It's interesting to live in Berlin after living in Chicago for a long time. It can feel like getting out of Plato's cave and seeing the real things in the sunshine, after seeing the shadows of the images in the cave. Chicago grew up in the late nineteenth century when Berlin was the hot industrial city, the innovation capital of the world--and naturally there are likenesses and modelings.
The University of Chicago was founded as a knock-off of the University of Berlin. (The original core collection of the U of Chicago library was acquired by buying up, whole, the most suitable-looking bookstore in the neighborhood of the U of Berlin.) The Berlin Ringbahn, an elevated rail line that encircles central Berlin (for 37 km), is like a tremendous magnification of the Chicago Loop (about 3 km). And so on.
Getting to this last stretch of the Spree means getting through the construction at Ostkreuz (East Cross), the eastern node of the Ringbahn. (The key intersections of the Ringbahn, where the north-south and east-west lines cross it, are named East Cross, West Cross, South Cross, and ... nonono, not North Cross. Gesundbrunnen, instead. Just to keep you alert.)
Ostkreuz has needed work. Here's one of the east-west platforms in 2007.
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| Platform, Ostkreuz, 2007. Photo by Christian Liebscher, Wiki commons. |
They started tearing up the place in 2008, and are very slowly (I presume thoroughly) putting it back together again. The new east-west platforms will be here. (The upper, finished part is the shed for the north-south tracks.)
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| Ostkreuz station, March 2014. Photo by Ingolf, Wiki Commons. |
For the time being, we clamber around a lot on temporary stairs and catwalks over the construction, trying to figure out where the trains are now. (Last week the S3 was here, but last week's "here" no longer exists ...) I locate the S3, which I assume is bound for Köpenick, where there is a confluence of rivers. A scratchy announcement comes on:
Worthy passengers, the incoming train shuttles only to Rummelsburg, where you can change again for a train to Köpenick.
The worthy passengers moan, quietly. (But someday the construction will be done.)
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Köpenick is the next piece of Berlin east of Niederschöneweide (last post), and is of course different. The districts and sub-districts and neighborhoods here are so distinct, so identified and marked and named .... I'm still not altogether used to it.
Naming is a human practice that thins out as you go west into the American interior, where nature gets bigger than culture. Where I grew up in eastern Colorado, a lot of noticeable physical features like buttes and bodies of water lacked names (the US Geological Survey might have called them something, but no one I knew called them anything). The flowers by the roadside and in the pastures lacked names (undoubtedly botanists had labeled them, but no one I knew called them anything). In Denver, when I was in college, I lived in a number of different places and never heard that any of my surroundings were neighborhoods with particular names. Chicago is different: you couldn't ever not know what neighborhood you were in. But it's more intense here in Berlin.
And the naming is complicated. Köpenick is a district that includes Köpenick city and other places like Friedrichshagen and Müggelheim (no, this does not mean a home for Muggles). Köpenick city is then made up of distinct pieces like Köpenick Altstadt--the old city center--and the Salvador-Allende-Quarter, and the Wolf's Garden (Wolfsgarten), and the Finance Department Heath (Kämmereiheide) and so on, each of which is a different sort of place.
The first piece of Köpenick-city that we come into, on leaving Niederschöneweide, is Spindlersfeld. We're out in the deep east here: brown houses, old streetcars with high steps, streetcar stops thick with smokers and cigarette litter; potholes in mid-street so deep and lasting that the grass takes hold in them--though it does not get as tall as the grass along the street-sides and in the parks, where it is waist-high and run to seed. I pass one little patch that has been mowed and smells like new-cut hay in the June sun.
There are old-east ruins. This is the Spindler works, which gave the Spindlersfeld neighborhood its name. The windows are broken, the woods begin to close in from the sides, and some of the trees that have dug their roots into the rooftops are getting rather large.
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| Spindler works, Spindlersfeld, June 2014. My photo. |
Spindler's company started out doing laundry (among other things), and laundry was big business in Köpenick in the nineteenth century. It's all about water, out here.
The Berlin-area ground water that goes into the city water systems is chalky-hard. (The verb "de-scale" was never a big part of my vocabulary until I moved to Berlin, but here it is essential. As in, "The espresso machine doesn't work any more, maybe it should have been de-scaled more often.") But the river water is softer, and in Köpenick in the nineteenth century it was relatively clean, safely upriver from massive human insanitation and nascent industry. And there were waterside meadows for drying and bleaching the laundry in the sun. Perfect for laundry!
So ... here are two representative local heroes of the Köpenick laundries, whose memorials I have stumbled over, tacking back and forth near the river bank, trying to get up the Spree and around the occasionally intrusive private property.
One of the local heroes is Henriette Lustig, the woman who is credited with getting the commercial laundry business started here in the 1830s. Different world then: Berlin was still very French (became less so, proportionally, when the heavy industrialization later in the century pulled in lots of German workers), and she was christened Marie Frederique Adelaide. The family called her by the name of her older sister Henriette, who had died. (Because it was convenient to keep calling the youngest child Henriette? Because it made it seem as if the first Henriette was still alive? How would you feel, being called by a dead sibling's name rather than your own?)
In earlier days, your servants did your laundry, in your own household--or you did it yourself if you were sufficiently downscale, but you had to be a long way downscale not to have someone to do heavy household work like laundry. (The wonderful opening passage of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, The Blue Flower, describes a young man arriving at a friend's house around 1800, and feeling awkward because, of all days in the year, he has arrived on washday. His own household (servants, under his mother's supervision) does the washing three times a year, "therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here ... he could tell from the great dingy snowfall of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard ... that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth ..., but it was certainly an indication of long standing.")
After the eighty-nine-shirt era, there was a longish interval--starting in Henriette Lustig's time and continuing up to the widespread diffusion of washing machines--in which it was normal to give your laundry to a commercial service that picked up and delivered to your door with considerable frequency. So here is Henriette Lustig starting out with a basket; and then with a cart pulled by a dog to carry the customers' linens; and then with a big wagon and a horse. Or even two horses. She had employees, and then more employees. Boom times! By 1900 there were four thousand laundry workers in Köpenick and eighty-nine firms; but she was the first. (The source for all this is a website called FemBio.)
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| Memorial plaque for Henriette Lustig, Altmarkt, Köpenick. Photo by Clemensfranz, Wiki Commons. |
What a life. She ran the business, met the payroll, had seventeen children, and couldn't sign her own name. Nor, according to one of her daughters, could she count past ten. The business never made real money, but it survived, side by side with the entirely different world of Wilhelm Spindler.
Back when Henriette was still doing laundry in other people's houses, before she started her own business, Wilhelm, who was almost the same age, was doing his Wanderschaft. (The traditional practice for skilled trades then was apprenticeship, then Wanderschaft or Wanderjahre--going from city to city, ideally in more than one country, working in different establishments to expand your knowledge and polish your skills--then, if all went well, you could set up on your own, back home.) In Wilhelm's case the trade was silk-dying, and after a couple of years on the road he set up a silk-dying business in Berlin, which also offered to wash fine shawls. (If we put the color in, we can clean your shawl without taking the color out, presumably.)
He was interested in technical developments, in chemistry. In his wander-years, in Paris, he had learned about dry-cleaning with chemicals like benzine. He introduced dry-cleaning to Germany--big breakthrough! Beginnings of one of those solid late-nineteenth-century German family fortunes that end you up with a neighborhood and bridge named after you and a plaque like this:
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| Wilhelm Spindler, memorial on Spindler-Bridge over the Spree. Photo by Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons. |
Wilhelm corresponded with people all over Europe, learning about the latest in dye chemistry. (How could you dye silk an even, perfect, lasting black?? Vital business question, in the days when the black dress was the standard garb of women past a certain age.) Working on dyes was hot stuff in chemistry in those days, a lively interface between science and industry. Adolf Brüning, who got his Ph.D. at Heidelberg under the immortal Robert Bunsen (namesake of the Bunsen burner!), came to work at Wilhelm Spindler's dyeworks in Berlin. And married Wilhelm's oldest daughter, and founded a firm in western Germany that eventually became the chemical giant Hoechst.
Brüning's great discovery was a green dye that would still look green under gaslight. The French empress had red hair, she wanted to wear green under the gaslight ... and another fortune was made when she became Brüning's customer. (The empress set the fashion, and Brüning got enormous contracts to supply the silk works in Lyons.)
They were conscientious employers, Spindler and Brüning. Health insurance for the workers, sports facilities, paid vacations, in the days when such things were rare.
**
In the 1920s, the Spindler firm was bought by Schering (which now belongs to Bayer). Henriette Lustig's daughter continued to run a small laundry in Köpenick.
After World War II, the Spindler works became part of a state holding company under varying names, including The People's Own Firm, United Laundries of Berlin. Henriette Lustig's granddaughter continued to run a small laundry in Köpenick ....
It's all over now; the granddaughter's little laundry gone in 1965, the remains of the Spindler business gone in the 1990s. Real estate developers own the remains of the Spindler works now and are building housing here. Some of the housing is new, occupying formerly vacant ground, some is supposed to be rehabbed space in the old works--not so evident, but perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place.
There is supposed to be a promenade along the Spree through all this new development (also not so evident, but perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place). Lots of private property here, lots of fences with beware-of-dog signs.
Or sometimes, for a change:
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| Warning! Combat Cat! Spindlersfeld. June 2014. My photo. |
Chicago-Berlin again. The notion (often honored in the breach, but still present) that the public should have a right to walk by the water, under the trees, is core Berlin--it's an important piece of what brought greater Berlin together (see "A little geography" post in February). Daniel Burnham, in the Chicago Plan, said: “The lakefront by right belongs to the people. Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.” (You go, Daniel Burnham!)
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At Köpenick a fat river called the Dahme joins the Spree:
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| Dahme River at Köpenick, June 2014. My photo. |
(The river was not the only victim of renaming. Little Sorbish towns in the country south of Berlin were also given more German-sounding names in 1938. For example, Trebatzch (eek, Wendish!) was renamed Leichhardt (ah, German!). The name effectively changed back in 1947: one dark night the locals uprooted the 1938 city-limit signs that said Leichhardt and planted new ones that said Trebatzch.)
So it's good that things have names (unlike in rural Colorado), but it gets complicated.
**
Out of Spindlersfeld into central Köpenick, and we're in a different world, primped and painted with all the amenities of a prosperous part of Berlin. Yellow houses, green houses, pink houses. Intact streets, mown grass, Vietnamese florists, Turkish produce shops, and so on. Köpenick no longer lives by taking in the city's washing, but it lives well.
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| Köpenick, Gutenbergstrasse. June 2014. My photo. |
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| Schloss Köpenick. Photo by Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons. |
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| Schlossgarten Köpenick, June 2014. My photo. |
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| Chair by the river, Köpenick, June 2014. My photo. |
Then--I think we're in the Finance Department Heath now--the riverside is open territory at last, and the summer afternoon is perfect, and nothing could be better than to walk by the water.
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| Along the Spree, June 2014. My photo. |
Eventually I hop the S-Bahn to go home via Ostkreuz. There is an announcement in the train:
Very honored passengers, this train goes only to Rummelsburg, where
you can change for a shuttle to Ostkreuz and change again there.
The very honored passengers moan.
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