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.]