Havel 1

The Forest of Lost-Place

My project this summer is walking the Berlin (and nearby) stretches of the river Havel. This is not so simple, because the Havel is a mess. It's hardly a river, it's more a dribble of lakes down the west side of Berlin, with little canals and side-channels splitting off in all directions. A line from upstream point A to downstream point B is sometimes hard even to identify, let alone to follow on foot. We'll just have to go where we can go and see what we find.

A little orientation: on the left-hand side of the water-street map below, there is an approximate water-bounded rectangle labeled "Lkr. [Landkreis, or county] Havelland," enclosed on the north and west by the Havel canal, and on the long east side by the river-and-lake line of the Havel itself. Nearly all of Berlin is on the east side of the Havel: in some places the river is the border between Berlin and Brandenburg and thus, in Cold War days, the border between East and West. (The West is east of the East in this case, in a nicely Alice-in-Wonderland sort of way. It reminds me of an American acquaintance who, as a child, imagined the Berlin Wall not as going around West Berlin but simply going down the middle of the city from north to south. Why, she wondered, did people go to so much trouble and hazard to try to get over it? Why didn't they just walk to one of the ends and go around?)



The county of Havelland, like the county of Oberhavel to the north, is in Brandenburg. The mostly rural state of Brandenburg surrounds the city-state of Berlin like a doughnut around its hole. Some years ago there was a referendum asking for approval to combine the two states into one, but it failed.

City-states aren't such a bad idea. (Germany has three: Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen.) Maybe metropolitan New York and Chicago should be states by themselves?? As it is, sticking New York City onto the unpopulated Adirondacks, or sticking Chicago onto quasi-Southern, catfish-rural downstate Illinois, makes for some strange state politics. (To say nothing of combining the industrial desolations of Detroit with the Siberia-like Upper Peninsula of Michigan.) And of course there are more people in non-states like New York or Chicago than in states like Wyoming or Nevada, just as there are more people in the state of Berlin than there are in the state of Brandenburg.

There are increasingly more people in Berlin than in Brandenburg. The population has been drifting gently up in Berlin and falling, stone-like, in the out-state parts of Brandenburg (how could you say upstate or downstate, in the American fashion, when Brandenburg is all around?). Some of the big out-state towns have lost fifteen, twenty, twenty-five percent of their population in the last fifteen years. In the parts of Brandenburg that are contiguous with Berlin and on the Berlin public transit system, population has risen, but not enough to net out to a positive against the out-state losses.

As rural Brandenburg de-peoples, other creatures move in. North of Berlin, near a canal that runs into the Havel, there is a place named Verlorenort, which means Lost-Place. I learn from the Brandenburg General News (the Märkische Allgemeine Zeitung) of February 28 that Lost-Place was troubled this last winter by a marauding wolf. (This is about thirty miles from the center of Berlin.)

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We are not going to Lost-Place, however, the S-Bahn doesn't go that far. But we might go out into the woods a bit, as we venture along the Havel. No wolves this close to the city, just forest with the sun dazzling on every flat surface where it can dazzle.

Along the Havel in Brandenburg, June 2015. My photo.

I am starting in Hennigsdorf, up in the northeast corner of the Havelland rectangle. Here the Havel canal splits off from the river, the river starts to blob out into lakes, and one of the Berlin S-Bahn lines ends. The first long water-blob south of the canal split is the Nieder-Neuendorfer See, which is the stretch of the river that I mean to see today. (See this link for a more close-up map from Google.)

I don't know exactly what to expect of Hennigsdorf. It should be fairly prosperous: I know there's a technology park along the river, with a big Bombardier establishment. (Bombardier is the Quebec firm that started out with snowmobiles and now makes aircraft--Learjets and such for the corporate market, regional jets for airlines like Delta and Lufthansa--and all sorts of rail equipment. The Hennigsdorf plant is devoted to trains. If you ride the metro in Shanghai or Guanzhou or Munich, or some of the sleek high-speeds across Germany or Scandinavia, you're riding in Hennigsdorf-made products.) 

So the town should be somewhat prosperous, but there are different sorts of prosperity in the Berlin borderlands. Some of the Brandenburg towns on the S-Bahn are chaotically unwalkable agglomerations, linking unattractive new private houses and fast-food joints with a network of extraordinarily bad streets. Other towns are real Speckgürtel (the city's beer-belly, the rich bedroom communities): here are the non-working wives polished like moderately valuable objets d'art, packing the kids into the Mercedes SUV to drive them to their riding lessons or Chinese lessons.

Hennigsdorf seems a mild-mannered kind of place. I'm out on (or slightly over) the edge of my aging map here, and after I'm off the S-Bahn I miss the first turn to the river. Apparently the technology park does not hog the waterside: there is supposed to be a path running behind Bombardier along the river. But I miss the turn, and have instead a surprisingly pleasant walk down the southbound street out of town. Usually streets like this are hellishly loud and trucky, but here trees shelter the pedestrian and bicycle paths from the roar of the street. Thank you, Hennigsdorf: nicely done.

Spandauer Allee, Hennigsdorf, June 2015. My photo.

And here we are at the river, or rather, the Nieder-Neuendorfer See, the Lower New-Town Lake.  This is fine, this is everything that a river on a summer day should be. Blue water, little rocky islands thick with trees; rowboats; deep-laden barges running upriver to the canal network that links to Poland and the Baltic. Occasional benches for a lunch stop.

Nieder-Neuendorfer See (Havel), June 2015. My photo.

On my left the river is running down to Berlin, but on my right the woods are Havelland countryside. Woods first, then fields and villages farther out. I've been out that way a few times--really out of the city, in regional-train or Brandenburg-bus territory. It's trickier organizing a walk out there, because the transit isn't so ubiquitous; but ach, it would be nice to do that again some time. Walking along woodland streams with islands full of forget-me-nots, or through the silver-gilt of the harvested grain-fields in high summer. Red poppies in the field-margins, apples ripening in the orchards. 

German culture tends to believe in the moral-imprinting quality of landscapes like this. Perhaps correctly, I don't know. It's a different notion from just finding the landscape pleasant to look at or being attached to it because it's familiar. One of the German Romatic-era poets says that what we should know about the right way to live and love is a word written on the visible world--specifically, the forest. Es steht im Wald geschrieben, it's written in the woods.

Walking in the forest is thought to be good not just for your cardiovascular system but also for your development as a human being. Our local (Turkish-run) supermarket has a big cardboard tree in the store at this season, on which children are invited to hang their paintings of their "most beautiful forest experience." The soundtrack of old rock music and belligerent ads in the store has been temporarily replaced by recordings of woodland bird-calls. (The need to preserve the local forest was the imperative that overrode local conflicts of interest early in the twentieth century, to lay the foundations for an effective metropolitan government in the Berlin area. The Greater Berlin that was created in 1920, which is still pretty much what the state of Berlin consists of, started out as a group of cities and towns united for forest preservation.) 

The agricultural landscape in Brandenburg and points northeast has a moral resonance in German culture also. There are the Landstrassen with their noble lines of trees:

Road near Kremmen, Brandenburg. Photo by kranich22, Wiki commons. 

There are the grain-fields and flax-fields, with red poppies and blue cornflowers left blooming at the edges:

Edge of a flax field in Brandenburg. Photo by Vater von Oktaeder, Wiki commons.

But what all this might mean is more complicated in the fields than in the forest. This landscape, north and east from Berlin, across Poland, into the Baltics, is the classic landscape of German colonialism (if the word is not too tendentious, and perhaps it is) in eastern Europe. Big grain-growing estates owned by Germans and worked at least partly by non-Germans (serfs until the early nineteenth century); the home territory of the Prussian aristocracy who ran Germany in the later nineteenth century and got a bad rep for arrogant, nationalistic militarism. They also got a good rep for upright, incorruptible, reasonably competent public service.

I've been reading Countess Dönhoff's (entertaining) memoir of her childhood in East Prussia between the World Wars, in a house almost the size of a football field, full of historic furniture and papers and dogs and guns and relatives and refugees. It sounds somewhat like growing up in a big country house in England--the alliance of children and servants against the rest of the world, the passion for horses and hunting, the mix of grandeur and frugality. (The house looked like a little Versailles, but the Dönhoffs always traveled third-class, and the children were not allowed to have both butter and marmalade on their rolls in the morning: they could pick one or the other.)  

As the country-house owners who ran England in the late nineteenth century were romanticized by Trollope, so their Prussian (especially Brandenburg) counterparts were romanticized by Theodor Fontane--with some irony leavening the romantic affection in both cases.

Fontane is a first-rate novelist and a second-rate poet, and generations of German school-children have had to memorize his ballad, Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in Havelland, which gives a kind of golden-glow picture of life in these parts. The von Ribbecks were Schlossherren, lords of the manor, not only in Ribbeck, which is a little west of here, but also for a while in Nieder Neuendorf, which is approximately where we are now, along the Nieder-Neuendorfer See.

Schloss Ribbeck, looked like this in the mid-nineteenth century, and would have been even simpler in the mid-eighteenth-century, the time of the Herr von Ribbeck who appears in Fontane's poem. 

Theodor Hennicke, Schloss Ribbeck, Wiki commons. 

I contemplate with bemusement the scores of videos on German YouTube, showing people reciting Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in Havelland--reciting it as a rap, or with their children, or as fast as they can, or with little characters built of Legos, or in parody versions, or in versions with animated pears, or I have no idea what all. The closest thing I can think of in the US would be The Night Before Christmas.

Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in Havelland, 
Ein Birnbaum in seinem Garten stand.

A pear-tree stood in his garden, says the poem, which Fontane based on a popular tale that may be somewhat true. In times when fruit was a more special and costly thing than it is now, and fruit-stealing was serious delinquency, old von Ribbeck filled his pockets with pears from the Schloss-garden tree in the autumn and handed them out to the village children. (Whom he addresses in the Plattdeutsch dialect that stops me in my tracks when I read Fontane. I have a horrible time reading Platt.)  

The old man was under no illusions about his son, who was grasping and stingy and would never hand out anything. The old man was also not about to be done down by such a piker of an heir. When he came to die, he asked that one of the pears from the Schloss-garden tree be laid in the grave with him. It was, and from his grave grew a fine pear-tree in the entirely public churchyard, from which all the children in the village could eat as they liked. 

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It's all lost-place now, all that Prussian agricultural world. Most of it was east of what is now the Polish border; East Prussia is now part of Russia. These regions were ethnically cleansed of Germans after World War II, sending some twelve million refugees flooding into the unhoused and hungry world of postwar Germany. Managing this flood-tide without absolute mayhem is something for which the country gets too little credit. These days, when the country is far more prosperous, people are panicking about taking in some hundreds of thousands of refugees. And to be sure, the present refugees are more foreign, less easily assimilable; but it's easy to forget that some of the Volksdeutsch in the 1940s were pretty odd lots: people who could barely speak the language and didn't fit in well. 

Others did much better, of course. At the beginning of 1945 a young Marion Dönhoff got on her horse in East Prussia and rode west for seven weeks in the dead of winter, with the Russian army behind. (It wasn't that it took all seven weeks to get out of reach of the Russians, but she had to find a safe place for the horse, which meant reaching someone she knew over on the far side of Germany who could house and protect the horse. What kind of person would you be if you weren't loyal to your horse?) She became a leading public figure in postwar Germany, as a journalist, editor and later co-publisher of that highly respectable weekly, Die Zeit. (I thought Die Zeit was boring when she ran it and became less so later, but maybe this is just me. The paper kept her name on the masthead long after she was dead.)

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Schloss Ribbeck is still there; this is the rather overbearing and un-cozy new version created in the 1890s. Fontane, who wrote the poem, may never have seen this one; it was finished just a few years before he died. 

Schloss Ribbeck. Photo by A. Savin, Wiki Commons.

The World-War-II-vintage von Ribbeck, who was a dedicated monarchist with no use for the upstart Hitler and no notion of concealing his opinions, died in a concentration camp. The German military had been occupying the Schloss during the war; the remains of the family seem to have moved back in briefly afterward, but they were thrown out finally by the Soviet occupying power in 1947 and made their way west. The Schloss was turned into a nursing home by the local government.

After reunification the von Ribbecks came back and made a claim on the property. This was one of the many, many sticky questions about property in eastern Germany that arose in the 1990s. Under the terms of the German reunification agreement, property that had been seized by the Nazis was supposed to go back to the heirs of the former owners, but property that had been seized by the Soviet occupying forces was not: it was to remain state property. (This was one of the conditions insisted on by the Soviet Union in the negotiations about glueing the two Germanies back together again.) So one might ask: if the von Ribbecks had lost the Schloss once to the Nazis and once to the Soviets, which time counted? 

There was a negotiated settlement; the nearby town of Nauen kept the Schloss and the von Ribbecks got some compensation. Some of them have moved back to Ribbeck (smaller houses this time), renovated the old distillery, and set up a business with on-site and online sales of their pear brandies and vinegars--and a book of poetry that includes Herr von Ribbeck auf Ribbeck in Havelland. 

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The von Ribbeck about whom the ballad-story was told died in 1759; and there was in fact a fine pear tree growing from the Ribbeck family grave plot all through the nineteenth century. A storm--one of these ferocious storms that comes scouring across from the North Sea in the winter--took the old tree out in 1911. Almost the last of the good years before the twentieth century comes crashing down on central Europe.

A replacement for the Ribbeck pear tree was planted in East German days, in the 1970s, but it never yielded well. (Let us not get too symbolic about this.) A new one was planted in 2000; I'm not sure how well it's doing. 

The Schloss was tidied up by the city about half a dozen years ago and was changed from a nursing home to a museum devoted to Theodor Fontane. I'm not sure what Fontane would have thought about that. 

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Ribbeck is now an administrative unit of the town of Nauen, which--being on the regional-commuter line with its old red double-decker trains--is partly a bedroom community for Berlin. One of Archangel's young assistants and her significant other are competing anxiously for the lease of a house in Nauen. 

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I keep heading south along the river/lake:

Nieder-Neuendorfer See, June 2015. My photo.

At some point I need to get back to transit. The efficient thing would be not to go round by the road to the nearest bus line but to cut straight through the woods. How well is this going to work? I ought to download a compass app on my mobile phone, and I haven't done it yet. But this really ought to be quite straightforward. In some places, where the broadleaf woods are open and grassy, someone has mown a path:

In the woods near the Havel, June 2015. My photo.

In some places you can't really get off-track because the forest is so dense beside the path. The pines have been planted in tight military rows to do their duty and hold down the heaving, blowing sand of Brandenburg. (The tops of the trees have needles, but all the bottom branches are bare because the trees are planted so close.)

Woods near the Havel, June 2015. My photo

In other places the dunes have been left to their dune-existence, without being pinned down by trees:

Near the Havel, June 2015. My photo.

Let us just proceed west across this little sandpile, and hope the path picks up on the other side.

Yes, it does ... and then it forks off in odd directions that do not correspond so obviously to the map. Still, I have a feeling that this branch is what will take me to the bus stop, even though it does not start off in the right direction.

And here we are, perfect landfall.

Bus stop in the woods, June 2015. My photo.

I am pleased with my navigation skills, or luck, but I really ought to get that compass.

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Archangel's assistant and her young man got their house in Nauen. They're very pleased. They grew up in villages outside Dresden, maybe a dozen kilometers apart; they were happy there, and I suspect that they see Nauen as a place where their children can grow up much as they did themselves. 

It won't happen; people always grow up differently from their parents. Our parents' world is always Lost-Place. But good luck to them.