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.