Spree 11

High Summer on the Spree

It's the top of the summer--not pre-summer (Vorsommer), not after-summer (Nachsommer), but high summer (Hochsommer). The afternoon sky burns blue as fire, and the plums and peaches at the Turkish fruit stands are so ripe, the skins slip off them, loose as old gloves. People head for the water. 

Me too. I'm headed for the F23 ferry, which stops at an unobtrusive little landing stage at the foot of Müggel Island Way, between people's back gardens, among the water lilies.

From F23 ferry at Müggelwerderweg pier, July 2014. My photo.

It's hot walking along the street between the rail transit and the ferry. But--ah, this is better!--how fresh the day is when we've pushed off from the shore, moving briskly ahead among the kayaks and canoes and paddle boats in this shallow end of the lake.

From ferry, crossing die Bänke, Müggelsee, July 2014. My photo.

The F23 is a solar-powered ferry that hauls pedestrians and bicycles through the bridgeless untidiness of water at the east end of the Müggelsee (islands, stray river branches, small lakes stuck onto the end of the big one). 

The ferry goes through the Spree-channel linking the Big Müggelsee to the Small Müggelsee, and then across the Small Müggelsee, stopping at landing stages at a couple of beer gardens along the way.

Neues Helgoland, F23 ferry stop, July 2014. My photo.

The ferry continues up the Spree, which is small and domestic in this stretch. No coal barges, no big excursion ships. We pass a rowboat propelled through the bright water by a stark naked old man with a wild shock of white hair. (Swimsuits are not considered socially essential in the back reaches of the river on hot days.) A small motorboat with a large family in it wanders from side to side in the channel, more or less in the ferry's way, but the ferry pilot slows and shifts, giving them space to figure out what they're doing. 

The back gardens of riverside houses run down to the water's edge, and people are putting out their lunches on tables under the trees. An older man makes a floppy dive from his garden into the river and swims out close to the ferry, treading water to wave amiably as we pass.

Then here's the last stop, a pier at the foot of Tankard Alley (Kruggasse) in Rahnsdorf. 

Ferry at Kruggasse stop, July 2014. My photo.

Rahnsdorf is an old fishing village that was conglomerated into Berlin when the (approximate) current version of the city was put together in 1920. 

Village Berlin is wonderful, I love coming out to these places in the summer. In the outer reaches of the city the medieval layouts of the villages are often still somewhat intact--the little fieldstone church from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the churchyard and village green, the low, broad-fronted farmers' or fishers' houses, sometimes with barns and fields still behind them. (No barns and fields here, Rahnsdorf lived by fish and not fields in its early days.)

Actually, there's no old church here either, because the whole village burned to the ground in the late nineteenth century, and the church was new-built in the years after, in an undistinguished neo-medieval style. But there's a fine tall linden tree by the church, and a few old graves, green and sleepy in the summer afternoon.

Rahnsdorf churchyard, July 2014. My photo.

There's a cross by the church inscribed with a rather gruesome verse memorializing the drowning of a young fisherman in October of 1863. (When the west winds blow the waves pile up at this end of the lake, and the Müggelsee can become surprisingly murderous.)

    The water was my dying bed,
    The evening was my last day.
    In vain I cried, Help me! Help me!
    Because no one saw me drowning,
    I died little by little in the water,
    In anguish and torment.

The cross has a rather odd history: In 1967 the Märkisches Museum--the local history museum in central Berlin--took it away for restoration, promising to provide a copy for the churchyard. But nothing happened, and when inquiries were made, the museum said that they were sure they had put the cross in storage but now they couldn't find it. The Rahnsdorf people and also the Köpenick local museum inquired and inquired, without luck, repeatedly, for (wait for it, folks) ... thirty-three years. In 2000 the cross was located at last, in the Märkisches Museum's remote storage, but it was badly damaged; somebody had cut out the more decorative part with an acetylene torch and made off with it. The Rahnsdorf people raised enough money from donations to have the cross recast for the churchyard, and there it still is. The village doesn't let go. [Details from the June-July 2012 Rahnsdorfer Echo.]

The church is on a bit of high ground, a sand dune at the end of the lake, and the village street (called, brilliantly, Village Street, Dorfstrasse) winds gently downward as you walk away from the churchyard.

Dorfstrasse, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo.

What a lovely little walk this is, past the flowers in the scraps of garden along the street--

Along Dorfstrasse, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo.

--past views of the river at the ends of side-streets:

Spree, Rahnsdorf, July 2014. My photo.

As you can see, it's terrifically boaty out here, and the rhetorical-sounding question, How could you live here without having a boat? becomes more practically urgent in a district that we come to presently, called Little Venice. It's in a sort of delta of the Spree between the Müggelsee and the Dämeritzsee, and the canals that take the place of streets are all little Spree-arms.

Klein-Venedig, July 2014. My photo.

Venice itself is so purely, quintessentially urban, that it seems shocking to see how very suburban this Little Venice is.  It looks like a 1970s American Midwestern suburb with boat-sheds instead of garages sticking out in front of the houses.

Little Venice, July 2014. My photo.

Then on we go, southeast along the river--or rather, a street away from it, as this area is terribly afflicted with private property along the water. Not that the street is uninteresting. Here is someone's camping trailer parked in front of their house, painted all around (there's a sailboat scene on the other side.)

Along Biberpelzstrasse, July 2014.  My photo.

There are all sorts of little arms and inlets of the Spree along here, and I need to do some map-checking (instead of my usual mindless and misdirectional ambling) to locate the necessary bridges.  

How secret some of these little waters look ...

From Hohe Brücke, Biberpelzstrasse, July 2014.  My photo.

Just before the Berlin city limit the river splits into an old and a new arm with an island between. The old Spree-arm runs down to a canal that links this end of the Spree to the Dahme, the river that comes in at Köpenick and used to be called the Wendische Spree (see Spree 8 post). The new arm runs straight into the lake here, the Dämeritzsee, and my goodness, look at the traffic on a summer weekday afternoon:

Spree near Dämeritzsee, from the Triglawbrücke, July 2014. My photo.

The bridge over the new Spree-arm is called the Triglaw bridge, after the three-headed Slavic god of war. (When the area was quasi-forcibly Christianized in the twelfth century, the crusaders knocked one of the heads off the big Triglaw-statue in Stettin and sent it to Rome as a gift to the pope, allegedly ...) 

The Dämeritzsee is the border between Berlin and Brandenburg, so--as I'm only doing the Berlin stretch of the Spree--we're about at the end of the line here. (Okay, the Spree south of Dämeritzsee is still the Berlin-Brandenburg border for a ways, but it seems to be beyond the reach of public transit down there--so the lake is where we stop, at least for the time being.)

We just need to go around the north side of the lake and back to the S-Bahn; the water is almost wholly inaccessible here. There's one nice little public cove where I stop for a bit to listen to the water sploshing loudly at the shore ...

Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo.

... and watch the reeds blowing in the strong afternoon wind.

Along Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo.

A woman about my age comes along, and we say polite German things to each other about how fine the day is, how agreeable the sound of the water on the shore is, what an excellent place the little cove is altogether.

But there isn't anything else like it. There are long hot streets with private houses clutching their own ten yards of fenced-off shoreline to their chests.  There's a big police station, a swimming beach (good), and finally a scruffy little stretch of woods--blessed shade!--with an abandoned shopping cart beside the path.

North of Dämeritzsee, July 2014. My photo.

It really is a very little stretch of woods, and it comes to no good end, in Erkner (Brandenburg). 

Coming into Erkner, July 2014. My photo. 

The tallest object in Erkner appears to be the McDonald's sign. 

Time to get to the S-Bahn station and home to (green!) center city. 

Spree 10

Life Among the Müggels

If you look at a map of Berlin, you will see--just at the point where we left off and went home last time--a big blue blob down in the southeast corner. This is a (very) wide spot in the Spree called the Großer Müggelsee, the Big Müggel Lake. Along the south side of the lake are the highest points in Berlin, the Müggel-mountains; on the north side is Friedrichshagen. 

Großer Müggelsee (with Kleiner Müggelsee at lower right).
Photo from Wiki Commons.

Everything around here is called Müggel-something. This stretch of the Spree shows up on the map as the Müggelspree. The street we cross on the way from the S-Bahn station to the lake is the Müggelseedamm. One of the neighborhoods we will pass through is Müggelheim. And so on and so on. 

But what is a Müggel?

It's human to name things, and then it's also human to forget what we meant when we did it. (As in the case of the river Panke (see April posts), the name of which comes from some Slavic word, and which Slavic word is a matter of hopeless controversy.)

The signage that is intended to inform visitors hereabouts provides different explanations of the name. The older texts say that Müggel is a version of the Slavonic mogyla, meaning burial mound or barrow, and allegedly there was such a barrow on these little mountains by the lake. 

These Bronze Age/ Iron Age barrows can be spooky places (think of the barrow-wights in Lord of the Rings). 

Rakne's Mound, Norway.  Photo by Tommy Gildseth, Wiki Commons.

(This particular barrow is nowhere nearby, but it's my favorite barrow picture.) So far as I can tell, there isn't actually an ancient burial mound by the Müggelsee. But in general, this long flat sweep of northern Europe, around the North Sea and the Baltic, is full of them. 

So is the long flat sweep of the North American Midwest. (How alike these places are, no wonder the Germans and Scandinavians settled in the Midwest in droves.) Here's the big grave-mound at Cahokia, in Illinois:

Monks Mound, Cahoka, Illinois. Photo uploaded by Grolltech, Wiki Commons.

And here's a very similar one in Germany. (Flights of stairs added later, in both cases; the prehistorics were not big on building long flights of stairs.)

Burial mound at Hochdorf an der Enz. Photo by Detlef Meissner, Wiki Commons.

But actually Müggels are probably not burial mounds. It is thought more likely now that Müggel comes from the Indogermanic world for cloud or fog. (There are faint--and in the past sometimes loud--political overtones to these discussions of whether the names of things here are really Germanic or really Slavic.) Thus Müggel is related to the Dutch word for drizzle, miggelen, which is a good word. Can't you imagine saying, on a wet gray day, that it's miggling outside?

It isn't miggling here today, however. It's a fine day--and oh dear, look at this. Hydrangeas in bloom along the street in Friedrichshagen. That means it isn't early summer any more, the summer is peaking and will tip over and fall before we know it (where does the time go?).

Along the street in Friedrichshagen, July 2014. My photo.

And where have the more distant times gone, too--Friedrichshagen's years of fame for great writing and semi-crackpot utopias, in the decades around 1900? Or the days of a different semi-crackpot utopia during the Cold War? 

Oh, you can smell the beginnings of the last century in the air here, you can watch it walking ahead of you in the street (that very handsome seventyish woman dressed all in trailing, fluttering gray silk, looking like as if she'd just walked off the set of something like Downton Abbey); you can see it on the house-walls ...

House in Friedrichshagen,
July 2014. My photo.

How much more lush turn-of-the-century progressivism was in Europe (even England) than in the US. You can hear some of the same themes on both sides of the Atlantic: better industrial working conditions, better education, more gender equality, more reliance on scientific expertise. But there were more adventurous attempts at social and artistic reform here. Friedrichshagen (the Friedrichshagen writer's circle, the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis) was a hotbed of progressive thought and literature in northern Europe. 

Here in Friedrichshagen they were full of enthusiasm for science and education and socialism and free love.  The writer's circle included authors and producers of some of the most radical (and best) theater of the time: Strindberg, Hauptmann, the people who brought Ibsen's plays to Berlin. (Terrific change in the world of theater: let's put on a play criticizing gender roles in contemporary marriage, or a play about a strike by starving weavers, instead of plays about heroic national leaders.)

There were popular science writers in the Friedrichshagen circle, promoting theories of evolution. There were founders of vegetarian-pacifist-socialist-nudist communities (not necessarily all of the above at once; pick two or three from the list for your community of choice). There were promoters of new religions. The new religions were supposed to be scientific, the new literature was supposed to be scientific (magic word!). Wilhelm Bölsche, the pop-science writer, promoter of de-theologized religion, the "life and soul" of the Friedrichshagen circle, wrote that poets were like chemists, experimenting to discover natural laws. 

 H. G. Wells would have been at home here, in many ways. (Wells is mostly remembered for his dystopias like The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, but he also wrote a number of novels about happy scientific futures that no one now reads, and a book that attempted to sell a new kind of God in 1917.) 

Wells was positive about Germany for being "the most scientific and most socialist of states" in the years before World War I. (Think of the education system, think of the welfare system--miles ahead of England!) Understandably, he didn't like the militarism. The Germans were building a navy that felt threatening to an England that wanted to keep its control of the seas. The Martian here attacking a British ship in the War of the Worlds is possibly a mental projection of hostile neighbors nearer than Mars .... 

Illustration by Henrique Alvim Correa for 1906 edition of War of the Worlds.
Photo uploaded by Brany123, Wiki Commons.

So the days of art nouveau and scientific religion and experimental theater and pacifist-vegetarian communities came to end. The wars came, and economic ruin came, and some of the utopias turned nasty. (Some of the Friedrichshagen circle were enthusiasts for racial hygiene, some made nice with the Nazis; others not.) We had fed the heart on fantasies, The heart's grown brutal from the fare. 

**

Archangel has cousins who live out here. The cousinage is large but fragmented: Jews and Gentiles, Communist party members and not, exiles who did and did not return from the US after 1945, people who never left but stuck it out in Germany through the mid-twentieth century, people who stayed in East Germany after the division and people who high-tailed it for West Germany. The cousins out here in Friedrichshagen are from the non-Jewish non-Communist East German division and are in their late seventies.

What upright, excellent people they are, the cousins. He's a Ph.D. mathematician who worked in logistics for the East German railroad. (He tried to get them to computerize early and was told, Oh, computers can't do all that, it's just Western propaganda.)  She was a pharmacist's assistant. They had a pack of children and therefore a big apartment--housing distributed according to need in East Berlin--so long from front to back that the children could learn roller skating in it on rainy days.

And on the fine days, the long summer days by the lake .... They had a little sailboat, and before the mathematician and his wife came home from work, the children put together a supper that could be packed into the boat. They would sail out a good way and let the boat ride on the water, somewhere between the town and the mountains, while they ate together and talked over the day and watched the sun go down. Not such bad times.

Müggelsee, looking across to the Müggelberge. Photo from Wiki Commons. 

They weren't Party members themselves, they were pillars of the local church.  Served on the church committees, sang in the choir; Bach's Christmas Oratorio at Christmas, like any self-respecting parish, year after year. (How many performances of the Christmas Oratorio did I count in Berlin one Christmas? Forty-seven? Sixty-three? It's like Handel's Messiah in English-speaking countries but more so. We always visit at Christmas; and Cousin G., piling Christmas cookies on the plate, hums, Brich an, du schönes Morgenlicht, und laß den Himmel tagen!  Break forth, you lovely morning light, and let the sky turn to day.)

One of their acquaintances married a Communist Party bigwig, and they were invited to the wedding at the Party’s big party-place on the lake. It was a fine evening, a memorable evening. The guests at the wedding didn’t really all belong to the same social worlds, but—how big was East Berlin, after all?—they saw each other. Cousin G. says, of the bigwig’s wife, “I saw her just after the Change [die Wende, one says here, meaning the end of the Communist regime]. She was so upset about it, she said she would never be happy again. (Have another cookie.) But, you know I ran into her not so long ago, and she was.  Happy again.”

**

Things are different now, for better or worse. The cousins have struggled with age and illness and East German pensions in a city with (somewhat) West German prices. But at Christmas, in their living room, the light shines through the old painted-glass nativity scene which is almost all that is left of the house in the center of Dresden where the mathematician grew up--all that came through the firestorm. But it is there, and they are there, serene and upright. Let the sky turn to day. Have a cookie. 

 Bölschestrasse, the main drag of Friedrichshagen (named for the poets-as-chemists man in the writers’ circle), is lined with cafes that advertise their designer breads on their blogs, and shops that sell specialty oils and vinegars, and a gallery that will sell you lakeshore landscapes and images of your soul or your guardian angel. That sort of place. 

Tree of Life, sculpture by Bernd Tholl on Bölschestrasse. Photo, Wiki Commons.

**

I take the tunnel under the Spree and march around the Big Müggelsee. On the west side of the lake the shoreline is marshy and indefinite, and so the path is a little back from the water. The lake is visible only as a brightness of blue light off to the left.

Along the west shore of the Müggelsee. My photo, July 2014.

There are a few bits of beach packed with giggling teenagers. There are troops of the seventy-plus crowd along the path (oh dear, some of these people are walking faster than I am), headed for lunch at the beer garden on the south shore of the lake.

Past the beer garden the path becomes more solitary and the shore is open and reedy.

Along the south shore of the Müggelsee, July 2014. My photo.

There’s a ferry across the east end of the lake, which I could take back to the S-Bahn. But the timing doesn’t quite work out, and also I have trouble finding the pier, because I follow the sign that says, “Ferry this way à” until I come to the sign that says, “ß Ferry that way,” without--to the best of my knowledge--having seen any ferry pier.

It’s quite a while till the next boat (assuming I could find the pier), and I know there’s a bus stop down in the woods a mile or so off. The question is, can I cut through this probably unsigned forest, with paths inadequately represented on the map, without losing my way, given my usual propensity for wandering in the wrong direction? Would this end up being slower than waiting for the next ferry?

Well, it looks very straightforward on the map. There’s an intersection of paths here by the electrical substation that seems to match an intersection on the map. (That squirrel is large enough to eat small human beings, and there's an equally dour and carnivorous robin painted on the side wall of the building.)

Electrical substation in woods near Müggelsee, July 2014. My photo.

It would appear that all we have to do is to turn away from the lake and proceed straight ahead through the forest. Eventually we will come to a street, which should lead to the bus stop.

And so it does.

Bus stop near Müggelsee, July 2014. My photo.

 I do like a forest that has bus stops.  We’ll get the ferry the next time.

**

The quote from Wilhelm Bölsche is from a book of his called Die naturwissenschaftlichen Grundlagen der Poesie. Prolegomena einer realistischen Ästhetik (1887). The quote from H.G. Wells is from a book he published in 1916, What Is Coming? A Forecast of Things After the War.  (London: Cassell, p. 99).  "We had fed the heart on fantasies ..." is from Yeats' Meditations in Time of Civil War.