Teltowkanal 3

The Light Goes Away

The last time I was on this stretch of the canal was a late-December afternoon a few years ago. I was in Lichterfelde, in mid-south Berlin, for some now-forgotten reason, and I came to the canal and thought it would be interesting to follow the water westward. It looked fine on the map (a sentence which suggests bad things are about to happen).

What happens in this stretch of the canal is that you're locked into the path for a longish way. On one side of the path is the water, with no bridges, and on the other side is high fence, guarding hostile establishments that (through the fence, on a dim winter afternoon) look like junkyards, complete with junkyard dogs. The establishments are actually things like recycling-processing centers and body shops (complete with recycling and body-shop dogs, who are no more mellow than their junkyard colleagues). 

I was just in Berlin for a Christmas visit that time, and, having been in Michigan until a couple of days before, I had forgotten how lightless the winter afternoons are here. It's not that it really starts to get dark before three--the sky is the same pale pewter color all day until four or so, it isn't black. But it's as if someone's taken the light out of the day, someone's shoved the dimmer switch all the way down, you see things indistinctly in the dimness. 

I was still trapped between the junkyards and the water when it started to get really dark. An occasional homeward-bound bicyclist bounced past, headlamp reflecting on the fluorescent-painted rocks and roots in the path, marked so that cyclists wouldn't hit them too fast in the dark and go tail over teakettle into the canal. On the map, it looked as though you could probably get off the path and into the streets where transit was available, but actually you were stuck between water and fence, without a very good idea of whether the nearest exit was ahead or behind. 

The remains of the day got dimmer and dimmer, and it was more and more solitary. The path ran through a strange doorway from nowhere to nowhere--so what happens if I go through the doorway? It takes me into some sort of body-snatcher realm? Nah, just more path, full of roots and rocks painted day-glo lemon and chartreuse and magenta, with the black water on one side and the high solid fences on the other. I didn't find a way off the path until I was almost in Kleinmachnow [see Teltowkanal 2 post] and it really was dark. 

But it all looks different on a bright mild afternoon. (I walked this little stretch of the canal from west to east at the end of October, before getting sidetracked by the Prague trip and stacks of work to do; hence this delayed post.) The bank rises enough on the junkyard side that the path is very sheltered, and on a sunny day it was warm as summer here, although it was coat-and-hat weather up in the city, beyond the recycling places and body shops.

Teltowkanal near Teltower Damm, October 2014. My photo.

The fluorescent paint on the roots and rocks had worn off and not been replaced, though also I think the path had been upgraded since the last time I was here--there are not so many hazards now for the fast-moving cyclist.

The doorway in the woods was still there, still slightly unnerving even in the October sunlight. 

Doorway along the Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

It's strange and ruinous, a way through a wall that doesn't exist any more, a doorway standing there without a function and therefore looking as though it ought to have a meaning. (It made me think of an abandoned town I came across once out on the Colorado plains: the houses were gone, the streets were gone, and all that was left, besides a crumbling schoolhouse wall, was a set of fire hydrants lost in the dry grass that hissed and rattled in the wind. How ruins affect us--even a ruined fire hydrant is a dreamy, melancholy thing.)

**

The overgrown solitude here is a fine thing on a sunny late fall day. Here's the footbridge over the Stichkanal--a side branch of the canal, like an exit off a freeway, that the water traffic once took into the industrial district to the north.

Footbridge, Zehlendorfer Stichkanal, October 2014. My photo.

There was a big Zeiss camera plant here, and a Telefunken plant (telegraph and radio equipment) before the Second World War. Then there was a big US Army establishment here after the war. Some industrial and commercial stuff still exists up along the Stichkanal, but it depends on truck not barge transport now, so the little side waterway is drifting back to nature.

The path has definitely been upgraded ...

Along the Teltowkanal, October 2014. My photo.

On the other side of the water, after a bit, is the fine sculptural mass of the Lichterfelde power plant. I do love power plants. We can see three of them from the windows of our apartment, and they serve as useful weather indicators--for example, it looks clear out there this morning, but you can't see the Reuter plant in the west at all, so there's moisture gathering. It's going to rain before the end of the day. (Our apartment is on the wrong side of the building to have the "good view" the neighborhood offers, over the immense tree-fleece of Tiergarten, with Gold-Else the angel floating above the trees on the Victory Column on one end of the park, and the jagged glassy mass of the Potsdamer Platz buildings at the other end. Instead we see power plants and harbor facilities and jumbles of housing; distant woods and a nearby jail and the rail lines with their little bright trains going past twelve stories down. It's like having a tremendous model railroad set, with the square-nosed red-and-yellow S-Bahns going by every couple of minutes, and the green-and-silver ODEGs (the Ostdeutsche Eisenbahn Gesellschaft, the East German Railroad company, which I believe is half owned by the Italian state railroad and runs very well), and the big red double-decker regionals screeching their brakes on the Bellevue curve, on their way to Frankfurt-an-der-Oder or Brandenburg-an-der-Havel or who knows where.)

Lichterfelde power plant, October 2014. My photo.

I am not the only person who finds the Berlin power plants handsome and poetic. The Lichterfelde plant was on a German postage stamp once, in a very muscular, stylized representation, and here is someone else's romantic photo of the plant. (And no, the cooling towers don't mean it's a nuclear plant; it's natural-gas-fired cogeneration.)

Lichterfelde power plant. Photo, Claas Augner, Wiki Commons. 

There's a small industrial harbor by the plant, and then we're back in the woods for a bit. (How long the leaves stay green here. Now, as I write, in the first week of December, the willows are still half-green along the Spree, although most of the other leaves have fallen.)

Teltowkanal near Lichterfelde Harbor, October 2014. My photo.

Then there's a crossroad sign along the path saying that Schlosspark Lichterfelde is off to the left--so perhaps this is the place to leave the water and look for transit home. 

The bus stop is by the old village green in Lichterfelde. This is not the village church in the picture, however, it's something like an electrical substation.

Lichterfelde Dorfanger, October 2014. My photo.

**

That was the last of the sunny days. I came back about two weeks later to do another short stretch of the canal, starting where I had left off, at Schlosspark 
Lichterfelde. 

So here we go down the garden path to the water in the gray November day (already there's less light, already the city is pulling back into itself in the dimness, getting ready to wait out the winter).

Schlosspark Lichterfelde, November 2014. My photo.

A friend who has lived all over the world says: There are three ways you can have seasons: hot and cold (continental climates like mid-America), wet and dry (parts of Asia and Africa), or light and dark (northern Europe). It's tempting to imagine that these different ways of experiencing the year give people different inner lives and make for different societies. (Oh, let's not get too deep into geographic determinism here. But still ... would southern California have the character it does if it had the climate of Buffalo, New York. Nah, I doubt it.)

Summer as endless heat is one thing, summer as endless light and a lot of 65 degrees F. is something else. And similarly, winter as three feet of snow and temperatures that will remove the more salient parts of your face is something different from this mild withdrawal into dimness. The tourists I pass in a December mid-afternoon, on my way to pick up groceries, are holding their maps up to their faces, struggling to read them in the daylight. The daylight is there, but it just doesn't amount to much, muffled by the endless trailing street-level cloud of early winter. 

**
It isn't beautiful here, exactly, along the canal. But it's very Berlin, this mix of green space and imposing industrial plant gone a bit scruffy, wrapped in November mists.

These gaunt brick buildings have a kind of unbeautiful distinction--unbeautiful like distinguished long-faced 1930-ish Englishwomen: think of Edith Sitwell, think of Viriginia Woolf and her sister. Horse-faces, one and all.

Along Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.

Bust of V. Woolf, Tavistock Square, London. Photo, Stu's Images, WikiCommons.

We're getting out of Lichterfelde, which is worth a good deal more exploration than it's getting on this trip. Lichterfelde, like a number of other sub-districts down in these parts, was a Rittergut--a manor--until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Then an entrepreneur got a good deal on the property from the lord of the manor (who was sinking under his debts) and developed it as a big-house neighborhood for high-level civil servants and military officers.

Ah, the silly houses these people built. They displaced the lord of the manor and wanted to live in castles. 

Villa by Gustav Lilienthal, Lichterfelde. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Actually, this one is moderate enough; it's one of the "Lilienthal castles" in Lichterfelde. Good Gustav Lilienthal--one of those turn-of-the-last-century utopians who made some money on big-villa commissions for the rich but spent a lot of time developing better housing for mid- to lower-income people. These Lichterfelde castles were meant for folks with moderate income. Lilienthal also founded a housing co-op for the non-rich (Free Soil, the enormous co-op that backs on the Tegeler Fließ), developed low-cost construction methods to provide solid buildings for a vegetarian colony and a church-based settlement for the homeless and handicapped north of Berlin. He created educational toys and helped brother Otto develop flying machines. (Otto built a hill--an unnatural object in table-flat Lichterfelde--to fly from. Otto eventually crashed, but the aerodynamic principles he worked out were what the Wright brothers used later. The settlement for the homeless and handicapped managed to hold off the euthanizing Nazis and nationalizing Communists and go its own way in peace, decade after decade. For a few months in 1990 it took in Eric Honecker, the ex-head of the East German state, who had lost his job and his Party housing and found he couldn't live anywhere without being driven out by hostile demonstrators.) 

Upright, determined people who went their own way, the Lilienthals and their friends. Gustav's daughter Olga and her husband Gerhard stuck with Jewish friends in the 1930s and made public protests against Nazi policies; Gerhard lost his job; later he refused military service and was lucky to live to tell the tale. When the Russian army came through at the end of the war, killing and plundering, Gerhard took a chance and played welcoming host to the soldiers that burst into the house, trying to get them drunk fast enough that unconsciousness would win the race against rising violence. Sort of worked; everyone lived to tell the tale. Olga told it to Archangel, at any rate, when he stayed with her for a few days in the house in the 70s, on a research trip. It was one of old Gustav's castles, of course.

We're getting out of Lichterfelde and into the next sub-district, Steglitz. There are still handsome compositions of autumn and industry:

Along Teltowkanal near Hannemannbrücke, November 2014. My photo.

There are terraces here and there along the water, buried in fallen leaves.

Along Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.

It will be a while before the winter cold, such as it is here, really comes. The geraniums are still in full bloom on the balconies, and may be until Christmas, if we're lucky.

In Steglitz, near Teltowkanal, November 2014. My photo.