There's a slow and messy stretch here in the Schöneweiden: the neighborhoods of Oberschöneweide (the upper beautiful meadow) on the north bank of the river and Niederschöneweide (the lower beautiful meadow) on the south bank. (There are no actual beautiful meadows in sight on either bank.) It's hard to stay by the water, as the riverbanks are often taken up with private property, heavy industry, the occasional ruin, and other quasi-disasters.
The recommendation of the greenways map is: forget about it, don't even try. Take the F11 ferry (from the point where we left off last time) over to the north bank, get up into the nearest stretch of woods and don't come back until you're out of this whole area and practically in Köpenick. The recommendation is probably good--green and quiet and efficient--but I don't know this part of the city at all and am curious about it. I do want to take the ferry (a part of Berlin public transit that I do not normally use), but I won't go up into the woods; I'll see if I can stay somewhat close to the water, either on the north bank (upper meadow) or the south (lower meadow).
So I take the S-Bahn out to the end of the Plänterwald (see last post) and walk down to the river, where a big barge is asleep at the bank: the Concordia, out of Glücksburg on the Baltic.
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| Barge parked along the Spree by the Plänterwald, June 2014. My photo. |
Very still, not a soul in sight on the barge. (Are they all asleep? Off buying groceries?) I have just missed the ferry, which is heading across the water to Oberschöneweide, so I peer at the barge for a bit (can't tell what it's carrying, it's all under wraps) and then sit on a bench under the trees thinking about Glücksburg. Archangel and I were up in that part of the world, on the Danish border, a few summers ago (meant to go bicycling but all the rental bicycles were too high for me: seats at a level half-way up my ribcage, suitable for six-foot Danes but not so good for creaky older persons who are five foot three).
Glücksburg is the northeasternmost point of Germany, where the Flensburg fjord that divides Germany and Denmark turns a sharp corner on its way into Flensburg harbor. Waterworld, up here in northern Europe. River, lake, sea, fjord, swamp, deep-sheltered harbors.
We tend not to think of the Danes as imperialists, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Denmark (which then owned Flensburg and Glücksburg) had trading stations in West Africa and colonies in the Caribbean and India. Flensburg harbor was busy and rich, Flensburg--as part of the Caribbean connection--was the rum-distilling capital of Europe. In honor of which we sat drinking rum on a long summer evening, in one of the narrow courtyards that lead back far from the streets in Flensburg. Good shelters from the winds off the sea, that can be icy even in August.
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| Inner courtyard, Flensburg. Photo by Soehnke Rahn, Wiki commons. |
Europe pulls this way and that between the two sea basins: the Mediterranean, with its ties to the ancient and Middle Eastern worlds (think of southern France in early-classical times, when its ties with Egypt or Phoenicia were probably closer than its ties to the Seine), and the Baltic-North Sea world that opens out into the north Atlantic (so that people were sailing from Denmark out to Iceland in the early middle ages, when sensible Mediterranean sailors would hardly go out into the Atlantic at all).
How different the two sea-basins look. Around the Mediterranean, deforested mountains rise from the water, and deserts and near-deserts stare at it. Here--well, not much rises up from the water, the water is more likely to rise up and drown the land. (Strengthen the dikes, build the sea-walls higher!) Marsh and forest are everywhere, the land drowns in green.
How stark and bright and bare this is, compared to, say a chateau on the Loire or an Italian palazzo. (Scandinavian design!)
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| Glücksburg water-castle. Photo by OnkelHeini, Wiki Commons. |
This was (sort of still is) the seat of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, one of those over-hyphenated little Germanic principalities that bred kings and queens for the rest of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like a Kentucky stable breeding race-horses.
If you look back to the world that was about to go up in flames a hundred years ago in August--a world where monarchs still mattered, constitutional though they were--how many of the European countries had monarchs who grew up here at Glücksburg or had parents or grandparents who did? England, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece ... Even the German imperial family was always being hauled off to Glücksburg for holidays, because the empress, Auguste Viktoria, not only came from the closely related family of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (ach, these names!), but also had a sister who was married to the Duke at Glücksburg. The Empress stayed in the castle on visits; the Emperor, who seems not to have liked so much closeness with his in-laws, stayed in his yacht out on the water. (This is the Auguste Viktoria for whom the bell was named that appears in the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal I post in March.)
A small world, that almost-but-not-quite comic-opera world of late nineteenth-century royalty.
This is King Giorgios I of Greece, who grew up in Glücksburg (as Prince Wilhelm of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg--but what could the Greeks make of a name like Wilhelm?).
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| King George (Giorgios) I of Greece. Photo from Wiki Commons. |
Wilhelm/ Giorgios was thus off the stage before the First World War gave the last disintegrating push to the Turkish Empire and so let the demons loose in the Middle East. Greece had been the first piece of the old Turkish Empire to split off and become a national state, with a monarch provided (at least recommended and supported) by the western powers. Iraq and Syria and other Middle Eastern states were later created on more or less the same model, but with more sloppily, less plausibly constructed borders ... (Gott gebe Glück mit Frieden.)
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The ferry stop has the usual array of public-transit notices: route, schedule, legal terms of transportation, plus a statement that scheduled ferry runs may be cancelled in times of storm, fog, or heavy ice. (The Berlin Water and Shipping Authority runs five or six icebreakers in winter--the city has icebreakers just as it has snowplows: tough blue boats with names like Seal and Sea Otter and Sea Lion--but in a bad winter the ice can get ahead of them just as the snow might get ahead of the snowplows.) Not a problem today, on this perfect rain-washed summer morning.
Presently the ferry comes hustling back.
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| F1 ferry on the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
I am on the south bank of the Spree; the stop on the north bank is somewhat downriver. The pilot uses just enough engine to get the ferry away from the pier; then he cuts the power, and the ferry drifts silently downriver, cross-river, on the current. The morning is wonderfully fresh on the water, in the silence. The ferry touches gently, exactly at the little pier on the other side, and the gangway clanks down in what looks like the middle of nowhere.
Is there even a street here? Maybe, but no street sign. Well, let's do like people in the Brothers Grimm stories and "fare forth on good fortune," and see where it gets us.
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So .... over the river and through the woods? Not exactly; more like over the river and through the Kleingärten.
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| In Oberschöneweide, June 2014. My photo. |
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| Apple tree in Oberschöneweide, June 2014. My photo. |
The Kleingarten stretch is just a little rim on a substantial industrial and residential neighborhood. I always lose my sense of direction in Kleingärten, and the stretch here is only just big enough for me to get farther north than I meant to. Maybe I should have stuck to that unlabeled little remnant of a one-lane street with the abandoned trolley tracks in it, running through the garden plots? But I didn't.
The street names here, once I get out of the Kleingärten and back to proper streets, are inventor-scientist names from industrial-revolutionary times. I go down Watt, across Helmholtz, to Siemens and then to Edison.
At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century Oberschöneweide was one of the great industrial districts of Europe. Here was the new world of big-science-based industry which, a hundred years ago (as industrialized war) was about to roll over the old world of monarchs who grew up in water-castles.
AEG (the Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft, the General Electric Company), which took much of the lead in electrifying Germany, had big operations here in Oberschöneweide. They started by buying the German rights to Edison's light-bulb patents (hence Edisonstrasse, and the Edison school, which is the neighborhood grade school):
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| Edison Grundschule, Oberschöneweide, June 2014. My photo. |
The building that appears below was the Frister light-fixture factory, the biggest in Europe by 1920. In East German days, the development lab for the country's radio and telecommunications business was here, along with facilities for design and production of lab instruments. The East German radio headquarters, where all the shows were produced, was nearby; broadcast equipment was produced a little way upriver, in Köpenick. A lively neighborhood here, in its way ...
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| Spreehöfe, former light-fixture factory, June 2014. My photo. |
Now there are offices in the building (everything from software firms to welding firms), restaurants, a cinema, a bowling alley, a fitness club .... The place looks more hesitant, less established, than similarly repurposed industrial buildings in Charlottenburg (see Spree 3 post, May 2014). The place does not look fully rented. There are uneasinesses: the tenants include a club with suspected connections to the neonazi scene; the police have stopped a couple of concerts there, once threatening to cave in the door with a battering ram because the owners wouldn't open.
Across the river, in Niederschöneweide, things are not so rehabbed.
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| Empty factory near Treskowbrücke, June 2014. My photo. |
Some of the residential neighborhood on the Niederschöneweide side is fine, but some of it is not:
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| Abandoned building, Niederschöneweide, June 2014. My photo. |
There are undigested pasts here, traces of other forces that helped to put an end to the world of the monarchs.
After I cross back to Niederschöneweide (on the recommendation of the greenways map) I try to avoid a through street called Schnellerstrasse on the south side of the river because I know it will be loud and exhaust-fumed. I vaguely supposed it was called Schnellerstrasse because it was schneller (faster) than the little side streets--but no, it is named for Ernst Schneller, who lived nearby.
Schneller was a schoolteacher and then an officer in the First World War. After the war he went back to teaching, but he had also been politicized by the war and its aftermath and was active in the Social Democratic Party. He helped organize defenses against the attempted right-wing military coup in 1920 (the Kapp-Putsch), which briefly drove the elected government out of Berlin. Schneller was alarmed enough by the near-success of the coup to switch loyalties from the Social Democrats to the Communists, who he thought (not without reason) would take a harder line against the dictatorial right. (A young Adolf Hitler had flown from Munich to Berlin to support the attempted coup--a sign of worse to come.)
Schneller became a member of the state legislature of Saxony and campaigned for Communist programs of the time, like free school lunches, free textbooks, and health care for schoolchildren. He graduated to the national legislature, and had his ups and downs with the Party leadership; he was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and was never out of prison after that. He was shot in 1944 for leading a resistance group in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
He was a fairly popular hero in postwar East Germany: many schools were named after him, and a television movie was made about him. Most of the schools have been renamed, and the memorial in his old neighborhood does not seem to be exactly held in honor.
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| Ernst Schneller memorial, Niederschöneweide. June 2014,. My photo. |
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I'm trying to get back to the river. I figure I'm not far when I'm at the intersection of Flood and Flow (Flut and Fließ) streets .... And here we go around the last bit of dereliction-enclosing fence, and back to the water. Here is a civilized footbridge (blown up 1945, rebuilt 2007: these things take time!) over to the other Schöneweide. But I think I'll stick to this (lower-meadow) side, which has more visible green space.
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| Kaisersteg footbridge over the Spree. June 2014. My photo. |
So at last I'm back by the river, and it looks very like the river--the way the river has looked almost from the mouth at the Havel. There are nineteen-hundredish factories dreaming by the water...
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| Along the Spree, looking toward Oberschöneweide |
... and there is green space, bursting with flowers ...
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| Roses along the Spree in Niederschöneweide, June 2014. My photo. |
... and there are more factories. (Note the front of the coal barge in the picture below: it's a double, it goes on forever, beyond the scope of even the widest wide-angle setting on my camera.)
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| Coal barge on the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
Perhaps they were sort of cars that the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs would have motored around in, in their day. Lost worlds. The company went under in the 1930s, along with much else.
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| NAG 1908 model. Photo by Softeis, Wiki Commons. |
Prince Christoph (as I read in the Flensburg newspaper), has a degree in engineering and runs a corporation called Glücksburg Consulting. It is headquartered in Hamburg now, with offices in a variety of other places, but it started in the water-castle at Glücksburg. (Like starting up a business in your suburban garage. Sort of.)
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