just bulldozed the trees or the cornfields ten years ago. Buch is the last piece of Berlin, the only part of the city that’s outside the circling freeway, the Berliner Ring--but Buch is old, old. There were a hundred houses here in the Bronze Age. A church and a beer joint were on the records here by the fourteenth century. By the middle of the eighteenth century there was a new church (the one in the picture), along with a built-out, renovated manor house and some serious garden design in the park. 

Much of this is gone. The church lost its tower in the Second World War and looks a little embarrassed without it. The house is altogether gone, allowed to deteriorate after the war and finally knocked down in the 1960s. The garden … well, we will see what we can find of the garden.

Schlosspark Buch, April 2014. My photo.

The paths are invitingly non-derelict at this time of year. As I walk along, I hear the slow creak of a bicycle behind me, and an elderly voice calls, “I’m coming up behind you on the left.” I move over, and in case I should be impatient, the voice adds gently, “But, you know, I’m not coming up fast.”  The bicyclist wobbles past with his load of groceries, at a pace that lets us praise the fine spring weather to each other before he is out of range.

Near the beginning of the path, across the street from a string of shops, there is a small Soviet war memorial with a clutter of fencing and workmen's oddments around it. It’s a stone obelisk with an inscription in Russian on one side. Only in Russian.

Everyone here used to know Russian, it was required in the schools; but that is past. (I used to know Russian, but I can't read this, squinting in the sun at the wrong angle through my bifocals.) As time goes on, fewer and fewer people will be able to make anything of this; the meaning will leave the inscription like light leaving a wall as the sun goes down.

What a load of historical grief is here. Eighty thousand Soviet soldiers died storming Berlin. In this one battle, three quarters as many dead as the entire American losses in the Pacific theater in all the years of the war. (It’s easy in the US to forget, or simply not to know, the enormous Soviet and Chinese death tolls—not to realize that this was a lot of what won the war.) The Russians came through here, and some were buried here, though later the graves were moved to a grander memorial closer in to center city.

Of course this was just a passing squall in terms of world-historical bad weather. World War II killed about two and a half percent of the world’s population; what historians call the General Crisis of the seventeenth century--wars, revolts, and associated famines and plagues--killed about a third of the world’s population, from England to China and beyond. (The weather metaphor is pertinent, because the General Crisis seems to have been set off by climate change; for friends with scholarly inclinations, a standard current summary is Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis, from Yale U. Press.) One of the useful things about a humanist education (literature, history) is that it gives you the good sense to wake up happy every morning just because it’s not the seventeenth century any more.

The local manifestation of the General Crisis was the Thirty Years' War, which ripped Central Europe to pieces, turning it into a Congo-like region of failed states, warlords, and crazed wandering troops of soldiers pillaging and slaughtering, raping and torturing and mutilating. People thought that Judgment Day had come: the four horsemen of the Apocalypse--pestilence, war, famine, and death--had been loosed on the world to destroy it.

Sure looked like it. But then the end of the world didn't come, and the Thirty Years' War ended in exhausted, patched-together treaties that didn't exactly solve underlying problems. No final judgment, just a mess to clean up. One of the clean-up crew in Brandenburg laid out this park.

Schlosspark Buch,  April 2014. My photo.

Here water has been pulled away from the Panke and decoratively engineered. Water encircles the central part of the park in two broad still arms, and little channels run here and there to enliven the landscape, sparkling in the spring sun. 

All this organization of water in the seventeenth century means that the Dutch have been here. The Dutch provided an important part the model for Brandenburg's recovery from the almost-end of the world. (Encourage technical skills and trade, ease up on religious persecution, build canals, drain wetlands, build a competent military.) The ruler of Brandenburg married a Dutch princess; one of his aides--a trusted man, who later would govern Berlin for him when he was away--married the Dutch princess's cousin and confidante. The aide bought the manor at Buch and laid out the Dutch-style garden. 

By the 1730s, everything is much better: the weather has improved, the state has stabilized, and it is now firmly established that the proper expression of religious sentiment is not burning heretics but building little boxes of pink and white stucco. 

Schlosskirche, Buch, April 2014. My photo.

France is now the model, not the Netherlands. The goal is to be enlightened, rational, to put away the last remains of the pointless savagery of the seventeenth century. Voltaire, who has tried to beat back the remains of the savagery (judicial torture, censorship, war), sits in Berlin at mid-century writing history, thinking of what has changed in his time, and says: Climate, government, religion. Part of the Schlosspark at Buch is remade into a French formal garden, with gravel paths and geometric flowerbeds. Voltaire quarrels with the King of Prussia, who is unhappy about Voltaire's rational speculations in illegal securities; Voltaire is unhappy about about Frederick's rational attacks on countries against which he has not yet declared war (if they were prepared for an attack, you would be less likely to win, right?).

Randall Jarrell, an American poet who trained the bomber pilots who flattened the German cities in World War II and wrote one of the most memorably gruesome poems of the war ("The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner" which ends, "When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.") also wrote a poem about an English garden in central Europe, which nods to Voltaire and his time in Berlin:

                         he held out sixty years,
    Gentling savage Europe with his Alexandrines,
    Submitted, went to Switzerland, and perished.
    One spends one's life with fools, and dies among watches.
    But see him in flower, in a Prussian garden,
    He walks all summer, yawning, in the shade
    Of an avenue of grenadiers ...

[And then come revolution and wars and slaughter again; Hitler and Stalin get half-line walk-ons in the poem. Opera fans will recognize the lines from Der Rosenkavalier in the closing.]

    A ghost sings; and the ghosts sing wonderingly:
    Ist halt vorbei! ... Ist halt vorbei! ....        [It's over!]

    Then there is silence; a soft floating sigh.
    Heut' oder morgen kommt der Tag,   [Today or tomorrow the day will come]
    And how shall we bear it?
                                          Lightly, lightly.

    The stars go down in the West: a ghostly air
    Troubles the dead city of the earth.

     . . . . It is as one imagined it: an English garden.


At Buch, a nineteenth-century owner redid part of the gardens again, this time in English style. No more water-engineering displays, no more gravel and geometry, but lawns and groves instead: the art is not supposed to look like art but nature. Romanticism puts rationality in its place, and the sleep of reason brings forth the usual monsters.

Schlosspark Buch, April 2014. My photo.

The graves around the Schlosskirche are covered with flowers; the organist is practicing something triumphantly Easterish inside.

Churchyard, Schlosskirche Buch, April 2014. My photo. 

Beyond the church, the street is hung with election posters. Every one I pass is for the NPD. (For US friends: this is the National-Democratic Party of Germany. Look it up, it isn't nice.)

Academic Questions 5: Paying the Personnel

I keep thinking about a couple of conversations I had in the US:

Here is a furious after-dinner argument at a meeting years ago: on one side is a business-law colleague who is interested in labor regulation, and on the other side is a financial economist who opposes labor regulation (like safety and minimum-wage laws) because he believes it can’t create real welfare improvements. People get paid their marginal product, he says. What they get from the company is determined by how much money they make for it. So companies can’t pay their lower-level people more, or provide them with more safety, than they do. There isn’t any slack in the system, there isn’t anywhere the money could come from. If you take it away from people who are earning more, and contribute more, they’ll leave, and that won’t help the people who are still in the company.

Here is a quasi-monologue from a macroeconomist when we are sitting in one of the local espresso joints one morning: I hate seeing my brother-in-law at holidays, says the macroeconomist. He has his own business, and he says, You’re an economist, you should be able tell me how to make money. I don’t know how to tell him to make money. He says, Don’t you have some formula for maximizing profits? Sure, I say, the marginal costs of your inputs, like labor and materials, should equal their marginal revenues. Then he says, How do I know what the marginal revenues of my labor and materials are? Then I say, You’re the businessman, you’re supposed to know that. And the conversation just gets worse from there.

Was I paid my marginal product when I was a maid in a cheap motel?  When I had a named professorship at a respectable research university? Nah, I doubt it. And, contrary to the financial economist’s beliefs, it’s not just because regulation distorts the purity of markets.

As the macroeconomist’s brother-in-law said, it’s hard to know what marginal revenues (and sometimes marginal costs) are. Exactly how much more money does Coca-Cola, Inc. make as a result of hiring one more janitor at headquarters? Besides, how well-defined is the marginal product of one input if there are complementarities in the production function? That is, if you and I working together can produce more than the sum of what we can produce working separately, then to whom should that “more”—that synergy surplus—be attributed and paid?

The uncertainties here allow some room for fudge in determining how much people are paid. Because we don’t know marginal products, we have to guess at them, and our guesses are influenced by highly salient (not always highly informative) facts and by sociopolitical pushes and pulls. This influences the personnel costs of universities in some curious ways.

1)   Faculty salaries in professional areas like business, law, and medicine are much higher in the US than in Germany, which is one of the (many) reasons that higher education is more costly in the US. And one of the reasons faculty salaries are higher is that starting salaries for new graduates in these area are also much higher in the US than here. This drives faculty compensation up, because paying teachers much less than their students earn immediately at graduation discourages people from becoming teachers. 

The national differences in entry-level professional salaries are not just differences in the overall level of economic performance but also (and more so) differences in how income is distributed within countries. Mean per capita income is about $8,000 lower in Germany than in the US. But mean starting MBA salaries are about $28,000 lower, and starting family-physician salaries are something like $100,000 lower in Germany. (Data from www.topmba.com, www.mdsalaries.com, and www.thieme.de/viamedici/arzt-im-beruf-weiterbildungs-coach-allgemeine-infos-1570/a/was-verdienen-aerzte-18665.htm  Different sources would undoubtedly provide different numbers, but the basic picture shouldn’t change.)  

There are all sorts of reasons for these differences, and the reasons are entangled in the whole socioeconomic structure. Just a sample: In the US, it's possible to make really big money from compensation in some fields: for example, the top reaches of business, entertainment, law, and medicine. This is less true in Europe, where big money comes more from ownership of capital, not from compensation (see Paul Krugman’s piece in the May 8 New York Review for more on this). 

Second, entry-level pay can be lower relative to later-life pay here than in the US. (It isn’t always, but it can be.) Archangel was extremely startled to find, when he was hiring people in Berlin, that age—not just work experience or accumulation of credentials, but pure number of years since birthdate—was one of the elements that went into the pay formula. He simply was not allowed to pay a brilliant twenty-eight-year old very much, regardless of credentials and work experience and past performance, because the person was, well ...  twenty-eight.

This was a civil-service rule on a particular job, not a universal practice; but it exists—it’s acceptable here when I think it wouldn’t be in the US—in part because there is a greater cultural skepticism about the value of youth. American popular culture is full of the themes of children being smarter than their parents, young people’s ideas being better than older people’s ideas, and so on. If I may generalize from some limited television-watching, there’s more sense in popular culture here that the young can be volatile and thoughtless and haven’t yet learned to manage their lives; they need guidance from their more solid elders. (The sense that the old don’t “get it,” and the young do, comes in part from the strong immigrant culture in the US: in immigrant families it’s the kids who acculturate quickly and speak the language better. Their parents are lost and have to be helped to navigate the culture.)

In any case, social structures put a lid on recent graduates’ salaries here, and that reduces some of the upward pressure on professors’ salaries.

2)   The way university education is financed also makes a difference to compensation levels. Tuition is relatively trivial here: the state pays most of the cost of running the universities via tax-funded appropriations. In the US, you graduate from business school or med school or law school with a big load of debt, because of the high tuition. So you “have to” make a lot of money in your first job in order to pay off the debt. (That is, people won't go into this line of work and incur the debt for the education unless they can make high starting salaries.)  And because graduates have to make so much money in their first jobs in order to pay off their debts, their professors have to be paid highly, which makes the education more expensive to provide, which increases the debt load, which increases the need for high starting salaries for graduates, which … etc., etc.  Some part of this dynamic is absent in Germany.

3)   The terms of the tradeoff between the monetary and non-monetary rewards of work are different in different places, because what you can and cannot buy with the money (and what you can buy only with the money) differ from place to place. You can translate dollars to euros at purchasing power parity, but the "same" money in this sense does not let you buy the same things. (Nor would you even want to buy the same things, perhaps, in different cultural settings.) German colleagues complain, with reason, about the difficulty of getting capable PhD students and faculty for the salaries that are offered here. But I think that you would have even more trouble getting them for the same price in the US because of the differences in what money can and must buy. What more money (past a certain moderate level) buys you here is more toys. What it buys you in the US, especially in large urban areas is protection against more existential threats. You need it for personal safety, health care, education for your kids. (Because schools are not funded by local property taxes here--property taxes are almost nonexistent, and school funding is not local--the question of what your children will learn in school is not so intimately tied to the size of your house.) So having more money can be a more pressing matter in the US--and this must affect the way that people sort themselves into jobs and bargain over compensation.

Panke 3

S-Bahn Smells

Someone has broken the glass again in the door of our neighborhood S-Bahn station. (How often is this, every third month?) But how wonderful the station smells in the morning, from the fresh flowers piled shoulder-high around the doors. The bakery-kiosk under the escalator smells of good fresh croissants and bad fresh coffee; and the schedule for Berlin’s three main opera houses is posted by the elevator, along with advertisements for movies, romance novels, and European Parliament candidates. 

Florist, S-Bahn Bellevue, April 2014. My photo.

I take the S-Bahn east to the Friedrichstrasse station (more florists, more bakeries; books, fresh fruit, shoes and a haircut establishment) and then north; I get out at Karow, which is where I left off on the last stretch. On the station platform here, the weeds are taking the concrete apart, slowly and without disturbance. The station interior is absolutely barren, vandalized, and filled with such a stench that I forget about my plans for a comparison photo and flee out into the fresh air as fast as I can.

Ah, so homelike, so like small train stations where I have hung out in the US. So many hours spent waiting to be picked up by family or friends in some sad dump with broken benches and no heat in the dead of winter.

Karow as a whole seems to be comfortable enough; a lot of new single-family houses have been built here since reunification. The private structures are okay, it's just the public structure, the station, that is squalid. 

**
The station is not so close to the river here, but in less than a mile we’re back to the waterside. It’s a cloudy day, with springtime kinds of clouds in marbly patterns behind the new leaves. 

It won’t rain; it just likes to threaten.

Along the Panke in Karow, April 2014. My photo.

I’m still thinking about the Karow station. 

Query: why are dereliction and the accompanying lack of small retail still marginallly more common in old East Berlin than old West Berlin, once you're out of the middle of the city? (Dereliction and lack of retail go together: on the one hand, you don't want to rent space for your bakery in a place where the smell will make people gag; on the other hand, if no one rents space in the station, there isn't so much money available to fix it up.)

Multiple choice options for the explanation, pick one or more: (A) Too little capitalism in the (distant) past: Private business ownership was discouraged for two generations in the East and is recovering only slowly. (B) Too much capitalism in the (recent) past: Deutsche Bahn, which is responsible for the S-Bahn, meant to do a big public stock offering several years ago, and in order to make the financials look good, it allegedly made some ill-advised maintenance cuts that have had long-term negative effects on the S-Bahn. (For accountant friends: it smells like real earnings management around here!)  (C) A lot of small retail in Berlin is run by non-Germans; and non-Germans are wary of the old East, which has a bit of a reputation for skinhead xenophobia.

(C) appears to have a lot of explanatory value if you look around places like the S-Bahn and U-Bahn stops in our home neighborhood. Those wonderfully "European" institutions, the ubiquitous florists and fresh-produce stands and bakeries and cafes, are run by the Vietnamese and the Turks and miscellaneous Middle Eastern and Balkan types who might feel uneasy in the remoter stretches of the old East.

Last summer there was a big flap in Hellersdorf (very East Berlin, as far east as you can get), when an empty school building was turned into housing for Syrian refugees. (The empty school in our neighborhood that had been serving the same purpose was needed as a school again.)

Vehement protests, on the edge of violence, broke out in Hellersdorf. Some of the locals said they didn’t want refugees housed nearby because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the refugees were criminals who might attack them. The refugees were also up in arms, saying they didn’t want to be housed out in godforsaken Hellersdorf because they themselves would be afraid to go out at night: the locals were criminals who might attack them.

It was an uglier version of the scene in Mozart’s Magic Flute where Papageno is afraid of Monostatos because he is black, and Monostatos is afraid of Papageno because he is wearing feathers, and they both hide behind trees (or whatever props the stage offers) singing “Hu! Hu! That must be the devil!  Hu!”

The protests have eased off in Hellersdorf since last summer. People from the neighborhood church and other groups have turned out in favor of the refugees, have stopped by to help out with German lessons, to bring toys for the children and warm clothes for everyone. Other sorts of people have followed the refugees when they are out on errands, throwing bottles at them. In March, a car belonging to one of the refugee-helpers was burned out in the parish-house parking lot.  Hu! Das ist der Teufel sicherlich!

**
But the putrid station is behind us, and we are northbound along the river again. It's fine to walk cross-country here: the new leaves are coming out in raspberry thickets that go on for yards and yards, and the buttercups are thick by the water. 

Buttercups along the Panke in Karow, April 2014. My photo.

Several months ago I saw a television documentary about a slightly problem-prone housing project on the edge of Berlin. (Too many of the wrong sort of people have moved in here, said the old inhabitants, you can tell they don't know how to behave because they're here for months without putting proper curtains in the windows.) Two of the interviewees were young men of Middle Eastern descent, who had grown up in the project and were occasionally inclined to tough-guy stances; one was a rapper with some angry lines. But do you know what the best thing is? one of the two, a Lebanese, said. You can take long walks in the country from here. 

What a very German Lebanese. At least, different from the Lebanese neighbors I grew up with in the American West, who would no more have taken long walks in the country than they would have stood in the courthouse square wearing clown noses. But then, maybe they were very Western-American Lebanese. (We do not do long country walks in western America, or at least we didn't in those days.)

 **

It's post-glacial wetland out here, marsh and dune landscape like parts of Michigan or Wisconsin. On the edge of Karow is a nature preserve: lagoons and reed-beds and patches of woods full of breeding waterfowl and sometimes clouds of migrants. (Are refuges for migrant birds easier to provide than refuges for migrant people?) The diversity of duck calls on a spring morning sounds like twenty kinds of car horns in a Manhattan traffic jam. 

A big hawk, a marsh harrier, glides low over the reeds for a long way, looking for prey to rip to pieces, and there is a swathe of silence where it passes (not such a refuge for the migrants here after all, perhaps.)

Here, where we are almost at Buch (the next S-Bahn stop), there is more water--the so-called Moorlinse, the marsh lens--and more noise. How loud birds are. Gulls screak and chitter at each other; swans do slow, booming liftoffs like loaded 747s. 

Moorlinse, near Buch, April 2014. My photo.

People have lived here since the stone age. The Funnel-beaker Culture, as the archaeologists call it, had settlements in these parts. Not Germanic, not Slavic, not even Indo-European speakers, probably. Houses on wooden piles in the water; hunting, fishing, a little unimpressive grain-growing; some of the first and most intensive cattle-raising in the stone age. If you have the gene mutation that lets you digest lactose even after you're an adult, you probably owe it to the Funnel Beaker folks, where the mutation apparently originated (Nature Genetics 2003). The gene spread around the world from northeastern Europe, and the Funnel-Beaker Culture was overrun by the next wave of immigrants. Funnel Beakers are on the dustbin of history! Globular Amphorae rule! (I'm not kidding, the next lot in this territory is the Globular Amphorae Culture, which probably brought the Indo-European language group with it. I had a lot of fun in my European Prehistory course in college....)

**
Of course, in spite of all these rural vistas, really we are still in the city. Turn right from the Moorlinse, dodge under the tracks at the S-Bahn station (which is getting a big face-lift: good move, Deutsche Bahn!), and we're and back along the Panke and in Buch, the northernmost sub-district in Berlin.

Along the Panke in Buch, April 2014.  My photo.

When Archangel walks with me, he grumbles that I chase squirrels--meaning that I wander off in the direction of anything that looks interesting rather than going briskly from point A to point B. I intend to chase a few squirrels at Buch, but that is for next time.