Spree 6

Dead Dinosaurs and Other Casualties 

Ah, this is a wonderful stretch, after all the struggles through the construction in the last miles. On this side of the river is Treptower Park (see last post--and it was so pleasant that I walked through it again), followed by the Plänterwald.  

Plänterwald, June 2014. My photo.

A Plänterwald is a forest that is managed by selection cutting: when you harvest the wood you take out individual trees of a variety of ages, in order to leave the forest diverse—you just don’t clear-cut or take all the mature trees or all the good trees.   

On the other side of the river are some fine pieces of old industry, often still in operation, updated or re-purposed.

Along the Spree in Treptow, June 2014. My photo.

Work is on the other side of the water, play is on this side--mostly solid old-fashioned kinds of play. As you go deeper into the East it often feels as though you're going back in time.

I pass a big beer garden. Some elderly bicyclists coming in the other direction stop here for morning coffee on the terrace under the trees--and aaaugh, they leave their bicycles on the path without locking them at all, not even with the feeble chain locks that are common in these parts; they just lean their bikes against the railing. We're definitely going back in time.

I pass various boat-rental establishments.

Along the Spree in Treptow, June 2014. My photo.

The original of the picture on the boat-rental shed is a little artificial island in the river, where there has been an Ausflugslokal, at least on and off, since the 1890s ....

Insel Berlin, June 2014.  My photo.

Do we have Ausflugslokale in the US? Presumably in some places, but not mostly where I have lived. These are establishments for eating and drinking outdoors under the trees (with some indoor space too, in case of rain) in some attractive spot. You gather family and/or friends and walk through the woods to the spot, or bicycle in a troop (children are expected to cycle from an early age: our neighbors' child got her first bicycle at the age of two). Along here, of course, you can come by boat. 

Or apparently--at this restaurant-on-a-boat, a little bit upriver--you can come by seaplane. 

Seaplane by restaurant on Spree, Treptow. June 2014. My photo.

Then you have coffee and cake, or pink Berlin beer, or sausage and potato salad ...  And you can sit and watch the river go by and contemplate what has become of the public's property since the end of the old East Germany.  

In the 1980s I used to think: the east European economic system is not functioning well, but how is it ever to be changed? If all the property held by the state were to go back into private hands, this might be a good thing--but into whose private hands? The heirs of the pre-Soviet owners? Hmm, but what if they're heirs of old Nazis who got the property by nefarious means? What about the heirs of the pre-Nazi owners (who, if they exist, are scattered over the world and unlikely to agree with each other about the necessary reinvestment in the property)?  Should you forget the old owners and sell to the highest bidders--or at least, sell to someone, in some sort of market-like proceedings?

Think about it. You're trying to sell a whole country off, in thousands of little packets. The country's been closed in on itself, information is not so good, many of the assets are run down and need urgent reinvestment. It is uncertain how quickly the country can recover from being a centrally controlled police state, so it's uncertain when, if ever, these assets will start generating serious income again. Under the circumstances, who knows what any of this stuff is worth? And there is so much of it ... and we can't take forever to do the transition.

So you know what happens. Some of the good stuff is sold at low prices to cronies who make a killing, and some of the bad stuff is sold at high prices to suckers, who lose their shirts. 

And, of course, once in a while the good stuff is sold cheap to suckers who make a killing, and the bad stuff is sold at high prices to cronies who lose their shirts, unless they manage to saddle the state with the debt fast enough ... because no one does know what this stuff is worth.  

To be sure, there were also honest and reasonable transactions, and many of the old businesses flourish. In twenty-five years, under largely favorable circumstances, some real progress has been made in rebuilding the old East. (Would-be nation-builders, consider the time-line here.)

For example this cement factory, initially built in the late 1940s on the initiative of the Soviet occupying forces, is doing well. (Isn't this a fine sculptural object by the water, against the clouds?) It is possible to ask, of course: Could you not do well here with a firm supplying building materials for the endless rebuilding of Berlin? The answer is probably, Oh yeah, you can always not do well. 

 Zementwerk Berlin, Rummelsburg. June 2014. My photo.

Consider the Spreepark. Before reunification it was a popular amusement park here at the end of the Plänterwald, with over a million visitors a year. There were seven bids for it when the country's assets were sold off in 1991, and the authorities--who clearly had no time to check credentials--awarded the park to Norbert Witte, a worthy member of a family of carneys and cons. (His grandfather Otto was a locally famous con man who claimed, apparently untruthfully, to have been King of Albania for a while before the First World War.) 

Norbert Witte had been responsible for a terrible carnival-ride accident in Hamburg in 1981 that killed seven people and maimed more. The carnival sites in Germany wouldn't give him permits any more after that, and he had betaken himself to Yugoslavia. 

Ah, but then capitalism came to East Berlin, and Norbert Witte bought the Spreepark. He became a big financial contributor to the Christian Democratic (center-right) party in Treptow-Köpenick. Spreepark employees were lent to the Christian Democrats as election workers, and Witte brought in a good list of new party members (many of whom later turned out to be Karteileichen--a wonderful German word that translates as "file-card corpses"--not really new members). 

Witte updated the Spreepark in ways that may not have appealed to the regular customers, and raised the entry prices. The park's finances grew shakier. The city guaranteed a loan to the Spreepark for much more than the place was worth and was left on the hook when the company declared insolvency in 2001. 

Witte cleared out to Peru. He packed up the six best rides under the noses of the authorities, claiming that the rides were being taken down for repair, and waltzed off to Lima with them to set up an amusement park there. 

It did not go terribly well. In fact it went belly-up like the Spreepark but much faster (has anyone noticed that this man is not a manager?). 

He tried his hand at drug-smuggling: no great talent for this either. He was caught trying to get 167 kilos of cocaine out of the country in the mast of a ship called the Flying Carpet. 

While Witte was in Peru, there were attempts to sell the remains of the amusement park. First a French company was interested in it, but the deal ran aground on the buyers' insistence on eliminating the public walkway along the river. The district dug in its heels and refused (you go, Treptow-Köpenick!), and the French backed out. They may well have had other reasons and used the public-walkway issue as a pretext. Or they may have believed that the project had a significantly better chance of success if they alienated the local public by closing off this extremely popular walkway and charging visitors a high price for some sort of private access to the river in a spot that would still be surrounded by very pleasant public access on both sides. 

Hmm, maybe it was best that these business geniuses did not have a shot at running the park ...?

Along the water near Spreepark, June 2014. My photo.

Then the Danish group that runs Tivoli considered buying it, but backed out on the grounds that the German economy was too slow at the time. Also, if I read the accounts correctly, there were still 23 people living in some kind of Wild West village on the grounds, who might be difficult to move ... (What was all this about? I have no clue.)

In 2010, the irrepressible Norbert Witte reappeared, out of Peruvian jail and back in Berlin, offering to run the place again. 

He meddled around in the park for a little while, but it was too run down now for him to make even the appearance of a going concern out of it. (For some truly wonderful photos of the present state of the park--the fallen dinosaurs, the grounded swanboats, the ferris-wheel cars dragging almost in the water--see this blog: Otts World.)

Witte's now-ex-wife, in whose name the rights to the park were held, generated a little money by offering tours of the ruins. (Look what a spectacular mess we have made!) 

This is a long-standing Berlin tradition, by the way. When one of the bastions of the Spandau Citadel was blown up by French artillery in the Napoleonic wars, the army charged admission for tours of the damage in order to raise money for repair. The new Berlin airport (incomplete, formerly supposed to open in 2011, no opening date now given), which is arguably the worst construction project in the contemporary world, offers tours of the disaster. The tours do attract the curious and raise a little money ....

To everyone's surprise, the city bought back the Spreepark a few months ago. The plan is to clean it up and run it as an amusement park again.  But we will see ...

There is an old Ausflugslokal at the edge of the Spreepark, the Eierhäuschen, which has been here since the early nineteenth century and figures in one of the classic nineteenth-century German novels (Fontane's Der Stechlin).  The postcard below is from 1906.

From Wiki Commons.

The Eierhäuschen is technically outside the Spreepark but was drawn into its disasters and has long been vacant and ruinous. The trees close in on it.

Eierhäuschen, June 2014. My photo.

And meanwhile the river does its work.  A tugboat rushes upriver to a job.

Tug on the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

The wake sloshes in a pleasant talky way against the riverbank. A big barge, the North Wind out of Petershagen, comes shouldering downriver, headed west in the darkening afternoon.

Nordwind on the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

I'm at the end of the Plänterwald, and it's time to head home. Let's see, where might the nearest transit stop be? I'm probably not so very close to the S-Bahn here, so maybe a bus or--since we're deep in the tram-filled East--a streetcar.

Ah, no, here it is. It's a ferry.