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.)