Panke 1

Stinky River

It’s spring! and we’re going upriver. Following the little river Panke from central Berlin up to the northern border and into the Brandenburg countryside, where we will probably get lost trying to find the source of the river. (This is a longer trip than the two canals in the previous posts; the Panke is about 29 km.)

The idea of walking upriver instead of down is that the river-mouth is easier to find, and if you just keep going you should get to the source. Doesn't necessarily work, because sometimes you get forced away from the waterside (walls, highways, etc.) and have a hard time getting back. I've been almost at the source of the Panke before, but the time I came closest, I got off track because some joker out in Brandenburg had turned a crossroad sign around so it pointed the wrong way. The wrong direction turned out to be at least as interesting as the right one, but I've never made it to the beginning of the river yet. 

Have I even made it to the river-mouth? What you see in the picture below is often called the Panke mouth, but strictly speaking it isn't.  The last stretch of the river, where it goes into the Spree, was closed off and paved over in the nineteenth century (when it stank like a sewer--it was popularly called the Stinkepanke--and hence it was not a very welcome landscape feature in center city). The water was diverted to the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrftskanal here at Nordhafen (see March post, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 2). 

Panke mouth at Nordhafen. Photo, Axel Mauruszat. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pankemuendung_Nordhafen.jpg

Much of the original course of the the south end of the Panke has been opened up again, but the last bit, where it goes into the Spree, is still down in the sewers. This is not a sewer tour, so.... no photo of the alternative mouth.

**

The late winter and early spring have been warm and dry, and the water in the Panke--which rarely amounts to much--is very low. The river is trashy in the stretch north of Nordhafen, almost as much trash as water in some places. It gets a bit more respectable-looking here where the banks have been walled with brick and the water doesn't seep away so much.

Along the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

We're going up through Wedding (including, for purposes of discussion,  Gesundbrunnen, which is the eastern half of the old Wedding district, given a separate existence when the Berlin districts were shuffled and re-cut in 2001). Wedding enjoys the distinction of being one of the two worst neighborhoods in Berlin, according to the latest edition of the Berlin Social Structure Atlas (a city project that collects and analyzes demographic data, micro-neighborhood by micro-neighborhood; the new edition has just appeared).

I like Wedding. A lot. I'm up here fairly often; and I don't mean to underplay the difficulties of life here--the neighborhood has plenty of problems. But for those of us who have lived in more dysfunctional places, it's one of the marvels of Berlin that it doesn't get any worse than this. In the worst place you could end up living here, you can still walk alone in the parks. The neighborhood isn't full of burned-out housing, the residents aren't mostly huddling behind locked doors. The streets are full of people, there is lively commerce, shop after shop spilling fifth-hand goods out onto the sidewalk or setting out a few rickety battered tables and chairs where the elders of the neighborhood can nurse a cup of coffee and supervise the passersby. There is some degree to which society still works here; it's seriously troubled but it's not mortally pathological. The likelihood that you will be held up at gunpoint is really quite low. (And people do not even find this remarkable.)

 Having said this, let us invoke charms against the Evil Eye.

Along the Panke in Gesundbrunnen, March 2014. My photo.

This is graffiti-artist territory. Here on the river-wall is a sad blue dinosaur that looks like a child's painting, and beside it some Germanic Bartleby has written in neat black script:

     "My day does not have as many seconds in it as I would 
      need to say no. No. No." 

Here is the back wall of an apartment house along the river.  

Along the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

Which raises questions, of course. This is bright and interesting for passers-by, but if I were living in this building, would I want all the graffiti on my back wall? Nah, not all that much. Our Hausmeister scrubs off the tags when they appear. (Some neighborhood wit sprayed on a building down the street from us: Graffiti are not art. Architecture is art.)  

But even if I don't want it on house walls--and I really wish people wouldn't deface the trains--I think I'd as soon have this on an underpass as have nothing but bare concrete:

Along the Panke.  March 2014, my photo.

What's so great about bare concrete? I'm not in love with bare concrete. 

**

Especially where the city is dense and various, the past dozes in the back courtyards, or the sun catches it now and then at a street corner--and so for a moment, at a turn of the river, we are not so far from the eighteenth century when this was all countryside and the king and his court rode here to hunt. (All right, the river would have slopped around in a less engineered-looking way then, but still--this is pretty countrified for being in the most populous sub-district of center city. Only the disembowelled shopping cart at the bottom of the picture reminds us where we are now.)

The Panke in Gesundbrunnen. March 2014, my photo.

One warm day, as the story goes, the king was riding out here on the hunt and stopped to ask for a glass of water at a mill along the Panke. The water was extraordinarily refreshing, he said. The court apothecary investigated and found (allegedly) healthful minerals in it, and so a little spa grew up here along the river late in the eighteenth century. Gesundbrunnen, the spring of health. (What did the miller's wife do with the glass? What became of the mill?)

The spa flourished for a while, it was never a big place. Not the sort of spa where the whole European nobility came to stroll and gamble, like Baden-Baden or Karlsbad, but a pleasant spot for the local upper classes to de-stress. I would guess the specimens of fancy brick-work that cluster near Badstrasse belong to the later days of the spa.

On Badstrasse near the Panke. March 2014, my photo.

The spring itself (the health spring, the Gesundbrunnen) was accidentally choked in the process of sewer-building in the 1880s, and so the spa came to an end. The neighborhood was already going downhill. Cheap beer-gardens, cheap gambling, cheap prostitution. (But shouldn't there be cheap pleasures as well as expensive ones?) Then came disastrously crammed, insanitary workers' housing, typhus, cholera, tuberculosis. Gesundbrunnen.

It makes you think of one of those terrifying cold sonnets from Rilke's Paris years--which are more terrifying in the German (see end of post): the unobtrusive rhyme and meter in the German move the lines forward like Fate wearing socks, walking up behind you so quietly that you don't know it's there until the sestet, and you don't know it has a weapon until the last line or two. 

As a king on the hunt might take a glass
to drink from, any glass--
and as, afterwards, whoever owned it
would put it away and keep it safe, as if it were not just any glass, 

so perhaps thirsty Fate raised 
this woman to his mouth and drank,
and a cramped small life, too fearful of 
breaking her, set her aside from use,

set her back in the anxious vitrine
where it kept its treasures
(or the things it thought were such).

There she stood, alien, like something lent away,
and she grew old and blind
and was no treasure and was never rare.

Cherry trees in bloom, Wollankstrasse, March 2014. My photo.

We come to the S-Bahn tracks, and it's time to call it a day and pick up the path again later. The cherries are in bloom now by the Wollankstrasse station. The Berlin Wall used to run along here, after it turned east at the end of the Invalidenfriedhof (see March post, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 1) and then turned north again.

Land use planning question (suitable for exams in graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses): What do you do with a disused border between formerly hostile states, after the walls and the watchtowers have been knocked down and the barbed wire has been rolled up and taken away? Suggest a use for the space. Justify your answer. 

Model answer: Lay out a good bicycle path and plant ten thousand cherry trees. Justification (as given for certain land-use provisions in the Berlin legal code): Because it is beautiful.

Cherry trees in bloom, Wollankstrasse, March 2014. My photo.

**

So wie der König auf der Jagd ein Glas
ergreift, daraus zu trinken, irgendeines,--
and wie hernach der welcher es besaß
es fortstellt und verwahrt als war es keines:

so hob vielleicht das Schicksal, durstig auch,
bisweilen Eine an den Mund und trank,
die dann ein kleines Leben, viel zu bang,
sie zu verbrechen, abseits vom Gebrauch

hinstellte in die ängsliche Vitrine,
in welcher seine Kostbarkeiten sind
(oder die Dinge, die für kostbar gelten).

Da stand sie fremd wie eine Fortgeliehne,
und wurde einfach alt und wurde blind
und war nicht kostbar und war niemals selten.

   Rilke, "Ein Frauen-Schicksal," Neue Gedichte