Teltow connection canals 1

Routes and Branches: Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal

On the east side of Berlin the Teltowkanal splits in three [see Teltowkanal 7 post]: the main canal turns south, the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal goes north, and a third branch, the Britzer Verbindungskanal, goes straight ahead east. Having gone to the end of the Teltowkanal itself, I want to come back and walk the branches. 

We are getting to the end of winter here: there are days when the whole sky lifts up, far above the rooftops. The sky is full of clouds, but the clouds are up where they belong, backdropping the skylines out at the city's edges (there's the Siemens tower in the west, there's the Märkisches Viertel in the north), instead of dragging in the streets, trailing their cold damp fingers over your face like something un-dead.

The season is unreliable, however. The online weather shows a big sunshine icon and says that it is clear now and will be clear all day today. But in fact it's as gray as a 1950s overcoat out there. And cold.

Lohmühlenbrücke, Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015.  My photo.

Here we are at the start of the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, having taken the S-Bahn to Ostkreuz (that massive long-term construction site), found the bus stop in a windy corner of the construction, and taken the bus south. Past a four-story apartment house with four-story-high metal daisies in various colors blooming around it. Past apartment houses with strong-colored murals on their end-walls. Across beautiful Puschkinallee, where the white trunks of the plane-trees lining the avenue glow with their own light, even on such a day.

I get off at the Lohmühlen bridge, which is where the Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal (this side of the bridge in the picture above) takes its leave of the Landwehrkanal (other side of the bridge). The far side of the Landwehrkanal is Kreuzberg; this side is Neukölln, a famously tough and troubled part of Berlin. (It used to be called Rixdorf, and it had such a bad rep in the 19th century that the city fathers changed the name to Neukölln in the hope of getting a fresh start. No luck.) 

Here along the wall of the canal a graffitist invokes a warmer season.

Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, near Lohmühlenbrücke, February 2015. My photo.

There are anti-gentrification posters and banners hung on the houses, or across the front of the occasional vacant lot, as the higher-rent wave creeps down from Kreuzberg. One of the posters rallies the neighbors to call for Milieuschutz for the neighborhood near the bridge. (Milieuschutz is a legal measure that can be taken to keep the neighborhood diverse, to keep landlords from clearing out their renters solely on the grounds that there are now people willing to pay half again as much for the space. Property-rights economists would disapprove of Milieuschutz. But then, how nice is it really, when someone comes along and says, I like your home, I think I will take it away from you, and I can do this because I am richer than you are?)

It is still damp and gray and cold. 

Here is no continuing city, here is no abiding stay.

Ill the wind, ill the time, uncertain the profit, certain the danger.…
Evil the wind, and bitter the sea, and grey the sky, grey grey grey.

**

But the neighborhood, here, now, feels good. Here bulky comfortable old apartment houses hunker down around a park, balconies overlooking the green space. There is a good playground, with a scattering of parents in parkas and very small children giggling on the swings in the dark cold morning. 

And "green space" is not merely a technical, official designation here. Look! The first new leaves are opening in the shrubbery at the edge of the park.

The path along the canal is small and muddy, and busy with bicyclists and young runners and old walkers. (And how we do track in the mud at this season, in spite of the multiple shoe-cleaning mats that separate raw nature and the living room floor.) 

Last year's seedheads fluff out on the vines entangled in the waterside railing, ready for a strong spring wind to take the seeds.

Along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

The alders along the water are in bloom, hung with long catkins.

Alder catkins along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

How things grow here, how leafy it will be here in the summer, how green-smelling ... We aren't there yet, but the sky has gone all blue above the canal:

Wildenbruchstrasse bridge, February 2015. My photo.

This bright weather will not last, but we've been getting a couple of hours of it most days, between the early cloud and the late cloud. Or sometimes a couple of hours at day's end, when persistent clouds clear off. (Look, the evening star!)

It feels like a contention between winter and spring. It feels as if there ought to be an allegorical sculptural representation, The Strife of Winter and Spring, or The Triumph of Spring Over Winter, like those allegorical Baroque sculptures that work so uneasily on our modern tastes: the Triumph of Faith over Heresy (well-clothed female terrorizing old men who are falling back with their clothes flying off them, in the Church of the Gesù), Time Unveiling Truth (old geezer pulling the drapery off a young female, in various versions by minor sculptors for vanished princely gardens), Wisdom Trampling on Vice (slightly clothed female standing on … well, it isn’t quite clear: some shaggy beast, in the park at Tsarskoye Selo).

This kind of sculpture is no longer produced. It doesn't seem so interesting or inspiring nowadays to have our naked physical selves representing abstractions like Prudence or the Nation or Truth. We're perhaps more comfortable with having abstractions represent us. (I remember a fascinatingly 1900-ish fuss when John van Alstine's abstract sculpture, Funambulist, was installed near one of the Michigan State dorms in 2010 or so: there were quaint outcries against modern art, and it was vandalized multiple times, not just out of a casual urge to spray, but out of specific hatred for the sculpture. But the vandalism eased off over time, and a few years later, a student who lived in the dorm said something like: I really hated it at first, but I went past it every day, and it got to be like, This is me, this is how my life feels. I sort of liked seeing it. It's a big intellectual step, after all, to represent the self as something outside the self, something that can be examined at a little distance.)

Perhaps this is the problem with the large allegorical figures on the neo-Baroque Bismarck monument that I often pass on my after-lunch walks in Tiergarten: they aren't ways of stepping outside the self to look critically at it (as, in some ways, the traditional virtue-and-vice figures were--Is that figure of Prudence really me? Or am I Gluttony?). Here on the Bismarck monument we have a heavily clothed female representing the Wisdom of the State, looking into the Book of History; a heavily clothed female representing the Power of the State, trampling down the Leopard of Discord; a considerably less clothed Siegfried-at-the-forge, hammering out the Sword of Empire. (If I had a hammer, I'd hammer in the morning.... An allegorical hammer, that was. It's the hammer of justice, it's the bell of freedom. Or perhaps not, in this case.)

**

There is actually an allegorical Contention of Winter and Spring, but it's an eighth-century pastoral poem, not a Baroque sculpture group.  Winter and Spring debate over whether the cuckoo, the traditional European messenger of spring, should be allowed to come. A group of shepherds with Greek-pastoral-poetry names are to judge the debate. (What is this rather precious, nostalgic, urbanized poetic style doing at the barely literate court of Charlemagne??)

Winter: Let him not come, Cuckoo!  

For toil comes with him and he wakens wars, 

Breaks blessed quiet [armistices in the Ukraine!] and disturbs the world ...  

Spring: And what are you that throw your blame on him? 

That huddle sluggish in your half-lit caves 

After your feasts of Venus, bouts of Bacchus?  

Winter: Riches are mine [more real estate developments!] and joy of revelling,  

And sweet is sleep, the fire on the hearth stone. 

Nothing of these he knows, and does his treasons.  

Spring: Nay, but he brings the flowers in his bright bill, 

And he brings honey, nests are built for him. 

The sea is quiet for his journeying, 

Young ones begotten, and the fields are green.  

Winter: I like not these things which are joy to you. 

I like to count the gold heaped in my chests; 
And feast, and then to sleep, and then to sleep.   

**

Well, "then to sleep" doesn't sound bad, but the spring is coming regardless.     The trees grow regardless, gradually swallowing up the railing along the water.  (Some local wit has painted eyes on one of them to make a face ....)

Trees along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, February 2015. My photo.

The colored houses along the canal swim in the blue water.

Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal, Feburary 2015. My photo.

Blue, blue--even the unloading-cranes are bright blue, as the canal becomes more industrial.

Crane on Ziegrastrasse, February 2015. My photo.

We've been past the power plant, around the sharp angle the water takes, headed toward the Teltowkanal. We're getting into a big junk and recycling stretch: scrap metal places, scrap paper places. Across the street are auto repair joints and a building where your rock band can rent space to practice full volume and do recordings. Then suddenly there is an enormous new hotel, glassy and slant-walled. 

Here we are at the Sonnenallee bridge, which used to be troubled by reckless drivers parking (and unparking) in the free center space between the lanes of fast heavy traffic on each side. What to do? Put little concrete pillars in the center space, so people can't park there .... Yes, but sweeten it a little bit. The pillars are blue and white like a summer sea and have a couple of large figures of swimmers rising above them, in front of the Brillux paint factory.

Sculpture, "Welle," by Eigidius Knops, Sonnenallee bridge, February 2015. My photo.

The Contention of Art and Parking, perhaps.

**

The eighth-century Contention of Winter and Spring ends with the shepherds deciding the debate in favor of spring and the cuckoo, unsurprisingly.

    Have done, have done, Winter, spendthrift and foul,
    And let the shepherd's friend, the cuckoo, come ...
    Green be our grazing, peace in the ploughed fields,
    Green branches give their shadow to tired men.


 And so the green branches will do, later, along the canal. 

Along Neuköllner Schiffahrtskanal. Photo, Andreas Haas, Wiki Commons.

**

The likelihood of getting farther on foot today, among the harbor and highway mess and the industry, is not high.  So, over the bridge to the Sonnenallee S-Bahn station, on a bright Neukölln street ... 

Corner of Sonnenallee and Saalestrasse, February 2015. My photo.

And so, home in the sunshine.

**

"Here is no abiding city ..." is from T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. 
The Strife (or Contention) of Winter and Spring is by Alcuin; the translation is by Helen Waddell.