Tegeler Fließ 1

Belly View, Fat Marie, and Humboldt, Kansas

Having walked the main branch of the Spree from one end of Berlin to the other this summer [see previous posts], I want to go back and explore some side-branches and tributaries on the east side of the city. But it will be easier to do this later, when the east-central chunk of the Stadtbahn re-opens after a bout of track replacement. (Summer is transit-construction season here, as it is highway-construction season in the US.) And I can’t let the season get to its end without walking at least the Berlin section of the Tegeler Fließ, as I have done every summer for several years. So we’re going to shift location for a couple of weeks.

Tegeler Fließ, June 2014.  Photo, EbeWi, Wiki Commons.

Unlike many of the smaller streams in Berlin, the Tegeler Fließ has not been engineered into a die-straight drain. It’s still a meandering wetland, full of cuckoos and nightingales, fish and fish-otters, marsh-orchid and snakeroot, carthusian pinks and devil's-bit (the last is a species of scabiosa, for the gardening-minded among you). The oldest traces of human settlement in Berlin are here: Stone Age people hunted reindeer along the stream, and Bronze Age people settled in little fisher-hunter-gatherer communities here. 

According to the anthropologists, it was a relatively easy life. Especially where there were fish, hunter-gatherers didn't have to work nearly as hard for a living as agriculturalists did later. The advantage of agriculture was not that it was an easier life, it was that you could support more people in the same space--and of course have more stuff, because you didn't need to move around as much. (But then, once you started supporting more people, you were more or less stuck with it, and so here we all are with lots of stuff and without the leisure of self-respecting Neanderthals.)

The Berlin section of the Tegeler Fließ was the East-West border in Cold War days, but it was one of the less tense stretches of the border. Numerous people were shot and/or drowned in the Spree and the Havel, and a few in the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal, trying to make it from East to West; but so far as it is possible to tell from the casualty lists in places like Wikipedia, no one died in the Tegeler Fließ. The Wall itself was set well back, on the north side of the wetland where the ground was solid enough to build on, and the wetland was pretty much left to itself by both sides. 

The Fließ starts up in the Barnim Plateau north of Berlin and collects a portion of the western plateau waters to bring them into the river Havel here at the Tegeler See--one of the widest of the wide spots of the Havel, the chain of lakes you see on the western edge of Berlin when you fly in from that direction. 

Tegeler See. Photo by Tilman Kluge, Wiki Commons.

I think that the first time in my life I ever heard a live cuckoo was out here. Because I was near a cluster of houses, I thought it was a cuckoo clock in some open-windowed living room. But it wasn’t. (The last time I was up here, last summer, I was sitting on a bench by the water eating a sandwich and thought my phone was ringing, but it turned out to be a duck announcing its interest in a share of the sandwich. And it's not so much that I have a bizarre ringtone, it was more that it was a bizarre duck.)

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To substitute for the S-Bahn trains that are not running because of the track replacement, there have been herds of buses, vast as bison herds on the plains, lumbering back and forth beside the silent S-Bahn routes since mid-July. The buses are rented, and the drivers often appear to be non-native-German speakers and/or non-Berliners, who make heavy weather of announcing the station stops. 

Our neighborhood station, Bellevue, which is pronounced in a terribly conscientiously French manner on the S-Bahn announcements, comes out sounding like Belly View on the bus.

So I hop the bus from Belly View to Friedrichstrasse and then take the S1 northbound to Tegel. (This is Tegel the sub-district, a component of Berlin, not Tegel the airport, which is at the southern edge of the sub-district.) The district up here is Reinickendorf, probably named for its thirteenth century developer (Lokator is the medieval technical term), one Reinhard. But somehow the name got twisted from Reinhard into Reinecke--for Reinecke Fuchs, Reynard the Fox, the trickster figure in medieval fables. (Did trickster figures and real estate developers seem similar in the Middle Ages?) Hence the red fox on the district coat of arms:

Reinickendorf arms.  Wiki Commons. 

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It’s late summer now, the abundant green of the city is darker than in May—sometimes dusty, but not today after a week of warm rains. What a scruffy little wilderness it is along the tracks going north from Friedrichstrasse. Around the Humboldthain stop (Humboldt Grove--we have to talk about the Humboldts later) there is mullein and something that looks like fireweed in bloom—tall yellow spikes and tall purple spikes beside the tracks, almost brushing the windows. There are weedy shoulder-high trees between the sets of tracks—how often do they clear the brush here in mid-city?  They must do it sometimes, or the forest would have taken over completely, but they obviously do it less than once a year. (This is the Berlin that lots of Germans don’t like: it’s so scruffy, so trashy, so unordentlich. "So shabby," says a German friend, with distaste, "so proletarian!" Well, yes, but ....)

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It's a little walk from the transit lines to the lakeshore at Tegel, through the center of town. Tegel is full of retirees, and it pulls you back in time—not to a 1900 full of semi-crackpot utopias like Friedrichshagen [see Spree 10 post, July], but to a sort of clumping respectable 1957 or so.  The old ladies in navy-blue pleated skirts take their constitutionals along the Greenwich Promenade, the shoreline walk with its alternating sections of lindens on the left and plane trees on the right, then plane trees on the left and lindens on the right, and good Lord, when did I last see shoes like this? On my grandmothers in the 1950s. 

Actually, old-lady shoes (like many social customs) would have lasted longer around here than in the US, so it's not clear in exactly what decade you land when strolling around Tegel, but it's at least a generation back. In the evening when I tell Archangel about my minor lunch misadventure, he chortles: “You landed in the 1970s!”  The problem was that I had meant to pick up a sandwich out in Tegel, to have lunch along the Fließ, and I thought it would be easy because there’s a street near the S-Bahn stop with bakeries scattered thickly along it. (The oldies have their breakfasts late here, at the tables along the sidewalk, or on their summer-beflowered apartment balconies.) And normally in Berlin, bakeries have excellent sandwiches. 

But I stuck my nose into any number of bakeries and there wasn’t a sandwich in sight--as would have been the case thirty or forty years ago, when bakeries just sold unadorned Brot and Brötchen, and if you wanted a sandwich you had to make it in your own kitchen like a responsible adult.

The only place I saw that had sandwiches for sale was the fish stand, which was selling rolls stuffed with shiny gray slabs of eel. But I couldn't really face a slab of eel on a hot summer day, admirable though the fish-eating hunter-gatherer life may have been.

(Pause for thought, prompted by a US visit early in August. When did the US become so panicked about food hygiene? Pickup sandwiches in the US are vile because they must be plastic-wrapped to protect them from germs, and sitting in plastic wrap makes them soggy and stale. Here the bakery sandwiches sit out, unwrapped, handled by the same people who handle money at the cash register and who, unlike their American counterparts, don't put on plastic gloves to touch the food. (And there are patient dogs waiting in line with their owners in the bakery, and impatient sparrows that have come through the open windows to flutter around in search of crumbs.) It's a US health inspector's nightmare, but we seem to be none the worse for it here, and the sandwiches taste much better.)

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A little way up the shore the Tegeler Fließ comes into the lake (and thus into the Havel) at the Harbor Bridge, which crosses the two channels of the Fließ and the long thin Humboldt Island that lies between them. There is a hilarious group of young people on the bridge, using felt-tip markers to sign the exposed belly of a very pregnant member of the group, like people signing the cast of someone with a broken arm. A sort of belly view, if you will. 

Tegeler Fliess entering Tegeler See, Hafenbrücke.  Photo, Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons

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Past the bridge, if you go sort of around the corner into the forest, you come to Fat Marie (dicke Marie), an oak which is allegedly 900 years old and is probably the oldest tree in Berlin. (There's never been a core sample to check the number of rings, and it may really be only about 500 years old--hence a sapling in the time of the Reformation, not the First Crusade--but that's respectable enough.)

Fat Marie,  Tegel Forest.  Photo, Havelbaude, Wiki Commons.

It shows how far we are out on the edge of the city here. Central Berlin doesn't have old trees: all the trees were killed in the mid-1940s, the streets and parks were bare as billiard tables. And there wasn't that much of an old tree population even before that, because so many trees had been cut down in the hard winters at the end of World War I. 

I am thinking of Rehberge (the Roe-Deer Hills) in mid-Berlin, a park that I see from my study window. It's a set of forest-covered sand dunes much like the hills above the Tegeler See. All the trees in Rehberge were cut down for firewood around the end of World War I--and then the dunes, no longer anchored by the trees, started moving out of the park, burying the streets, piling against the houses. There was hasty replanting to anchor the dunes and keep them from swallowing up the neighborhood. And then destruction by fire and axe again in another thirty years--and faster replanting this time.

The old forest out here at Tegel, which is now mostly public, used to belong to the Humboldts (as did some chunks of land further east, more or less along our walking route). The name probably does not mean much in the US now, but it did in the nineteenth century, as you can see by scanning an American map westward from the Mississippi. Here are Humboldt, Iowa and Humboldt, Kansas; here are Humboldt Counties in any number of states; here are the Humboldt River and the Little Humboldt River and Humboldt State University, here's the Humboldt Current cooling the western coast of South America. These are all named for Alexander von Humboldt, who is buried up here in the forest, above the lake, under oaks almost as venerable as Fat Marie--the tree which Alexander and his brother named for the family cook when they were young. (No record of what the cook thought about this.) The family home, Schloss Tegel, where Alexander and his brother Wilhelm grew up, is back up in the trees here somewhere. Schloss Boredom, Alexander called it when he was young and desperate to get away. [Source for much of this is Manfred Geier's nice dual biography, Die Brüder Humboldt.]

Alexander, grown up, was the great celebrity scientist of his day--maybe the first celebrity scientist? He had done serious research and seen exciting places (five years of exploration in the Americas), he had ideas, he could write well for a public audience, he could be an amusing talker. His public lectures in Berlin were so popular that the crowds trying to get in to one of the biggest halls in town were hardly manageable. (Two soldiers, attempting to keep order in the crowds, were carried away unconscious.) "Everybody went," says one account. "Teachers and bakers, shopgirls and errand boys, professors, noblemen, craftsmen ..."  [This is from an article about Alexander in Der Spiegel, 2004.] 

Alexander von Humboldt, portrait by J. K. Stieler, 1843.
From WikiCommons.

When he wasn't exploring he lived in Paris, and he came back to Berlin only reluctantly, in middle age; he did not like Berlin. It was backward, provincial .... (So shabby! So proletarian!) But he had run through a lot of money, doing science--most of his personal fortune had gone to exploring, and to developing and reporting the results. The king insisted he come home, and he could not so easily afford to break with the Prussian government, which now provided him with regular financial support. So he came home, and amused the king, and lectured, and wrote. 

Some historian of science has made him into an adjective: Humboldtian science is a label for a certain kind of nineteenth-century science, characterized by a passion for exact measurement and the latest instruments, as well as by a sense that everything is connected and lots of measurements will eventually let us figure out how the connections work. (The basic idea of ecosystems is reasonably traceable to Alexander's work.) 

Something else about Alexander's science also--there's a flavor that lingers in central European science long after it has dissipated in England and France. For example, the narrator of one of my favorite nineteenth-century German novels is a young geologist (undoubtedly an admirer of Alexander von Humboldt) who is making study trips in the Alps, determined, as he says, to understand how the geological formations “are created, how they are changed, and how they speak to our hearts.”  Um, that last one got left out of my science classes somehow. But it isn't left out of Alexander's works. He says: “The goals that I strive for are an overview of Nature as a whole, evidence of how its powers work together, and a renewal of pleasure [in Nature] ….”  (from Ansichten der Natur, quoted in Geier, p. 193). 

It is important that the natural world makes us happy, says Alexander. And so it does, here.

Along the Tegeler Fließ, August 2014.  My photo.

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It’s hard to keep by the water for some distance after the bridge at the Tegeler See: there is some private property, and the railroad and a highway, and we don’t settle down to the pleasant path through the woods until we get past the highway. Then … ah, yes, here’s the turn, up along the edge of the cemetery, and here we are by the water again.

At least I think we're by the water. Everything has leafed out and grown together so densely by this time of the summer that there is nothing but a wall of green by the path. It's only at the occasional footbridges that it's possible to see the water, and even there it's almost lost in the thrusting, entangled green of late-summer growth.

Tegeler Fließ, August 2014. My photo.

We aren’t in the wilds here, in spite of the density of the green. There are houses and apartments and schools and day-care centers a stone’s throw from the path, but most of the time you can’t tell. It looks like countryside.

How like and unlike this is to city-edge wetland walks in Michigan. In East Lansing I was much devoted to the Northern Tier Trail and the River Trail and the trails north of Lake Lansing. (Early Saturday morning, get out and go, and get the week’s cobwebs out of your mind! Golden sassafrass and dark red oaks in the fall, snowpack in the winter, deafening invisible frogs in the spring!) The landscape and ecosystem are upper-Midwest-ish around Berlin, and the long boardwalks over stretches of the wetland here are reminiscent of the boardwalk stretches in the Lake Lansing park.

But the way all this is socially situated is very different in the two places. Walking is such a segregated, controlled activity in Michigan, as in much of the US. If you want to walk in the woods you drive to some special segregated area and go round and round on some excessively well-marked little loop trail like a hamster on a wheel. At Lake Lansing there is a sign that says you have to go around on the trails clockwise, I have no idea why. (This of course inspired me to go around counterclockwise, which appeared to have no destructive consequences.)

Here the woods are simply part of the city, and the tracks that run in loose networks through the woods are how you get to work or do your errands. The bicyclists who pass you in the forest are on the way to work with their briefcases or their tools, or on the way home with bags of groceries, and they certainly have not had to drive to any trailhead. This is just part of ordinary life, in the green summer.

In the Tegeler Fließ, August 2014. My photo.

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"I am half an American," Alexander von Humboldt said, in his old age, to a young American visitor in Berlin. He had been happy in the Americas. "My thoughts and aspirations are with you. But I do not like your present policies." He meant the continuing existence of slavery in the US before the civil war; he was one of the leading anti-slavery voices in Europe. [Quotes from Alexander, here and below, in Gerhard Casper's Pour le merite speech: http://web.stanford.edu/group/gcasper_project/cgi-bin/pdf/Ein-junger-Mann.pdf] 

An American correspondent wrote to him once to argue that it would be wrong to abolish slavery because this would cause cotton exports to fall. As we would say nowadays, it would cause GDP to decline, and this was, in the correspondent's view, an unanswerable argument against any kind of change.

How I detest this policy that measures and evaluates the public happiness only by the value of exports! Alexander writes back. For nations as for individuals, wealth is only incidental to our happiness. Before being free it is necessary to be just, and without justice there is no lasting prosperity. 

This is why there is a Humboldt, Kansas. Kansas was on the violent front lines of the slavery question in the years leading up to the Civil War, and to call your little scruff of a settlement "Humboldt" was making it extremely clear where you stood. Southern raiders burned down most of the town early in the war; the Humboldtians had fortified their local dry goods store--it must have been the biggest place in town--but they couldn't hold it and make an effective defense. They built again, however, and the town is still sort of there: very small, with population gently leaking away as it does from little towns on the prairie. It's a long way from the hills above the Tegeler See.