A Few Words of Polabian
How fresh the mornings are now. Mist over the sun until late morning; sweet air in mid-city--new leaves, daffodils, primroses, forsythia. A little waft of currywurst in the air by midday. (Signature Berlin street food, awful stuff.)
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| Forsythia along the Panke, April 2014. My photo. |
This is the first time I have lived in a place where the
spring was so generous. In the mid-to-northern US, autumn is fabulously beautiful, but spring includes a lot of raw winds, pelting icy rains, and
maybe snow on May Day. But here it is the autumn that is inhumane, and spring
is so charming you can hardly believe it’s honest.
When I walk to the S-Bahn in the morning, rabbits hop softly through the shrubbery and across the neighborhood lawns.... Though when I say rabbit, the image that comes to mind is different from what I see now by my back door. Where I grew up in Colorado we had big tough high-plains jackrabbits with a kick like the kick of a rifle. If you caught one and tried to hang onto it, it could break your arm. What we have here in central Berlin are bunnies. Little soft lolloping fertility-symbol rabbits like the ones in Renaissance paintings.
When I walk to the S-Bahn in the morning, rabbits hop softly through the shrubbery and across the neighborhood lawns.... Though when I say rabbit, the image that comes to mind is different from what I see now by my back door. Where I grew up in Colorado we had big tough high-plains jackrabbits with a kick like the kick of a rifle. If you caught one and tried to hang onto it, it could break your arm. What we have here in central Berlin are bunnies. Little soft lolloping fertility-symbol rabbits like the ones in Renaissance paintings.
**
And now we are sauntering through pleasant park stretches in the old East--which is not so very different from old West Berlin any more, but you can still sort of tell which side of the vanished Wall you're on. On this side there are yellow streetcars humming and nattering along the streets. (The old West is mostly not streetcar territory; it has more fast light rail.) The streets are sometimes very small. (Aaaugh, this is a one-car-wide underpass under the train tracks, and that means one car, not one car plus a pedestrian). It is quiet. The besetting local crime is vandalism. (Our old-West neighborhood, by contrast, is the bicycle-theft champion of Berlin.)
**
Pankow is where the leaders of the occupying Russian army set up housekeeping after World War II--ah, nice villas, somehow the bombs missed them!--and the East German government leaders followed suit. (This had not been a tough poor area like Wedding before the war, it had been a neighborhood of big industrialists' villas and factories.) So "Pankow" came to be a figure of speech designating the Communist government. The Polabians--whatever they may have meant by the "Pank-" root--would have been surprised.
Konrad Adenauer, who was the chancellor of Germany forever when we were children (it's as if Eisenhower had been President for fifteen years) never referred to the East German government as "the East German government." He always called them "the bosses in Pankow." Or, to be exact, he called them "the bosses in Pankoff"--meaning (a) they are not a legitimate government, and (b) they are not legitimate Germans because they can't even pronounce their own neighborhood correctly. (Adenauer was a Rhinelander, and probably like other Rhinelanders we know, had doubts that Berlin should ever have been included in Germany in the first place--at least, in any Germany that included the Rhine. It was a great mistake in the nineteenth century, says an elderly Rhenish acquaintance. We should never have joined up with Berlin. It's out on the border of Siberia.)
**
Linguistic-cultural-ethnic allegiances are complex things, and people's lives take strange courses through the traps and the shelters that these allegiances offer. From college days, when I studied medieval England, I dimly remember a standard reader for medieval English literature that was put together by a professor at the University of Michigan. (A moderately distinguished Chaucer scholar, now dead.) I find, here, that his family had owned one of the grander villas in Pankow, some way back from the river.
So someone of White-Russian-German-Jewish background finds refuge in Chaucer. The elderly Japanese Chaucer scholar I met in the early 70s found refuge in English poetry when, as a patriotic Japanese, he was overwhelmed by distress and depression at the Japanese defeat in 1945. The great German literary patriots of the early nineteenth century (Wm. von Humboldt, who founded the University of Berlin, and A. W. Schlegel, one of the prime creators of German Romanticism) had a passion for Sanskrit and the Hindu scriptures: nineteenth-century German literary culture, in spite of its often German-nationalist flavor, owes significant debts to the Bhagavad-Gita. Literature is a forest, the roots interlock over long distances and hold the world together, like the tree roots holding the bank in place on the Landwehrkanal.
The family in the villa made their money from a big cigarette factory, a block or so from the villa. In the 1930s, of course, they lost the property to the Nazis with their crazed fantasies of ethnic-national purity. Sensibly, like my father-in-law in similar circumstances, most of the family fled to the US. The Michigan Chaucer scholar might have put in a claim for the East Berlin property after reunification--some people in similar situations did--but he did not. Let it find a good use, he said. Let the past be past. He donated some money for the restoration.
The villa is now the Lebanese embassy. The old cigarette factory is now luxury apartments.
A no-smoking building, I believe.
**
We come to the Panke Basin, where the water backs up in pleasant lagoons and is drained off to the Havel (and perhaps elsewhere) when there is danger of high water.
This bike path along the Panke is part of a long cross-country path, a fine summer run from Berlin to Usedom (a part-German part-Polish island just off the Baltic coast). In another month or so the path will be busier. Now there are just local travelers: bicyclists with briefcases, bicyclists with groceries, older couples spreading out picnic lunches, their bicycles leaned against the trees. A few riders are perhaps heading farther; a young man spins by with serious luggage in the saddle-bags and a guitar on his back.
**
The river is a little bigger north of here, before the water is split up and sent off into drains. It has more of a voice, chuckling and bubbling over the occasional stone or fallen branch. Soon we will be out in the country.
The S-Bahn takes us back (almost) to the river Panke. Here we go through the grove of cherry trees by the station, over the ex-border from old West Berlin into old East Berlin, from Wedding into Pankow.
When I was first in Berlin, place-names like Pankow and Treptow and Gatow and Kladow puzzled me. German pronunciation is terrifically rule-following, and according to the rules these places ought to be pronounced Pankoff and Treptoff and so on, but they aren’t. They’re Pank-oh, Trep-toe, etc.
When I was first in Berlin, place-names like Pankow and Treptow and Gatow and Kladow puzzled me. German pronunciation is terrifically rule-following, and according to the rules these places ought to be pronounced Pankoff and Treptoff and so on, but they aren’t. They’re Pank-oh, Trep-toe, etc.
It’s a reminder of how
non-German Berlin is. The oldest layer of population here is ethnically and linguistically Slavic, not German. The original inhabitants were Sorbian-speakers and Polabian-speakers--German-speakers came later--and these names ending in -ow are Slavic names that have never been fully Germanized. (Polabian is an extinct language, but Sorbian is not; you can still hear a little Sorbian programming on the radio, and we know people from the area whose
grandparents were Sorbian-speakers not German-speakers.)
The name of the river, in fact, the Panke, comes from a Polabian word. The linguists are uncertain which Polabian word, however. So who knows what this looked like to the namers of the river and what they meant to say about it--how long ago, fourteen hundred years? A long time.
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Along the Panke in Pankow, April 2014. My photo.
|
And now we are sauntering through pleasant park stretches in the old East--which is not so very different from old West Berlin any more, but you can still sort of tell which side of the vanished Wall you're on. On this side there are yellow streetcars humming and nattering along the streets. (The old West is mostly not streetcar territory; it has more fast light rail.) The streets are sometimes very small. (Aaaugh, this is a one-car-wide underpass under the train tracks, and that means one car, not one car plus a pedestrian). It is quiet. The besetting local crime is vandalism. (Our old-West neighborhood, by contrast, is the bicycle-theft champion of Berlin.)
**
Pankow is where the leaders of the occupying Russian army set up housekeeping after World War II--ah, nice villas, somehow the bombs missed them!--and the East German government leaders followed suit. (This had not been a tough poor area like Wedding before the war, it had been a neighborhood of big industrialists' villas and factories.) So "Pankow" came to be a figure of speech designating the Communist government. The Polabians--whatever they may have meant by the "Pank-" root--would have been surprised.
Konrad Adenauer, who was the chancellor of Germany forever when we were children (it's as if Eisenhower had been President for fifteen years) never referred to the East German government as "the East German government." He always called them "the bosses in Pankow." Or, to be exact, he called them "the bosses in Pankoff"--meaning (a) they are not a legitimate government, and (b) they are not legitimate Germans because they can't even pronounce their own neighborhood correctly. (Adenauer was a Rhinelander, and probably like other Rhinelanders we know, had doubts that Berlin should ever have been included in Germany in the first place--at least, in any Germany that included the Rhine. It was a great mistake in the nineteenth century, says an elderly Rhenish acquaintance. We should never have joined up with Berlin. It's out on the border of Siberia.)
**
Linguistic-cultural-ethnic allegiances are complex things, and people's lives take strange courses through the traps and the shelters that these allegiances offer. From college days, when I studied medieval England, I dimly remember a standard reader for medieval English literature that was put together by a professor at the University of Michigan. (A moderately distinguished Chaucer scholar, now dead.) I find, here, that his family had owned one of the grander villas in Pankow, some way back from the river.
 |
| Villa Garbaty, Pankow. Photo by Dguendel, Wiki commons. |
The family in the villa made their money from a big cigarette factory, a block or so from the villa. In the 1930s, of course, they lost the property to the Nazis with their crazed fantasies of ethnic-national purity. Sensibly, like my father-in-law in similar circumstances, most of the family fled to the US. The Michigan Chaucer scholar might have put in a claim for the East Berlin property after reunification--some people in similar situations did--but he did not. Let it find a good use, he said. Let the past be past. He donated some money for the restoration.
The villa is now the Lebanese embassy. The old cigarette factory is now luxury apartments.
A no-smoking building, I believe.
**
We come to the Panke Basin, where the water backs up in pleasant lagoons and is drained off to the Havel (and perhaps elsewhere) when there is danger of high water.
 |
| Along the Panke Basin. April 2014, my photo. |
**
The river is a little bigger north of here, before the water is split up and sent off into drains. It has more of a voice, chuckling and bubbling over the occasional stone or fallen branch. Soon we will be out in the country.
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