Dahme 2

Forest, River, Streetcar

It's a gray morning in a slow spring, a few days after Easter. Some cold weeks in March stalled the season, and then there was the big storm Niklas and its sodden, occasionally snowy, aftershocks. 

The shrubbery in center city is greening up, but here--on the way from the Grünau S-Bahn station to the river--the woods still look wintry, and often the only green thing visible is the moss on fallen logs.

Near Grünau S-Bahn. My photo, April 2015.

It isn't far to the river, which looks a little bleak here, heading up deeper into these not-yet-woken woods. 

Dahme, looking upriver in Grünau.  My photo, April 2015

The Dahme is big here, and it has a big voice, unlike the near-silent canals where I have been walking in the winter. The river is wide enough to be choppy on a morning like this, and the water makes heavy lop ... lop ... sounds against the bank. And hisss and slorpp and other surprisingly warm and mammalian noises.

I am not the only walker bound upriver. A couple of tottery old dears with tiny backpacks got off just ahead of me at the Grünau station, took the shortcut ahead of me through the trees to the water, and now they're turning south, up the Dahme. They are so ancient and wobbly-looking, I keep thinking I'm going to catch up and pass them. And I do, after about an hour; they're faster than they look.

As the tottery old dears and I march south, the river fills with rowers. The principle on which this stretch of Grünau is established is the one laid down by Water Rat early in The Wind in the Willows:  "Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing--absolutely nothing--half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats."

The house where we meet the river, which has an immense vine-tracery on it, is a Bootsattlerei, a boat-saddlery, that makes canopies and tarps and awnings and seat covers for the boats here in boat-land. 

Bootsattlerei on the Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Many of the houses that follow, along Regattastrasse, are clubhouses for sailing clubs and rowing clubs, kayaking and canoeing clubs, clubs that promote Wasserwandern--"water hiking," boating along the endless back-country waterways of this flat wet northern world. 

The houses have a spacious, 1900-ish feel to them. (The Wind in the Willows came out in 1908, the year Kenneth Grahame left his job as Secretary of the Bank of England. He had started the book some years before, not long after an unsettling incident at the bank. A person referred to in the newspapers as a "socialist lunatic" had come into the bank and offered him a rolled-up manuscript, tied with a white ribbon at one end and a black ribbon at the other. The lunatic asked Grahame to pick one end; Grahame picked the black, and the other pulled a gun out of the manuscript roll and shot at Grahame three times, at close range, without managing to hit him. --This not the great age of specialist competence in Britain: amateur central bankers, amateur assassins.) 

Here's the house of the Academic Rowing Association, the first of the clubs to establish itself out here in Grünau, in 1902. (In English if you're an academic it usually means you're a professor, but in Germany it means you have a university degree; you're a person certified as having some clearly defined semi-abstract expertise, you're not an amateur. Not like England in 1900 or so, where having been to a university meant you were a cultivated gentleman, with better manners than to display semi-abstract expertise in public.)

Akademischer Ruderverein, Regattastrasse, Grünau. My photo, April 2015. 

The Academic Rowing Association (which perhaps would not have liked to describe its activities as "messing about in boats") split in two, like so many things, during the Cold War, with the eastern half here and the western half somewhere out along the Havel, on the other side of Berlin. And like so many things, it has been glued back together again in some fashion since the 1990s.

Along the street are posters for a water-sport-fest that will happen here early next month. The poster, like the houses, evokes the 1900-ish world (ah, people want to erase the twentieth century, put it out of mind like a bad dream ... but if we go back to 1902, do we have to do it all over again?).

Poster for Wassersportfest along Regattastrasse. My photo, April 2015.

Regattastrasse shrinks into Sportpromenade, which shrinks into a sort of bicycle path. (It appears on the map as a regular street for a long way, but beyond a certain point it's blessedly closed to cars.) The boathouses have come to an end, we're on the river--or perhaps on the Long Lake by now--the shoreline is beautifully open, and the day is getting finer:

Dahme, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

The water is on my left. On my right, where the grayness of the early day still lingers, is the streetcar line and a hefty stretch of the Berlin City Forest.

Along tramline 68, Grünau. My photo, April 2015.

Okay, so this is not exactly the wilderness here. Ding, ding, ding goes the trolley, the 68 tram, covered with ads for a discount grocery and going too fast for a clear shot:

Tram 68, along Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I do love the 68 tram, everyone loves the 68 tram--though there is some public debate about whether this or the 61, along the north shore of the Müggelsee, is the "most beautiful tramline in Berlin."  (Do I remember any public discussions about which is the most beautiful public transit line in Denver or Chicago? Nah, and this is not just memory failure on my part. Though there were things to be said for the 147, in Chicago, or even for the Jeffery Express when it was not packed with bodies in such a third-world way that you couldn't see out the windows to the lake.) 

In one place a little further up, before we get too deep among the trees, some praiseworthy citizen has planted pansies along the tracks. (It's pansy-planting season just now; all the florists have pansy-flats piled by their doors.)

Little thought-flowers. And there is pansies, says Ophelia, that's for thoughts. Pansy/ pensée. Very small blobs of thought along the streetcar line. Usually I bring something philosophical to read on the public transit, Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, but today it's just Die Zeit, with an article about the difficulties of creating an efficient mechanical asparagus harvester.

Along the 68 line, Grünau.  My photo, April 2015.

The German name for pansy is Stiefmütterchen, little step-mother. The flashy lower petals, the stepmother and her daughters, shoulder in front of the more simply dressed upper petals, the stepdaughters. (My mother explained this to me when I was small. We were on the side of the slighted stepdaughters.) 

The bike path--the old street--keeps fairly close to the tramline here, but if you're not in a rush you can veer off on little footpaths through the trees, even closer to the water. The last time I was out here, summers and summers ago, it was a hot weekend day, and every little cove was full of picnickers and swimmers, with their bicycles stacked against the trees. There are a couple of official swimming beaches along here, and a few reed patches that are fenced off to encourage them to regenerate themselves. But mostly it's open woods and innumerable little sandy coves where you can dangle your feet in the water and pick up Spree-mussel shells. (I kept one of the shells on the kitchen counter in Michigan for years, as sort of a talisman, a reminder or a hope that it would be possible to come back to this stretch of the river. The shell still sits on the kitchen counter here, by the espresso machine, and it still makes me happy to see it, evening after evening, as we do our after-dinner cleanup.)

It's not fast progress through the woods: the track is full of rocks and roots and sinkholes, and occasionally it veers out so directly onto the river's edge that the water has eaten away the edge of the path (ah, but here is a convenient tree limb to hang onto, for those of us who do not balance so well on narrow footways as we did years ago). The tottery old dears are mostly sticking to the bike path.


It's getting on for lunchtime, and I did pick up a sandwich at the Grünau station. Actually not a sandwich, as the rather dour woman behind the counter corrected me: not a belegtes Brot but a Laugeneck, a lye corner.... Where was it--in which German airport?--where I saw a sign on the pretzel stand advertising "lye pretzels"? This frank translation of Laugenbrezel might have put off the English-speaking customers. But in fact that distinctive smooth brown finish on German pretzels does come from dipping the formed pretzel into a lye solution before baking. (Anything with a very high pH will do the job; home bakers tend to use soda water, but it's less effective.) You can do the lye dip with regular rolls as well as with pretzels, and this particular bake-shop had a fine array of triangular, very dark-brown, pretzel-finish rolls stuffed with things like cucumber and salami, or tomato and gouda. 

So I keep an eye out for a cove with a good stone or fallen log in it, where I could sit and have my lunch. And here is one with a couple of nice logs ... a little awkward because there is no footing on the other side of the logs, just a steep pitch down to the water; but the main log is wedged well in place and isn't going to roll me suddenly into the river.

I open my little paper sandwich bag, and ... ach du meine, the rustling of paper is like ringing a dinner bell in the woods. Suddenly I have friends, looking for their share of the crumbs. A coot hurries across the water to my cove, bobbling its head at double speed; a pair of mallards circle behind him, and a crow hops up aggressively to my log. 

One of the few things that have made me feel alien in Berlin is that I don't know the native flora and fauna very well. My parents taught me animal and plant and mineral names at about the time they taught me not to walk in front of cars or fall in deep water, and here it simply feels bizarre to be a responsible adult in other respects and yet not to be able to recognize a common bird or streetside weed. It's like losing part of your speech, your ability to connect things and words.

I am learning, however. I know that the crow is a Nebelkrähe, a fog-crow (one of the gray-backed birds that swagger around the city like gangsters: hooded crow is the English name). I know that the little sparrow-size birds with yellow breasts and blue-black caps that whistle along the street behind our apartment house are Kohlmeisen ...  Let's see, what is this species called in English? We don't have them in America, but they're so ubiquitous on this side of the Atlantic, there must be an English name. Ah yes, the great tit. (Surely this wouldn't be a usable name in the US? Do even the British say, We have great tits in the back yard?)

Here is Herr Fog-crow (or possibly Frau Fog-Crow, as they look very much alike):

Hooded crow on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Deeper in the city there are signs along the waterways saying not to feed bread to the birds, it isn't good for them, so I don't feel too guilty about scarfing almost all of my sandwich. Sorry, my lye-corner. But the general air of anticipation around me is so intense, I do toss the last bit out. A coot gets it, the crow stamps and flaps and curses--and there are immediately more coots, conjured up from nothing by a tossed bread-crumb.

Coots on the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

I had never seen coots until we moved here, but I recognized them immediately. (At least with them I could still attach words to things.) I learned to read, when I was about three, from a book of very bad reproductions of Audubon's Birds of America, which my mother had won as a door-prize at some in-law's bridal shower. (I persecuted people to read me the names under the the pictures until I knew a lot of the names by heart, and at some point the print started turning into recognizable words on its own.) 

It's a great moment when you learn to read, it changes your life completely to have access to print. Even if the first printed words that make sense to you are Common Loon. 

The book started with water birds: common loon, American coot, pied-billed grebe, crested grebe--which I had about as much chance of seeing, in the high plains, as of seeing an emu. But the names and pictures did imprint themselves on my mind, and so I knew a coot in a moment when I finally saw one, sixty years later.

**

It's time to move on after lunch--the sun is really out now, the woods are bathed in light in this leafless season, and the pines start to give out a resiny fragrance in the infant heat of April. Shine out, fair sun, with all your heat./ Show all your thousand-colored light!  

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

This is a new season. I've hardly seen freight traffic on the waters all winter, but now here is a big barge flying a Polish flag, on its way up from the Oder-Spree canal through the Long Lake (which we are on by now) and westward to who knows where. 

Here would have been a more adventurous place to have lunch, out on the tree trunk ... But no, maybe I'm too old for this one.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

On we go through the lovely woods. Here is a little projecting corner of land, where the lake turns ... and this took a hit in the Niklas storm, I see. Two tall young pines are recently down, snapped off raggedly a dozen feet off the ground; the top of one is broken off and lodged halfway up in another tree. 

We must be getting closer to residential areas again; there is a civilized custom of putting benches in places where people might reasonably want to sit down.

Along the Dahme. My photo, April 2015.

Ah yes, here we come back closer to the streetcar tracks again, and then out of the woods and into Karolinenhof. Some farmer established a household--a Hof--here in the eighteenth century and named it for his wife Karoline. A hundred years later it was turned into lots for biggish houses, and there's obviously been more building down here recently.

Village pond, Karolinenhof. My photo, April 2015.

It's sleepy and suburban here; people haven't taken in the eggs from their Easter egg trees yet.

Easter egg tree, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Our Hausmeister has taken in the Easter eggs from our trees already, though I saw yesterday that he had forgotten a red one out by the stone seat where teenage couples meet for very serious private discussions, in the depths of the shrubbery in front of the house. 

The earliest-blooming fruit trees (what are these? I've lost my language again) have been bursting out in our neighborhood up on the Spree in the last few days, and they are bursting out here too.

In Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

Shall I walk on into central Schmöckwitz? No, perhaps save that for next time. 

The streetcar stop in the middle of Karolinenhof is just on the other side of the fence from a playground, where the shed in back has been brightly painted with flora and fauna.  

At the streetcar stop, Karolinenhof.  My photo, April 2015.

The style isn't exactly J. J. Audubon, but the picture is recognizable. That's a crested grebe, that is. 

**

Material on Kenneth Grahame is from an article in The Telegraph: 
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/donotmigrate/3671092/Kenneth-Grahame-Lost-in-the-wild-wood.html

Shine out, fair sun ... is from the Masque of the Twelve Months (1619), possibly by George Chapman; it provides the text of the opening to Britten's Spring Symphony.

Dahme 1

 On the Way to the Long Lake

What a tangle of waters this is in the southeast corner of the city, with lakes and rivers and canals, and old river-arms that no longer join their rivers, all losing themselves deep in the woods (which I hope I will not do myself). We need a map here.

Orientation time: green on the map means forest, grayish means built-up areas. The heavy broken line is the boundary between Berlin and Brandenburg. The Spree (see posts from last summer) runs from Erkner on the right-hand side of the map through the little Dämeritzsee, along the south edge of Rahnsdorf, through the Grosser Müggelsee, and on westward through Berlin. The Dahme comes up from the south, through Grünau and Adlershof, joining the Spree at Köpenick.

Spree, Dahme, and lakes. Map by Felix Hahn, Wiki commons. 

The stretch of the Dahme below the Müggelsee is also called the Long Lake, the Langer See. The Long Lake goes down as far as Schmöckwitz; the river runs on through the next north-south lake, the Zeuthener See (which looks entirely separate from other lakes on the map, but isn't). South of the Zeuthener See the Dahme keeps going, as a more modest little river, but still navigable. How far it is walkable for the unambitious hiker, we will see.

The mouth of the Dahme is familiar territory, from the Spree walk last summer: I take trains through the old Schöneweide industrial district (big electrical-industry establishments here in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; see Spree 7 post, June 2014) to Spindlersfeld and Köpenick (chemical works and vast commercial laundries; see Spree 8 post, July 2014). 

The last train runs east along a little tail stuck onto the Ringbahn long ago to carry workers out to the factories in Schöneweide and Spindlersfeld. Spindlersfeld is the end of the line, and the cars have pretty well emptied out by the time I get on. The old factories here are closed and either disintegrating or turned into apartments and shops; the train decants only a handful of people at the end of the line, in the gray March day.

There used to be a branch railroad, a freight line, that went direct to the Spindler works; but most of it was pulled up long ago, and the branch line ends in a patch of grass behind someone's house.

Branch railway to Spindler works. Photo, Christian Liebscher, Wiki Commons. 

Cold morning in the old East, in yellow-streetcar-world. (No streetcars in the old West, to speak of.) The new trams are sleek and long and low, but the old ones are short and fat and high-riding, looking like little blimps on rollerblades. You don't see the old ones in center city any more, but out here we drift into the past a bit.

It isn't far from here to the Dahme, maybe half a dozen streets.

**

The street signs in Berlin sometimes have little extra labels above the street name, to identify the person for whom the street is named. Physicist. Mayor. Poet. Entrepreneur. Here near the Spindlersfeld station, the label on a number of streets is Widerstandskämpfer. Resistance fighter.

We're in the Köpenick sub-district here, which used to be home to the people who worked in the chemical and electric works in Spindlersfeld and Schöneweide, and of course in the Köpenick laundries. It was a home of left-wing union activism and (sometimes armed) opposition to the Nazis, who made a serious attempt to root it out in early summer of 1933. Opposition parties had just been banned and labor unions dissolved; and one morning near the end of June, storm troopers headed for Köpenick, concealed in (what else would be inconspicuous in Köpenick?) laundry vans.

They picked up about two hundred people: union activists, opposition politicians, a (Jewish) company manager. In the course of what is called the Köpenick blood-week they tortured people (in back rooms of restaurants, in the pleasant boathouses along the Dahme). Some they let go afterward, to spread terror in the neighborhood; some they hanged (in the woods, in their own homes). Some were tied up in sacks and left to die deep in the woods (think of all that green on the map), or were thrown into the Dahme, where the bodies tended to drift to the Grünau ferry pier. (Why this semi-ritual urge to throw enemies into the water--as if to purify the land? Think of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, murdered in 1919 by the right-wing paramilitary, bodies thrown into the water to drift to shore in mid-city.)

Many people were never accounted for. Estimates of the numbers of the dead in the Köpenick blood-week range from twenty-five to ninety. Probably some bodies were never found, in the deep waters and the deep woods; probably some people fled and were lost in the turmoil of the years that followed. 

The pastor of the Köpenick Schlosskirche (the palace church) and his wife hid some of the people the storm troopers were hunting for. Later, when it was needed, they hid Jews. The congregation belonged to what is called the confessing church, the protestant-religious opposition to the Nazis.

I realized, here, that I had always imagined the confessing congregations as being in the stern, mighty-fortress sorts of churches that one sees here and there around Berlin. But of course they were as likely to be in baroque creampuffs like the Schlosskirche in Köpenick, which sits on the half-island in the Dahme near the junction with the Spree.

Schlosskirche, Köpenick. Photo, Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki commons.

**

From the Spindlersfeld station it's a little walk to the river, past a rather forbidding building that turns out to be the Alexander-von-Humboldt School, designed by Bruno Taut's brother Max in the hopeful days of the late 1920s. (Hitler went after the artists even before he went after opposition politicians; the Tauts and their friends lost their jobs already in the early months of 1933, but they kept their lives, at least for a while [see Teltowkanal 7 post, February 2015].) 

Alexander von Humboldt Schule, Oberspreestrasse. Photo, Mazbin, Wiki Commons.

A little way past the school and we're at the Long Bridge, which crosses the Dahme right by the Schloss and has been there in various forms since the Middle Ages. A document from 1424 mentions the Köpenick bridges as being in bad condition. (Ah, Berlin! Everything changes, and some things don't.) 

The Long Bridge has been surprisingly durable, however. It was still a wooden structure in 1813, when Napoleon's army was backing out of northeastern Europe, trying to keep ahead of pursuing Russians and their allies. The French meant to burn the Long Bridge behind them. But in those days of simpler technology, how would you make sure that the whole bridge--which is moderately solid and in this climate probably damp--really burns? Just lighting a match isn't going to do the job. 

Long Bridge over the Dahme, old city and corner of Schloss, Köpenick.  
Photo, Lotse, Wiki Commons.

The French got dry hay from the neighboring fields and made balls of it that could be packed on the bridge and lit the next day, when all the troops were across. (Note to the non-agricultural: dry hay is terrifically flammable stuff.) The Köpenickers sneaked in during the night and soaked the hay-balls with water from the Dahme. The French didn't have time to start the bridge-burning project from scratch again the next day, so the Long Bridge survived.

By the time of World War II the wooden bridge had been replaced by a stone version, overburdened with traffic, with an extension that was supposed to be temporary until the city had time and money to do a proper renovation. The time and money had (unsurprisingly) not come along yet by April of 1945, when the Russians were (again) advancing on Berlin. A group of German soldiers with a small artillery piece took over the grounds of the church's parish house, near the river junction. The idea was to hold up the Russians by blowing up the Long Bridge and as many Russians as possible in the process, forcing some kind of fight in Köpenick that would probably destroy the city.

The pastor's wife, the one who hid the Communists and hid the Jews, went to the gun crew and persuaded them not to blow the bridge. Let them through, she said. Let the city live. 

If the gun crew had done their duty as prescribed, they would have shot her for spreading defeatism and aiding the enemy. In principle, if they didn't, some higher military authority could have come along and shot them for not doing their duty. But the odds of this were not so high in the fantastic chaos of the war's end. So no one shot anyone, the gun crew did not blow the bridge, the Russians passed through, and there is a little memorial tablet to the pastor's wife on the Long Bridge, honoring her for saving the old city. [source: http://www.gedenktafeln-in-berlin.de/uploads/tx_tafeln//Alide_Ratsch_
Berliner_Woche_Koepenick_21.12.2011.pdf]

Now the bridge is in the normal over-trafficked, in-need-of-renovation state, with an auxiliary bridge beside it. The auxiliary was supposed to have been used only until some date now several years past, by which time the main bridge would have been renovated. But it hasn't been, and by now the auxiliary bridge needs renovation, and it's all still on the city's construction calendar, somewhere.

By the bridge, in the sharp light-gray spring morning, rowing crews are setting out for a few hours' practice on the Dahme.

**

The Dahme is a handsome sheet of water, a big solid generous river in this stretch. It is not very pedestrian-accessible, however. I trudge down Grünauer Strasse in a rather cranky state of mind. Past hotels with private boat tie-ups, past stretches of new housing with private gardens on the water, behind high walls. Past things that really have no business on the river at all: parking lots, auto repair places, house painters' establishments, all with high walls. As if in frustration at lack of opportunities, my camera battery suddenly declares itself dead.

Of course some of what blocks the waterside does have business there. The boat-repair places, the boat rental places, the sailing schools. Up ahead I see something called the Ahab Academy, which for a moment I think is a slightly warped sailing school--let's go hunting white whales in the Spree! (But actually it's a place that teaches people to be aerobics instructors and fitness-center managers and the like.) 

I walked this stretch of the river on a hot summer day several years ago and found it dreary, but on a fresh edge-of-spring morning it has its pleasures.  Here is a little patch of Kleingärten on the water, with forsythia coming into bloom. You can see through the gardens to the broad gray river and an island with more Kleingärten, where people have been taking their garden tools and bedding plants and what-have-you across in rowboats. And of course you have to row your coffee and cake across too, but think how pleasant, on a summer afternoon, to drink your coffee under your little apple tree on your little island, with the sailboats scudding past.

Then here we are at a familiar spot, by the hulking cement works where the Teltowkanal comes into the river [see Teltowkanal 8 post, February 2015]. But good heavens, it looks different, a month later in the season. No, it is not warm, and no, the sun is not shining--but in February, all you could see from the bridge here was the river and a bit of southern Köpenick on the other side. And now the winter mists have lifted, and look, over to the east, there are the mountains! 

 Well, to be exact, there are the Müggelberge, which are what we have by way of mountains within the Berlin city limits ("the Berlin Alps," as Archangel's cousin calls them). Three hundred feet high! But really, in this table-flat landscape, they do look like something, heaving themselves up in the woods on the far side of the Dahme. 

Beyond the Teltowkanal things get more suburban. The street is called Regattastrasse now; the streetscape has the feel of late-nineteenth-century villa-land. No more cement works. There are boathouses and big solid old apartment blocks with tall trees beside them. Somewhere a little further along is the so-called Regatta-stretch, the part of the river where they run the boat-races in summer. There's a boat-storage place on the inland side of the street, where a couple of small cabin cruisers are just being hauled out for the spring. There's a street called Wassersportallee, with a ferry across the Dahme at the end of it. A couple of streets back from the river is a neo-this-and-that church, from around the turn of the last century, splodging together various medieval styles:

Friedenskirche, Grünau.  Photo, Cnbnsr, Wiki commons. 

 I turn the other way from the ferry, headed back to the S-Bahn ... and look! On the south side of the street the forest begins. The tremendous forest that will go on and on, with only a few patchy interruptions between here and the Saxon border. 

In the center of Berlin, which is warm with the breath of the city and the reflections off a thousand south-facing walls, the leaves are starting to come out. In another week perhaps the woods will be greening too.

[Later note: no, in another week the woods would be sodden with storm mess: Hurricane Niklas came through last Tuesday. Driving snow, wrecked trains, wrecked cars. (The Berlin news media advised, Don't park your car near a tree. Hello, there's nowhere in Berlin that is not near a tree. But then most of us don't have cars, so perhaps it's a moot point.) ... How loud a storm like this is: the trees roar, the highrise creaks, the wind screams in the ventilation shaft and bangs on the walls at a remarkable decibel level. Tuesday night I thought-- Can we sleep with this racket going on? Oh, yeah: like the proverbial logs. It rained and blew until about Friday, but we are emerging.]