Academic Questions 6: Administrators are special people

One rainy evening we were sitting in the back room of the pub in the next street, a distinguished German historian and Archangel and I. In the US universities, said the historian, you have professional deans and other administrators, who make a career of it. Is that a good thing?  

At the German university where Archangel and the historian both profess, deans are elected by the faculty of their colleges for two-year terms. It’s a part-time job, often temporary; it doesn’t take people very far out of their research and teaching, so it isn’t very hard for them to get back. (Nobody is hired from outside the college for the sole purpose of being a dean.) Administrators above the dean level sometimes also have their jobs for a few years and then rotate back into regular faculty positions. This kind of rotation is not so likely in the US because administrative jobs are bigger in scale and scope: they take you too far away from research and teaching. By the time you have your full-time administrative job figured out, it’s hard to get back to scholarship.

So faculty governance still exists here, big time. To turn the historian’s question on its head, is that a good thing?

We all complain about the proliferation and professionalization of university administration in the US. What has become of faculty governance? we say. And of course everyone can tell stories about the clueless professional administrators who obstruct the work of teaching and research in costly ways, and the stories can even be true.

And everyone in Germany can tell stories about the clueless amateur administrators who obstruct the work of teaching and research in costly ways, and these stories can also be true. (The VP for Finance who can’t read a budget statement competently, the President who has never run anything bigger than his own office and expects to make decisions for a big university the way he has made them for his secretary and doctoral students.)

But it’s pointless to take sides for “faculty governance” versus “professional administration.” It’s like governments and markets: it isn’t helpful to take sides vigorously for one or the other when we need some of both. The question is how to get the right mix and how to get them to work together effectively.

The troubles around the scholars-and-administrators issue are typical troubles of specialization. Managing a big university is a specialized task, like teaching brain surgery, and you don’t really want part-time amateurs doing either of these things. The advantage of specialization is that you get people who are giving their full attention to the job at hand and (at best) know a lot about doing it.

The disadvantages of specialization? Durkheim was so wrong when he thought that specialization would lead to more social solidarity because we would all need each other more and therefore find each other more attractive (The Division of Labor in Society, 1893). One of the big disadvantages of specialization is that it means we don’t understand each other, our experiences and interests and values are too different, and we sometimes find each other very unattractive.

Fortunately, there are people who are both good scholars and good managers and therefore don’t suffer so much from the deformations of specialization. But you can’t populate all the universities in the country with people like this. There aren’t enough of them. Hence we have to live in universities populated in part by people who are scholars with minimal administrative skills or administrators with modest scholarly credentials—extreme contemplative and active types, as people in the ancient and medieval worlds would have said.

And how shocking the contemplative and active types find each other at times, if we look at end-of-spectrum instances. For the extreme activist, ideas are mostly tools for getting something done: now you pick up one tool, now you pick up another, as circumstances demand. So now you passionately espouse one set of ideas in order to move a project forward, and later you passionately espouse a different set of ideas to move the project even farther. Which (if either) of the sets of ideas is true does not matter so much as reaching some practical goal: growing the organization, winning the election, saving the rainforest. To the contemplative type, this is shocking: this is dishonest or grossly negligent.

Conversely, for the extreme contemplative type, practical matters are mostly tools or occasions for refining ideas. What is interesting about organizational growth or elections or saving rainforests is how the processes work. The contemplative type often seems more intellectually intrigued by organizational maneuvering than practically dedicated to making sure that the good guys win. To the active type this is shocking: this is irresponsible or humanly cold.

And each extreme type can see the other extreme type as lazy. The contemplatives don’t prepare properly for business meetings! Don’t contribute sensibly to the re-drafting of important policy statements! Don’t answer emails promptly! Do nothing but gaze at their metaphorical navels!—that is, their mathematical models of the universe or their ancient potsherds. The administrator fumes inwardly: These people are so self-indulgent! They’re just promoting their own careers by publishing another useless article, and they don’t care about how we’re going to raise the revenue that pays their salaries.

Conversely, to a non-activist, it seems that the activists don’t make any effort to think. They babble buzzwords! They're trying to promote ideas (and worse, trying to make me promote ideas) that were shown to be absurd twenty years ago, and they don’t even know it because they don’t bother to read any more! They want to admit and pass any student who can write a big enough check, and they don’t think about the long-term consequences! And so on. The scholar fumes inwardly: These people are so self-centered! They’re just promoting their careers, with their strategic planning meetings and branding initiatives, and they don’t care how much it interferes with the teaching and the research that are the whole reason we are here. 

And each side feels sorry for itself because each side thinks, I am working so hard and people don’t appreciate it.

Of course we can do better than this, and much of the time we do. We manage to live together without mutual resentment, and indeed with some Durkheimian mutual appreciation. We understand that you don’t actually want Ludwig Wittgenstein trying to run a large organization, and you also don’t want people pretending to be professors of philosophy when their talents consist primarily of getting stuff done and selling it in the marketplace (not Wittgenstein’s strengths).

We need professional administrators. The question is where we need them and what they should be doing. I think that German universities often have more trouble with where and US universities often have more trouble with what.

German universities often lack management strength in the layers between the individual (chaired) professor and the president-VP level. There’s a tendency for responsibility to accumulate excessively at higher and lower levels, with a weak space in the middle. Archangel once came home fuming because the person laying new computer cable in his building thought the university president had to determine the path the cable was to take. I believe the university president at the time was a historian of the early Christian church. (A nice man with no clue about computer cabling.)

The consequence of the weak middle is that too often things do not get done. The President and VPs can't do it all, and the professors have other interests. Hiring processes bog down (maybe you could delay hiring someone to teach those classes until next year, when we would have more leisure to process the forms?), admissions processes fall into chaos, the classroom space and the requirements for classroom space don't match up, and if you can find a room of the right size the roof leaks. (Not unknown in the US, either, of course.)

The disadvantage of the weak middle is not only the difficulty of getting infrastructure-type things done, like hiring and space management. It is also possible to ask whether recent German scandals about plagiarized and purchased Ph.D.’s would have been as frequent if admitting Ph.D. students and supervising their progress had been more of a middle-level matter—if there had been more input at a department level—rather than being left so much to the individual supervising professor (who may be supervising far too many Ph.D. students to keep a very close eye on most of them).

US universities often have a better structural balance of power across levels of the hierarchy (or so, at least, it seems to me). But the balance of power between scholarly and non-scholarly priorities in the US, at all levels, can be more problematic.

Revenue must be raised, in the US: students and alumni and corporations must be persuaded to write large checks. Obviously the institution cannot continue unless they do so. And equally obviously, the factors that will motivate these people to write large checks overlap only partially with high-quality scholarship and teaching. There are many generous and thoughtful check-writers out there, but any fund-raiser will tell you how sensitive fund-raising is to glamor factors.

Consider the building where each floor was sponsored by one or more corporate donors, who got their names on the floor--but none of the corporate donors wanted their names on the basement. (Basements are inglorious. Tough luck if your department got assigned to the basement.)

Consider the students who must be admitted and given degrees, in spite of dubious performance, because their families or companies are big contributors. (In some corrupt parts of the world, rich parents will hire a substitute to take university exams for their child, who then gets the degree the substitute has earned. Because US higher education is more efficiently managed, it asks the important question, why should we let these people write checks to substitutes when they could write checks to us instead? --Just kidding, sort of.)

Consider the administrators’ enthusiasm for departments that get big grants—which may only mean that their research is more expensive, not that it’s more valuable or important in other ways. (Can’t you philosophers and linguists and mathematicians find a way of doing scholarship that would cost more money? If not, what use are you?--Just kidding, sort of.) This can be an issue in German universities, too, admittedly: the big grant money the natural sciences bring in looks impressive to presidents and policy-makers, while the human sciences look like cheap dates.

Well, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do, as they said in the old Westerns. Administrators gotta patch together a semi-functioning organization against all the disastrous forces of entropy, and scholars gotta build untestable string theories and analyze sixteenth-century sonnets. And good luck to us all. 

Spree 3

Old Herr Z.  and the Fat Fish

Much of this stretch of the Spree is happy: not in the modern sense of subjective feeling, but in the classical sense that this is a successful human project, a piece of mixed good fortune and good endeavor. This is my home stretch, where I walk up and down on many afternoons, winter and summer alike--and am happy, in the modern sense of subjective feeling.

Archangel, who is wary of unpaved nature, looks at it dubiously.

There is mud here, he says. 

True. We have had spring thundershowers, and the bicyclists weave from side to side along the river-path to keep out of the puddles.

** 

From the U-Bahn stop, it is not far to the spot along the river where we left off last time. Just a few hundred meters down Wintersteinstrasse, with its mix of ugly flat-chested apartment houses and occasional soaring imaginations.

Phoenix: painting by Gert Neuhaus on the side of an 
apartment house on Wintersteinstrasse, Charlottenburg. 
Photo, Wiki Commons

We come to the water at a perfect place, a rose garden behind the Russian church (bright blue with little gold domes), across the river from my favorite power plant in all Berlin.

What a poetic power plant, what a romantic-English-landscape-painting sort of power plant! (Though the landscape painter would have managed to get it perfectly upright and not slightly tilted as in my photo).

Kraftwerk Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

The part of the plant that appears above is the working part: three gas turbines that give us heat and power at peak times in the winter. (There is also a big block of pollution control equipment nearby that is one of the largest objects in the neighborhood.) Step a little further down the river and we come to an older part of the plant, a machine hall now vacant and in search of uses.

Kraftwerk Charlottenburg (old machine hall).  Photo, ThoKay, Wiki Commons.

**
I believe that one of C.S. Lewis's books represents Hell as a place where people are constantly moving farther away from each other. Detroit has been like this (as other cities have been, to lesser degrees--and not just in the US). Trash a neighborhood (that is, fail to maintain the physical and social fabric of it), move away; trash the new neighborhood, move farther away--always new suburbs, farther and farther out. The infrastructure starts falling to pieces, so you move to another town, another part of the country, where things are newer. How long can you do this? Even in a big country, how long can you strew the place with your trash instead of learning to (as it were) clean your room and fix the plumbing when it needs fixing? So that people can live in the same place for centuries without living in their own filth.

Berlin has been in a clean-up-fix-up orgy for a couple of decades now, and even if some of the results have not been ideal, repurposing and rebuilding in place surely beats saying, "Oh, great, now that the Wall is down we can clear out of here and build new suburbs in Brandenburg!" There has been some building on the fringes of the city, but also much interior building and rebuilding and repurposing. We will see some examples as we go along the Spree through center city. And something interesting will be done with the power plant machine hall one of these days; it will just take time. Not to rush, with things that will matter to the neighborhood for the next hundred years.

**
A little further along, we come to a major intersection in the Spree-Oder Wasserstrasse, the "water street" that links the Spree (and so the Elbe and the North Sea, Amsterdam and London and the western world) to the Oder (and so Poland and the Baltic, and Finland and Russia). You can travel forever on the water from here: across the Baltic, along the Russian rivers into the interior, the way my father's family moved in the eighteenth century, from the hills outside Frankfurt to Saratov on the southern Volga. Complaining vigorously of dirt and lice the whole way. 

Water-street intersection: Spree, Landwehrkanal, Charlottenburger Verbindungskanal.
May 2014, my photo.

Here the Spree makes another 90-degree turn and starts to loop wildly, inscribing sine waves along the edge of the Technical University. Continuing on the footpath would take me along the Landwehrkanal (see February posts), and getting back along the Spree takes a little bit of roundabouting. Over the Dove Bridge--named for the scientist Heinrich Dove (who also has a crater on the moon named after him)--and then we scramble back the way we came, and then ... ah yes, we are about to meet the Spree again. 

Dovebrücke, May 2014.  My photo.

Here we know we're near the Technical U because the streets are all named for scientists: Dove, Einstein, Helmholtz, Darwin, Galvani.  If the street names were Protestant theologians' names (Calvin, Melanchthon, Spener, Thomasius), we would be a little further west. If they were classical-German-culture names (Goethe, Schiller, Kant, Weimar, Leibniz), we would be a little further south. 

How achievements litter the city streets here, like autumn leaves. You can't walk around the block without being reminded of poets and philosophers and scientists and social reformers. What are the most common street names in Germany--Goethe and Schiller? (Street names are often duplicated in Berlin because Berlin is made up of many separate cities: in the automobile club atlas of Berlin I count eight Goethe Streets and a Goethe Way, as well as seven Schiller Streets, three Schiller Ways, two Schiller Promenades, and a Schiller Ring.) 

In the US I believe the most common street names are Main and Elm. (To be fair, Washington and Lincoln get in there a lot too. But poets and scientists? Nah, not so much.)

The sky is thickening up, getting ready for rain, here where someone has been torturing trees in the French fashion to make a geometrically orderly little grove by the water. Can I make it home before the showers come?  It's not so far, but the sky is starting to look serious.

Along the Spree in Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

This is an interesting stretch. There are old industrial buildings along here, often repurposed, sometimes not. (Siemens still makes big turbines north of the river, a bit further along, where they made big turbines in the nineteenth century.)

Along the Spree in Charlottenburg, May 2014.  My photo.

There is also a little financial district here, mostly European insurance companies. Axa is on the Landwehrkanal right by the Dovebrücke. Skandia is next-door to the building below, where the walls reflect the dithering sky. (Rain? Sun? Rain?) Pricewaterhouse Coopers (auditor of financial firms) is nearby, on the other side of the big water intersection, on a scientist-street (Lise Meitner, the nuclear physicist). 

Along the Spree in Charlottenburg, May 2014.  My photo. 

**
The orderly small homeless encampments under the bridges along this stretch of the river have migrated to the parks for the summer. In winter, under each bridge, there are two or three standard-charity-issue foam mattresses and sleeping bags, along with a few personal possessions. A bucket and janitor's broom to keep the under-bridge space tidy. An improvised night-stand piled with old hardcover books. 

The occupants are often out foraging during the day; no one disturbs the bedrolls and possessions. On sharp winter nights, volunteers come by on the "cold bus" to ask, "Do you want to go to a shelter tonight?" Some people say yes and and get in the bus, some people say no. ("In the shelter you get lice," one man grumbles.) The neighborhood newspaper says, "In the cold weather, be sure to speak to your local homeless, make sure they're all right." People do. (These are not families living under the bridges, as it might be in the US; these are men of a certain age with certain problems in life.)

Neighborhood scenes on the S-Bahn. 

• Sleek professional man, early middle age, very good suit, very good briefcase, absorbed in the newspaper, has beside him the only vacant seat in the car. Homeless man, distinctly smelly, says, "May I sit here?" "Of course," says Mr. Goodsuit, re-folding his newspaper to make more room. "It's not of course," says the other. "But thanks."
• A trendy young couple have just got on the train carrying some takeout--not the standard train-station sandwiches or noodle-boxes, but something special in designer-looking cartons. A glazed, shambling beggar starts to work the car, asking for small change for food and not having much luck. The young couple split their designer takeout with him, half and half.

**

I cross the river at the Gotzkowsky bridge, where the Erlöserkirche (the Church of the Redeemer) stands up in a mighty-fortress kind of way, facing down the bleak hotel across the street. 

Gotzkowskybrücke and Erlöserkirche, May 2014. My photo.

.... Ah, Gotzkowsky, the financial whiz of eighteenth-century Prussia--who, when the Russians besieged and finally occupied Berlin in 1760 and tried to extort four million thaler from the city, bargained them down to a million and a half, and dragged out the payments so that only half a million actually ever went to the Russians. He paid a tenth of the sum for the city from his personal funds. A semi-responsible financial whiz is not so bad to have around ...  

Though the Russians got their own back. He was also speculating in Russian grain, expecting prices to go sky-high because of the war. But the price rise didn't happen, the grain was bad, and his partners slithered out or went bankrupt before he did. He ended up holding the bag for an enormous amount of money and had to sell much of his art collection to Russia to cover it. (This is where the Hermitage got eleven Rembrandts, two Raphaels, etc., etc. Gotzkowsky bought well.)

**

And oh dear, the river's edge here beyond the church, on the Wikingerufer (the Viking Bank) is still fenced off for some kind of work that does not seem to be progressing. (This has been going on for a long time.) Finally the fencing stops, and I can get down to the water .... Good thing, too, because here comes the rain.

Down to the Spree, between Wikingerufer and Hansa-Ufer, May 2014 My photo.

It's not much of a rain, it patters gently on the leaves overhead. The trees are so thick here, the rain hardly comes through, and you can hardly see across the water. The bright-orange expanse of the Technical U's Materials Science building is half lost behind the leaves.

Along the Spree near the TU, May 2014.  My photo.

Materials Science is orange, the footbridge at the next bend in the river is orange ... A heron stands on one of the yellow markers in the river by the footbridge, mostly busy scratching under its wings for lice, but also willing to adopt a more dignified pose on request. 

Gray Heron, Wullenwebersteg, May 2014.  My photo.

Under the footbridge, around the corner--the Spree is looping giddily again here. And happily the rain has stopped and is moving off to the east, behind the Bolleblock.

Lessingbrücke and Bolleblock, May 2014. My photo.

We're back in Moabit again (south edge this time: see March post, Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 2, for the north edge). The Bolleblock is an ingenious piece of early-90s repurposing: credit to architects Kühn Bergander Bley, of Berlin. And oh, you can argue about it, as we should aways argue about buildings, because buildings matter. It isn't perfect, there isn't enough low-income housing, it turns its back on the scruffy street that borders it on the north. But it is the big object in the view from my study window, and how much pleasure it gives, every day, in every weather. (Bless you, Kühn Bergander Bley!) It didn't privatize the riverfront, it left the space free for bicyclists and walkers, it provided spaces for some diversity of jobs, it included a playground, it includes basic amenities like a grocery.

**

Moabit was still fairly agricultural in the nineteenth century. Further out there were orchards and fields and pastures; here by the river, where it was convenient to transport, were a quasi-industrial dairy (owned by the Bolle family, hence the name), a granary, and a not-so-agricultural steam laundry. 

The old buildings have been worked into a fairly pleasant postmodern cityscape. There is a species of technology park here, an upscale hotel, expensive apartments, and a big office building currently occupied by the Interior Ministry. 

Interior Ministry and apartments reflected in hotel wall; rhododendrons.  May 2014. My photo.

The old dairy buildings have become part of the hotel, as well as housing restaurants and a grocery; the old steam laundry is offices, the old grain-unloading tower still stands by the water, and the bicycle path threads through the space where the grain elevator would have gone up and down from the barges.

Grain unloading tower, Bolleblock, May 2014. My photo,

My pals and I used to go fishing there, says my aged neighbor nostalgically. Herr Z. is a Polish immigrant, a retired janitor, suddenly gone frail and empty since his wife died, as though the stuffing had been pulled out of him. It was thick with fish, that stretch of the Spree. So much grain got spilled in the river right there, it brought the fish. Those were the fattest fish in Berlin. 

It's not really a place for old Poles to go fishing any more, by the upscale restaurants on the water's edge. (This is one of the not-good things about the design here.) And of course the grain doesn't spill any more, so the fish are not the same--though perhaps the restaurant patrons toss crumbs.

Herr Z. likes to use me for a straight man when he is in a good mood and not in a fury with some other unfortunate neighbor. One fine spring afternoon when I came out the front door he was lying in wait and told me he had found a treasure. 
     
     Treasure?  What kind?

     You have to help me.  He counts off seven of the little paving-blocks with          his stick and points. There, in a crack between the blocks, something is            sparkling. Can you pick it up? With my old bones, I can't get down there.

     My bones have seen better days, as a matter of fact, but I can still get            down on the ground and up again. The sparkler is a rhinestone, fallen off          someone's costume jewelry.  I give it to Herr Z.

     It's a diamond, he says. I'm going to take it to the jeweler and have it              appraised. In my role as straight man, I look amazed. He does not quite          wink. I'll split the million euros with you when I get it, he says, and we              shake hands on the deal.

**
Past the hotel, across the walk from the Interior Ministry, there is a fine playground:

Playground by Innenministerium, May 2014. My photo.

And then we are back to the street, to the Moabit Bridge, with bears guarding each end of it. I remember the bears from the first time we came to the neighborhood, almost fifteen years ago now--just wandering around and fantasizing about living here, not supposing it would work out.

When you walk onto the bridge, you face an inquiring bear (sculpture by Gunter Anlauf):

Bear on Moabiter Brücke.  Photo, Mutter Erde, Wiki Commons.

When you walk off the bridge on the other side, the introduction to the neighborhood is provided by another bear's rear end.

Moabiter Brücke, May 2014. My photo.

Welcome home, all. 

    

Spree 2

Kleingarten, Schlossgarten

You have to like cloudy days to enjoy living here. It’s not that Berlin gets so much rain and snow, it just gets a lot of cloud.

But it’s wonderfully various cloud. In winter the clouds sit in the streets like fat bad-tempered spirits, oozing ectoplasm between the houses, so that you can’t see from here to the corner. In the spring, big slate-and-white cloudscapes with fiery edges blow past, bringing the rain. (Too dramatic really, too last-act-of-the-opera!)

Then there's today. What is the color of this sort-of-overcast, almost-monotone sky? Iridescent, not quite white. Mother-of-pearl.

 Does it matter what color the sky is?  Yes.

It would be sad not to pay attention to the world.

Along the water, Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

At the beginning of this stretch of the river I'm still walking along Kleingärten for a while, as at the end of the last post. And good heavens, here are a couple of garden dwarves. How long has it been since I saw a dwarf in a Kleingarten? And they used to be so ubiquitous, decades ago. (Though there's still enough other garden kitsch along here: Scenes from Bambi in plastic relief! Ceramic squirrels with smiles like toothpaste ads!)

The dwarves were made fun of for so long—they were the German equivalent of pink flamingos on the lawn--it sort of discouraged people from having them. 

Garden dwarf. Photo, Martin1009, Wikicommons

In the 90s there was a resurgence of dwarves, but parody-dwarves now, giving the finger to passersby or lying dead with knives in their backs. 

Not an improvement, really. 

Various associations have arisen to address the dwarf problem in Europe. The International Association for the Protection of Garden Dwarves, headquartered in Switzerland like the Red Cross or the League of Nations, encourages the production of historically correct dwarves (male, bearded, with traditional hat, no more than 69 cm high). In France, which takes these things differently, the Front de Liberation des Nains de Jardins rescues dwarves from gardens and sets them free in the woods, which are thought to be their natural habitat. 

The dwarf issue seems quiescent in Berlin. The Kleingärten are flowering madly.

Kleingarten along the Spree, May 2014. My photo.

**
And then we come to a complicated bit of water. The Spree makes a ninety-degree turn here and heads south, while a canal continues straight on to link up with the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal at Westhafen [see March posts on the Schifffahrtskanal]. 

There's a bit of a slope somewhere here (an exceptional event, in tabletop-flat Berlin!). On the Spree itself there's a weir, where the water tumbles down with a pleasing small roar. The boat traffic all goes through on the parallel canal, where there's a lock to move the boats down to the level of the lower Spree. 

Weir, Spree, May 2014.  My photo.

A sign on the river says, "Alle Schleusen sind gesperrt."  

       All the locks are blocked.  
       All the locks are locked.  

But presumably this is not true; there are boats coming and going. I see a police boat called the Havel, which is inspecting the Spree. I see a Fisheries Oversight boat called the Catfish, which is presumably inspecting the fish. 

**
And then we are round the corner of the river and walking in the Charlottenburg Palace gardens, where water has been pulled in from the river to make a big carp pond and decorative streams for the gardens. 

How dense and intense the green is at this season (and how leafy-green the air smells). 

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

There really is a little stream in this picture; I think it's the Fürstenbrunner Graben--the Prince's Fountain Channel--but it's almost invisible. (Does it go to the prince's fountain? Perhaps not now: the baroque waterworks in the garden are mostly gone, and I think the tourist-drenching fountain in the parterres is postwar.)

Ah, and what shall we think now of palaces and princes, of all this tourist-bait grandeur? What are all these people thinking who are taking pictures of each other by the carp pond and trying to decide whether to spend fifteen euros a pop on seeing the interior? 

Schloss Charlottenburg. Photo, Golliday, Wiki Commons.

I'm not a big fan of palace interiors, country-house interiors. (How my aunt Marie, who started life as a Russian peasant, loved such places. I'd be happy seeing a palace every day of the week, she said. That was when I was living in Munich and took her to see Neuschwanstein---which is surely way too garden-dwarfy?)

Here is a dream of ease and beautiful things: the prince's life as seen in fairy tales, as seen from the peasant's hut. 

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills ....

There are beautiful things here. (Pay your fifteen euros, people.) But not ease, perhaps. 

    Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
    Called architect and artist in, that they,
    Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
    The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
    The gentleness none there had ever known.

Stucco work, Goldene Galerie, Schloss Charlottenburg. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Much of this was destroyed in the 1940s, both palace and garden. Much of what we see now is restoration--somewhat disputed in the case of the baroque garden. The garden is a pleasant simplified 1950 kind of baroque (like the over-orchestrated Bach in Disney's Fantasia. Disney liked German kitsch, he used the garden dwarves for Snow White and used Neuschwanstein for the castle in Fantasyland.)

I take one more turn around the broderieparterres in the garden. (Inside and outside, garden-image and garden, the forms echo and sing to each other, perhaps not perfectly in tune.)

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

Along one of the little streams I surprise a heron fishing.  He's a bit blurry here, because he is just starting to flap and squawk and threaten to sue me for unauthorized photography before disappearing under the bridge.

Heron, Schlossgarten Charlottenburg, May 2014. My photo.

**

Note: the verse quoted above is from W.B. Yeats, Meditations in Time of Civil War.