Panke 5

Millefleurs and Poison Pools

The season is weeks ahead of itself. In April the city is green as summer. It is so warm that across the way, Herr Underwear is out on his balcony in nothing but his briefs, enjoying his morning cigarette. (On winter mornings he is well wrapped up, and as the season advances you can more or less tell the temperature by how many layers he has shed.)

In the grassy space between our building and Herr Underwear’s, and in every grassy space for miles, little flowers dot the green like the millefleurs background in medieval tapestries.

The Unicorn in Captivity. Tapestry in The Cloisters. Photo from Google Art project.

Daisies, dandelions, buttercups, forget-me-nots, flowers whose names I don't know.  

Step out the back door, step off the S-Bahn, step into the open anywhere, and the fragrance knocks you dead. There are lilies-of-the-valley hidden in the shade, massed lilacs like cloudbanks along the S-Bahn.  Spirea, wild roses, apple-blossom by the armload. 

Armor and apple-blossom along the Pankeweg in Brandenburg, April 2014. My photo.

And there are odd things under the apple trees now and then. No clue why these people have a full suit of armor in their front garden.

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The signage out here in Brandenburg is better than it was several years ago, when I last walked out to Bernau and lost the path once or twice. If the path was always next to the river, of course you couldn’t lose it regardless of how well or badly it was signed. But path and river sometimes get separated when the river passes through a string of back gardens or dives under a train track or a shopping mall, and the path must take a different way around the obstacle. 

Panke in Brandenburg, April 2014.  My photo.

In general, however, the path is so continuous, so well paved, you couldn’t possibly miss it.

You couldn’t miss it, that is.  I, who have a minimal spatial memory and an immense capacity for taking wrong turns, could probably miss it.  

I have a moment’s uncertainty, somewhere between Zepernick and Bernau, about whether the path really goes right through the VW dealership, as the sign seems to indicate. Yep, right through the used car section and back into the woods again.

Along the Pankeweg, Brandenburg, April 2014.  My photo.

How pleasant this is. What is better than a country walk in the spring, among the millefleurs? This is what I missed most when I was in the US, where you can't walk through the fields and woods this way (Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted!), and there's something of a millefleur shortage.

Along the path it is not monoculture country--not fields of the same thing for miles and miles. There is a small rye field on one side of the path, sending up a rank green smell of spring growth. There is a damp patch with a stand of reeds.

Reeds along the Panke, Brandenburg, April 2014. My photo.

There is a meadow that will perhaps be cut for hay later in the spring. 

Along the Pankeweg, Brandenburg, April 2014. My photo.

Or perhaps not cut for hay. Some of the countryside along the Panke is poisoned with heavy metals from industrial runoff and so is off limits for producing things that will get into the human food chain. 

There are horses, which are not part of the human food chain hereabouts--though, after the horsemeat-in-the-frozen-lasagne scandal last year, this is not so certain. (The scandal has receded from public consciousness: it's good to get a rest from the jokes about spaghetti bologneighs, but I'm not sure how much progress has been made in cleaning up the food chain.)

Along the Pankeweg near Zepernick, April 2014. My photo.

And finally here we are at the north end of the Pankeweg, near the Bernau train station.

We aren't at the head of the river yet, though: the beginning of the Panke is as untidy as its end (see Panke 1 post). The river does not come from a single spring; it's more like a gathering of seepage in the wet meadows north of Bernau. Out here it's what the geologists call an episodic stream, not spatially or temporally continuous.

When a new rail line was built here in the 1930s it backed up some of the seepage into a pond called the Teufelspfuhl, the Devil’s Pool. It isn't the source of the river, but it is said to be the first point at which the river has a continuous flow of water.

So this will do for a goal, and I assume that it will be easy to reach because on the map it looks like a nice little lake, and nice little lakes are usually well-signed and accessible. 

Should have done my homework better. I try going up one street that borders the vacant space on the map where the little lake is, and I find that the vacant space is Sperrgebiet: off-limits, with something very large and ruinous behind the wall and the locked gates. 

I don't do urbex, I'm an uncool old woman with a bad knee who doesn't climb (high) walls or slip through barbed wire any more the way I used to; so I go back and try the street on the other side. (Other people are more enterprising, and the Bernau Sperrgebiet has appeared on a number of urban exploration blogs, with photos from people who do climb fences. This is a good one: http://the-ost-world.blogspot.de/2013/05/heeresbekleidungsamt-bernau-hauptamt_2.html)

Back on the other side I find a track through the weeds. After a bit there is a sign that says, "No fishing or swimming," which suggests promisingly that it would be possible in principle to fish or swim somewhere nearby. And yes, here is the Devil's Pool, a rather desolate little body of water behind the big desolation of the off-limits ruins.

Teufelspfuhl, Bernau, April 2014. My photo.

The ruins are the Heeresbekleidungsamt, the military clothing office, built in 1939 to supply the Germany military with uniforms and related items. It's a huge place. After the war the Soviet Army took it over and used it for various purposes: as you can see on the ost-world blog, there are still signs in Russian on the walls. 

The facility had an accident in the 1960s, a chemical spill that poisoned the Teufelspfuhl and presumably did no good to the adjacent grounds. It's never been cleaned up properly, hence the no-fish-no-swim signs. Where would the money for a cleanup come from? The Russians are gone. Brandenburg isn't rolling in money.

There are occasional rumors of private-sector interest in developing the property, like twitches on a fishing line. But toxicity and ruin are off-putting, and nothing happens. Except the little birch trees that are growing in the walls dig their roots deeper into the brick, and more rain comes through the broken windows. 

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All this is very near the center of Bernau. The Panke used to right through the middle of the city, but it was banished outside the walls early on, like the troublesome neighbor that it sometimes was. 

Bernau city walls (Steintor), April 2014. My photo.

Pollution control was, perhaps, simpler in the Middle Ages. (Not necessarily more effective, but simpler.) Bernau was then famous for its beer, which was made from Panke water and sold all over northeastern Europe: half the households in town brewed semi-commercially. The brewing days were coordinated, so that the town crier could announce: 

     A proclamation is hereby made, 
     don't use the Panke as a latrine, 
     tomorrow is brewing day! 

(Es wird hiermit bekannt gemacht, dass niemand in die Panke macht, denn morgen wird gebraut!) Source, http://www.panke-guide.de/bernau.html.

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There's a lovely little fifteenth-century church in Bernau. A few angels inside the town walls, to counter the devils in the toxic pool. 

Marienkirche, Bernau, April 2014. My photo.