Summer. We go to bed in the sunlight and get up in the sunlight. The kitchen smells of ripening peaches, and the basil on the windowsill grows almost faster than we can harvest it. Tourists wobble erratically through the Tiergarten on bicycles they are not used to, and green reflections drown in the waters everywhere, layers deep.
The temperature alternates between subarctic and blast-furnace. One week it is so cold that I deeply regret not having put on gloves when I walk into the next neighborhood for morning coffee with friends. (When the waiter asks what we would like to have, I say, An espresso, please; and the Peruvian woman next to me, sad and shivering, says, A coat.) The next week it is in the nineties (F.) for days on end (no joke in a world without air conditioning). In the evening, in the late light, the tables under the trees at our neighborhood Italiener are full of people battling dehydration with the aid of very tall beers. Even our neighborhood wine-merchant is sitting behind a very tall beer. (This is a German usage that still seems strange to me: an Italian restaurant is just called "an Italian," ein Italiener, in casual speech; a French restaurant is called "a French," and so on.)
And the next week it is cold again, with terrific winds coming down from the Baltic: winds you could lean on and they would hold you up like a wall, winds that make a woman-against-nature struggle out of that daily German household task, opening the windows to let the damp out of the bathroom. (No vent fans here.) How can you keep the casement open when it's blowing force nine on the Beaufort scale? ... Of course, if it's blowing force nine on the Beaufort scale, then it doesn't take long to clear out the damp.
**
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| Swan on the Aalemannkanal, Berlin-Spandau, June 2015. My photo. |
The temperature alternates between subarctic and blast-furnace. One week it is so cold that I deeply regret not having put on gloves when I walk into the next neighborhood for morning coffee with friends. (When the waiter asks what we would like to have, I say, An espresso, please; and the Peruvian woman next to me, sad and shivering, says, A coat.) The next week it is in the nineties (F.) for days on end (no joke in a world without air conditioning). In the evening, in the late light, the tables under the trees at our neighborhood Italiener are full of people battling dehydration with the aid of very tall beers. Even our neighborhood wine-merchant is sitting behind a very tall beer. (This is a German usage that still seems strange to me: an Italian restaurant is just called "an Italian," ein Italiener, in casual speech; a French restaurant is called "a French," and so on.)
And the next week it is cold again, with terrific winds coming down from the Baltic: winds you could lean on and they would hold you up like a wall, winds that make a woman-against-nature struggle out of that daily German household task, opening the windows to let the damp out of the bathroom. (No vent fans here.) How can you keep the casement open when it's blowing force nine on the Beaufort scale? ... Of course, if it's blowing force nine on the Beaufort scale, then it doesn't take long to clear out the damp.
**
One not-too-hot day I pick up where I left off last along the Havel and spend some time working my way around the bays and canals that stick out in all directions from the river here. The canals along this stretch don't connect to other water-streets; they're just dead-ends some hundreds of meters long. These were the river's freeway exits and loading bays, for industry that has mostly vanished. Sometimes where my old map shows a long trudge around one of these riverine off-ramps, a fine new pedestrian and bicycle bridge has appeared that takes a straight shot across the water.
More people live up in this part of the city now than did fifteen or so years ago, and the new footbridges are part of the general improvement program up here (which has had its ups and downs, like most Berlin improvement programs). Also, the path along this stretch of the Havel coincides with the big bike route from Copenhagen down through Germany to Austria, and the new bridges are good for the long-distance travelers who spin by at this season, with saddlebags full and waterproofed maps clipped to their handlebars.
Pedestrians have the right-of-way, says the sign; bicycles are permitted.
**
Last time we made it (just) over the Brandenburg border, back into Berlin; so we are now, and will be for some time, in the Berlin district of Spandau. This is a tall thin district that takes up most of the western edge of Berlin, with the old city of Spandau--older than Berlin proper, and bigger than Berlin in early days-- approximately in the middle of the district. We haven't got as far as Spandau city yet; we're in the northernmost sub-district, Hakenfelde. Two-thirds of Hakenfelde is taken up by the Spandauer Forest, which is one of the biggest and most biodiverse stretches of woods in Berlin.
There are supposed to be 240 species of mushrooms in the forest here, for example. Do these Berlin-orange tree-fungi count as mushrooms, I wonder? (Orange is all over Berlin, it's the color of the city sanitation department. As the department is big on recycling and sustainability, its slogan, appearing on the orange garbage trucks, orange street-side bins, etc., is, "Only orange is so green.")
Do other cities' garbage collection services have their own PR campaigns with slogans, I ask myself?? Did Chicago Streets and San have a slogan when we lived there? Nah, I think not. They certainly didn't paint little semi-clever remarks on the public trashcans. The one by our Bellevue S-Bahn stop was repainted at the beginning of the summer; it used to say something about dog droppings, but now it says Picobellevue. (This is a play on the German expression picobello, which means immaculately in order--or, to use another native German expression, tipptopp.)
Somewhere along here, in these open woods, I see a wild-strawberry patch--which would certainly be tipptopp at the right time of year. I investigate; but the fruit is only just setting, it's a long way from ripe.
Somewhere, also, I hear a cuckoo calling ... Oh I went to the flowing spring where the water's so good, And I heard there the cuckoo as she called from the wood, says an Austrian folk-song. When my brother and I were children we used to sing it in the back seat of the car, out in the Colorado semi-desert where there were neither flowing springs nor cuckoos nor woods.
**
Along with the three-thousand-plus acres of forest in Hakenfelde, there used to be a big coal-fired power plant and some heavy manufacturing. These were outliers of the big weapons-manufacturing cluster in Spandau city that supplied the German forces in the World Wars. (My brother and I used to play World War II on the living room floor on rainy days in the 1950s. He got to be the Americans and win; I had to be the Japanese and lose. Once when our forces were evenly matched for too long he raised the question of bringing in the Germans, but we were not sure which side they were supposed to be on.)
**
Spandau's history is military. Even a child would look at the location and say, "Hey, let's build a fort here!" Near where the Spree enters the Havel, a little northeast of Spandau city, there is a fortifiable piece of rock in the water, and it was fortified and defended for a thousand years or more, with varying degrees of success.
Spandau was all about the military. Berlin itself, before the late nineteenth century, was hardly more than a garrison town--a military post with a few civilian amenities clinging to it like fleas to a dog, and not always getting much more respect.
It's easy to forget, or not to know, how intensely military central Europe was until quite recently: how dominant the noble-officer class was, how intensely its espoused values (authority, class, duty, hierarchy) permeated society. Vienna had more pretensions than Berlin as a civilized capital, but even Vienna still had more the flavor of an early-modern armed camp than any western European capital did. Military honor was the starch that stiffened social customs and gave them their local shape.
I think the first piece of fiction that I ever read in German (with ill-educated astonishment) was Schnitzler's novella Leutnant Gustl, which appeared in Vienna in 1900. It drops you into a consciousness that would hardly have existed in England at the time, and is not possible to imagine in America. The young lieutenant in the story, in the crush around a concert-hall checkroom, allows himself to be jostled and then called "stupid boy" by the neighborhood baker. He should have drawn his saber to compel an apology (did English-speakers take their sabers to concerts in 1900? No), or he should have knocked the man down or ... But somehow in the confusion of the moment it doesn't happen, and he finds himself out on the street with the departing crowd.
Because he has allowed himself to be publicly insulted by a man of lower standing, the lieutenant's duty under the code of honor is to kill himself. And he intends to do it the next morning, after a night of wandering through Vienna saying goodbye to the agreeable things of life. But on his way home in the morning to get his revolver to blow his brains out (apparently one does not take revolvers to concert-halls) he stops at his usual cafe, where the waiter tells him the neighborhood news: the baker died of a stroke during the night. So the baker can't tell the story about him, and no one else seems to have noticed the little incident, so ... No need for Lieutenant Gustl to shoot himself after all. (Gustl is a bit of a goof, and Schnitzler is not sparing with his ironies.)
But now the military is no longer here, either in Spandau or in the general social mores. It's as if there's a hole in history where the content has dropped away, like a frame with the (perhaps not very attractive) picture fallen out.
The Spandau Citadel has become a venue for open-air concerts and other consumerist events. This summer the concert lineup runs from Limp Bizkit to Tom Jones (isn't he dead??) to Van Morrison. Later there will be a wedding-planning "Infoshow" here, where you can meet "all your partners for a successful celebration: wedding planners, caterers, limousines, pastry-chefs, suppliers of fireworks and wedding-doves [what?], jewelers, paper goods suppliers, speech-makers, stylists, photographers." (Help, this sounds like too much. Archangel and I went to the Chicago City and County Building with a couple of friends and got married by a judge who gave us a nice speech about looking after each other, and then did some highly illegal electioneering--this was Chicago, after all. We had a champagne lunch at Marshall Field's afterward; we had kind of a good time. Could I think of the pigeons that lived at the Chicago Public Library as our wedding-doves? They were filthy beasts, but I suspect the ones at the dove-rental places aren't much better.)
Nothing against big celebrations, as long as people aren't putting them on only because they have to. (Poor Lieutenant Gustl thinks he has to kill himself; he's too much of an innocent goof to question it.) Have to ... "Nobody has to have to," says the classic German-enlightenment citation: Kein Mensch muss müssen. People should act based on their own sound reason and not on unexamined "have to"s. (Nice idea, limited realization.)
A scene from the play in which this line appears is represented in relief on the bridge over the river in our neighborhood. Do I know any American bridges with scenes from plays on them? Nah, it's a different world.
**
I had thought the Spree (in outer reaches) was boaty and the Dahme was boatier; but the Havel is clearly boatiest. There are biggish boats in rows like cars in a parking ramp:
There are little boats nosed in among the water-lilies:
Spandau is changing in two directions these days. There are upscale folks moving in here, the people in the star-architect apartments right on the water, the people with the big boats. At the same time, scruffier parts of Spandau are filling up with people who have been pushed out of more central districts of Berlin by investors and developers who have to have higher returns on their property. As the socioeconomic indicators rise in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, they fall in Spandau.
**
Of course the military wasn't everything in central Europe, even in the nineteenth century. There were un-military parallel universes, which were secondary to the military universe for a long time but not forever. Off the left, just here, the water widens out into the Tegeler See; on the other side is Schloss Tegel, where the Humboldt brothers in the nineteenth century were putting together important pieces of the modern sciences [see Tegeler Fließ 1 post, August 2014] and the modern research university. The sciences (in the German sense, not just natural sciences but all kinds of systematic knowledge) are one parallel universe. (Logic and evidence are different imperatives than authority and hierarchy.)
Here on this side of the river is authority and hierarchy, however. This is Count Rochus zu Lynar, the Italian who was responsible for the state-of-the-art military engineering at the Spandau Citadel in the sixteenth century.
Lynar also built a palace for himself in central Spandau, which was later made into a prison. (Gone now, replaced by apartments.) And how can you not smile, thinking of that fine man Carl Schurz, later an eminent US Republican Senator and Cabinet member, standing here in Spandau one cold night in 1850 trying to run a prison break?
That was the other parallel universe, the much-repressed world of liberal politics in the illiberal Germany of roughly 1850-1950. One of the reasons that the US is much much more German than it was willing to admit after 1914, is the flood of Germans like Schurz who came as exiles or refugees or simply fed-up-with-its after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. (They had aimed to create constitutional monarchies on the British model, but the German monarchs weren't having it.)
One of the last outbursts of the 1848-1850 disturbances, after the failure of constitution-writing, was an attempt to set up a republic in southwestern Germany, in the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Palatinate. Carl Schurz, who had been studying history and philology at the University of Bonn, rather suddenly found himself as the amateur in charge of artillery for the revolutionary militia. Portions of the Grand Ducal army mutinied and joined the revolutionaries, but it didn't last past the fine days of early summer. Prussia, as guardian of order in the Germanic world, sent troops. The revolutionary and Grand Ducal amateurs were no match for the Prussians, who mopped them up in a month, trapping the last holdouts in the fortress at Rastatt. Schurz had been at Rastatt, but he and a friend slipped out of the fortress by way of a drain and made their way safe to Switzerland.
They had left behind an older friend of Schurz's, a professor of art history and small-time poet named Gottfried Kinkel. (For the musically inclined: Robert Schumann provided a setting for one of Kinkel's poems.) Kinkel had more luck than many at Rastatt: he was not put in front of firing squad and did not die of typhus in the insalubrious conditions in which he and the other prisoners were held. But he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and after a few interim stops, he ended up in the prison in Spandau.
Kinkel's wife (poet, composer, friend of the Mendelssohns, moderate live-wire in the intellectual world of 1830s Berlin before she went back to Bonn and married Kinkel) wrote to Schurz: Something has to be done, and done soon, before prison life destroys the last of his mental and physical strength. What is needed is a friend with courage, persistence, and skill.
Schurz looks more or less like the man for the job:
He made his way to Spandau with money and false papers, and organized some friends. Some of this (the money and probably some of the friends) had been set up by Frau Kinkel--but on the spot, how do you actually get your old professor out of jail? Schurz and the friends debate. Surprise the guards with a quick show of force by a handful of armed men, grab the professor and get out? No, too many soldiers within call; Spandau is crawling with soldiers. Smuggle a good file in to Kinkel and have him file through the bars of his cell window? No, says Schurz, Kinkel is too much of klutz, he can't do things like that. (Of course he does not say klutz; he says, in good German abstractions, the problem is Kinkel's Ungeübtheit in handlichen Verrichtungen.) Bribing a guard looked like the way to go, and after some false starts a bribable guard was found.
The bribee was supposed to steal the key to the cell and bring Kinkel out to the street door in the middle of the night. Schurz waited in the street, but it didn't happen. The keys weren't where the guard expected them to be, he couldn't find them, he couldn't do anything tonight, and all the difficult arrangements for getting out of Berlin and out of the country tonight would have to be canceled. (Persistence! as Frau Kinkel says.)
The guard is willing to try again, but apparently he has got cold feet about bringing a prisoner right out the door: too conspicuous, too much chance of getting caught. But he's willing to let Kinkel down from a high window of the prison on a rope. Professor Klutz doesn't have to do much, just allow himself to be let down. And it works, albeit with much too much noise, as rope and professor knock out loose bricks and masonry on the ill-kept wall of Lynar's old palace.
They make it safely away, in spite of all the noise--north to the Baltic and across the sea to Britain. Kinkel founds a German newspaper in London that flourishes, under other management, until 1914. Most of his time is spent creating the discipline of art history in Britain--the British haven't really been looking at it as a Wissenschaft yet. He lectures first at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert, now run by a German) and then at the University of London.
Schurz clears out to America ... What lives these people lead. He sells real estate in Wisconsin. He becomes an important figure in the Republican party. He makes campaign speeches in German for Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln makes him the US ambassador to Spain. (Lincoln's Secretary of State is somewhat horrified--this man is a European revolutionary! What will the Spanish think?--but Lincoln doesn't back down.) In any case, the ambassadorship doesn't last long. When the Civil War starts, Schurz comes back to the US to fight for the North. He is a divisional commander at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, at Chattanooga. Industrially slaughterous battles of a kind that will come to Europe fifty years later. Europe, not having paid much attention to the American Civil War, has no idea what is coming. (Exception, for the musically inclined: listen to Vaughan Williams' settings of some of Walt Whitman's Civil War poems in Dona Nobis Pacem--most of this was written in the 1930s, but some just before World War I, and the music sounds as if it knows what is coming.)
Later Schurz is a journalist, later he is a Senator from Missouri, later he is Secretary of the Interior. He takes steps to reduce corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and get policy toward Native Americans out of the hands of the military, away from warfare as the primary policy instrument.
Marion Countess Dönhoff [see previous post] tells a story about her father as a young man on an adventurous visit to America, riding through the Utah mountains with a small group including Schurz, to rescue captives and defuse tensions after an Indian raid on a white settlement. What conversations shall we imagine around the campfire, between the East Prussian nobleman, the anti-Prussian revolutionary, and--of all people--Walt Whitman, who had had a job for a few years at Indian Affairs and had been fired but was invited along anyway?
**
Another of Schurz's activities as Interior Secretary was to try to convince the American population of the need for forest preservation. (You can take the German out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the German.) It was a little early for this to have much resonance in America, perhaps, but it was a nice try.
**
This is pleasant enough, along the river--the new residential building does not mostly hog the shore, and in places it even beflowers the public path handsomely:
But here I have got myself down into the Havelspitze, the peak or point of the Havel, which is a sort of peninsula extending south between the Havel on my left and a sizeable little bay on my right. It will be necessary to go back up the edge of the bay, around the top of it and down the other side; and this will land me up against a bridgeless side canal which will also have to be circumnavigated.
Oh well, it's a nice day.
And voilà--it's not so far around the bay as I thought, because there's a new footbridge across a narrow place, a drawbridge, to let the sailboats through. (Chicago memories again: bridge after bridge opening along the Chicago River, like pairs of cockroach legs unfolding and waving in the air; and that queasy feeling when you were on foot in the middle of a (closed) bridge and saw a yacht coming--the bridge isn't going to open now, is it, before I get to the other side?)
On the other side of the bay is a raggedy stretch of park. There are noble chestnut trees, and grazing geese (not as common here as in the US, not such a public plague):
Where the foot-traffic has not been heavy, the paving stones of the path are rimmed with midsummer flowers :
So, up the little canal we go on one side, down the canal on the other side, and back to the river, where the boats are starting to come out in the fine afternoon, full of the noisy and hilarious young.
On down the river for a bit, and then it's going to be time to pick up a bus and get home. We're out of the woods, out of the new building projects, into a more urban world. Here is older housing, with tempting glimpses of inner courtyards from the street.
A different world, to pick up on another day. I go to the bus-stop street, which is a bit shabbier, and ... good lord, what IS that knock-you-flat-on-the-sidewalk perfume in the air?
Oh, of course--it's summer. Linden-blossom overhead.
**
Kein Mensch muss müssen is from Act I of Lessing's Nathan der Weise.
The story about Kinkel's escape from Spandau prison is from Schurz's memoirs, as recounted in an article in Die Welt: http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article216019/Die-Flucht-aus-dem-Zuchthaus.html
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| Aalemannkanal bridge. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons. |
More people live up in this part of the city now than did fifteen or so years ago, and the new footbridges are part of the general improvement program up here (which has had its ups and downs, like most Berlin improvement programs). Also, the path along this stretch of the Havel coincides with the big bike route from Copenhagen down through Germany to Austria, and the new bridges are good for the long-distance travelers who spin by at this season, with saddlebags full and waterproofed maps clipped to their handlebars.
Pedestrians have the right-of-way, says the sign; bicycles are permitted.
 |
| Traffic sign on bike/ footpath. June 2015, my photo. |
**
Last time we made it (just) over the Brandenburg border, back into Berlin; so we are now, and will be for some time, in the Berlin district of Spandau. This is a tall thin district that takes up most of the western edge of Berlin, with the old city of Spandau--older than Berlin proper, and bigger than Berlin in early days-- approximately in the middle of the district. We haven't got as far as Spandau city yet; we're in the northernmost sub-district, Hakenfelde. Two-thirds of Hakenfelde is taken up by the Spandauer Forest, which is one of the biggest and most biodiverse stretches of woods in Berlin.
There are supposed to be 240 species of mushrooms in the forest here, for example. Do these Berlin-orange tree-fungi count as mushrooms, I wonder? (Orange is all over Berlin, it's the color of the city sanitation department. As the department is big on recycling and sustainability, its slogan, appearing on the orange garbage trucks, orange street-side bins, etc., is, "Only orange is so green.")
 |
| Fungus on tree near Havel, June 2015, my photo. |
Do other cities' garbage collection services have their own PR campaigns with slogans, I ask myself?? Did Chicago Streets and San have a slogan when we lived there? Nah, I think not. They certainly didn't paint little semi-clever remarks on the public trashcans. The one by our Bellevue S-Bahn stop was repainted at the beginning of the summer; it used to say something about dog droppings, but now it says Picobellevue. (This is a play on the German expression picobello, which means immaculately in order--or, to use another native German expression, tipptopp.)
Somewhere along here, in these open woods, I see a wild-strawberry patch--which would certainly be tipptopp at the right time of year. I investigate; but the fruit is only just setting, it's a long way from ripe.
Somewhere, also, I hear a cuckoo calling ... Oh I went to the flowing spring where the water's so good, And I heard there the cuckoo as she called from the wood, says an Austrian folk-song. When my brother and I were children we used to sing it in the back seat of the car, out in the Colorado semi-desert where there were neither flowing springs nor cuckoos nor woods.
**
Along with the three-thousand-plus acres of forest in Hakenfelde, there used to be a big coal-fired power plant and some heavy manufacturing. These were outliers of the big weapons-manufacturing cluster in Spandau city that supplied the German forces in the World Wars. (My brother and I used to play World War II on the living room floor on rainy days in the 1950s. He got to be the Americans and win; I had to be the Japanese and lose. Once when our forces were evenly matched for too long he raised the question of bringing in the Germans, but we were not sure which side they were supposed to be on.)
**
Spandau's history is military. Even a child would look at the location and say, "Hey, let's build a fort here!" Near where the Spree enters the Havel, a little northeast of Spandau city, there is a fortifiable piece of rock in the water, and it was fortified and defended for a thousand years or more, with varying degrees of success.
 |
| Spandau Citadel. Photo, Dirk Reichel, Wiki Commons. |
Spandau was all about the military. Berlin itself, before the late nineteenth century, was hardly more than a garrison town--a military post with a few civilian amenities clinging to it like fleas to a dog, and not always getting much more respect.
It's easy to forget, or not to know, how intensely military central Europe was until quite recently: how dominant the noble-officer class was, how intensely its espoused values (authority, class, duty, hierarchy) permeated society. Vienna had more pretensions than Berlin as a civilized capital, but even Vienna still had more the flavor of an early-modern armed camp than any western European capital did. Military honor was the starch that stiffened social customs and gave them their local shape.
I think the first piece of fiction that I ever read in German (with ill-educated astonishment) was Schnitzler's novella Leutnant Gustl, which appeared in Vienna in 1900. It drops you into a consciousness that would hardly have existed in England at the time, and is not possible to imagine in America. The young lieutenant in the story, in the crush around a concert-hall checkroom, allows himself to be jostled and then called "stupid boy" by the neighborhood baker. He should have drawn his saber to compel an apology (did English-speakers take their sabers to concerts in 1900? No), or he should have knocked the man down or ... But somehow in the confusion of the moment it doesn't happen, and he finds himself out on the street with the departing crowd.
Because he has allowed himself to be publicly insulted by a man of lower standing, the lieutenant's duty under the code of honor is to kill himself. And he intends to do it the next morning, after a night of wandering through Vienna saying goodbye to the agreeable things of life. But on his way home in the morning to get his revolver to blow his brains out (apparently one does not take revolvers to concert-halls) he stops at his usual cafe, where the waiter tells him the neighborhood news: the baker died of a stroke during the night. So the baker can't tell the story about him, and no one else seems to have noticed the little incident, so ... No need for Lieutenant Gustl to shoot himself after all. (Gustl is a bit of a goof, and Schnitzler is not sparing with his ironies.)
But now the military is no longer here, either in Spandau or in the general social mores. It's as if there's a hole in history where the content has dropped away, like a frame with the (perhaps not very attractive) picture fallen out.
The Spandau Citadel has become a venue for open-air concerts and other consumerist events. This summer the concert lineup runs from Limp Bizkit to Tom Jones (isn't he dead??) to Van Morrison. Later there will be a wedding-planning "Infoshow" here, where you can meet "all your partners for a successful celebration: wedding planners, caterers, limousines, pastry-chefs, suppliers of fireworks and wedding-doves [what?], jewelers, paper goods suppliers, speech-makers, stylists, photographers." (Help, this sounds like too much. Archangel and I went to the Chicago City and County Building with a couple of friends and got married by a judge who gave us a nice speech about looking after each other, and then did some highly illegal electioneering--this was Chicago, after all. We had a champagne lunch at Marshall Field's afterward; we had kind of a good time. Could I think of the pigeons that lived at the Chicago Public Library as our wedding-doves? They were filthy beasts, but I suspect the ones at the dove-rental places aren't much better.)
Nothing against big celebrations, as long as people aren't putting them on only because they have to. (Poor Lieutenant Gustl thinks he has to kill himself; he's too much of an innocent goof to question it.) Have to ... "Nobody has to have to," says the classic German-enlightenment citation: Kein Mensch muss müssen. People should act based on their own sound reason and not on unexamined "have to"s. (Nice idea, limited realization.)
A scene from the play in which this line appears is represented in relief on the bridge over the river in our neighborhood. Do I know any American bridges with scenes from plays on them? Nah, it's a different world.
**
I had thought the Spree (in outer reaches) was boaty and the Dahme was boatier; but the Havel is clearly boatiest. There are biggish boats in rows like cars in a parking ramp:
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| Boat tie-up on the Havel in Spandau. June 2015, my photo. |
There are little boats nosed in among the water-lilies:
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| Along the Havel, Spandau, June 2015. My photo. |
Spandau is changing in two directions these days. There are upscale folks moving in here, the people in the star-architect apartments right on the water, the people with the big boats. At the same time, scruffier parts of Spandau are filling up with people who have been pushed out of more central districts of Berlin by investors and developers who have to have higher returns on their property. As the socioeconomic indicators rise in Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg, they fall in Spandau.
**
Of course the military wasn't everything in central Europe, even in the nineteenth century. There were un-military parallel universes, which were secondary to the military universe for a long time but not forever. Off the left, just here, the water widens out into the Tegeler See; on the other side is Schloss Tegel, where the Humboldt brothers in the nineteenth century were putting together important pieces of the modern sciences [see Tegeler Fließ 1 post, August 2014] and the modern research university. The sciences (in the German sense, not just natural sciences but all kinds of systematic knowledge) are one parallel universe. (Logic and evidence are different imperatives than authority and hierarchy.)
Here on this side of the river is authority and hierarchy, however. This is Count Rochus zu Lynar, the Italian who was responsible for the state-of-the-art military engineering at the Spandau Citadel in the sixteenth century.
 |
| Count zu Lynar, bust in Lübbenau. Photo by Dr. Bernd Gross, Wiki Commons. |
Lynar also built a palace for himself in central Spandau, which was later made into a prison. (Gone now, replaced by apartments.) And how can you not smile, thinking of that fine man Carl Schurz, later an eminent US Republican Senator and Cabinet member, standing here in Spandau one cold night in 1850 trying to run a prison break?
That was the other parallel universe, the much-repressed world of liberal politics in the illiberal Germany of roughly 1850-1950. One of the reasons that the US is much much more German than it was willing to admit after 1914, is the flood of Germans like Schurz who came as exiles or refugees or simply fed-up-with-its after the failure of the 1848 revolutions. (They had aimed to create constitutional monarchies on the British model, but the German monarchs weren't having it.)
One of the last outbursts of the 1848-1850 disturbances, after the failure of constitution-writing, was an attempt to set up a republic in southwestern Germany, in the Grand Duchy of Baden and the Palatinate. Carl Schurz, who had been studying history and philology at the University of Bonn, rather suddenly found himself as the amateur in charge of artillery for the revolutionary militia. Portions of the Grand Ducal army mutinied and joined the revolutionaries, but it didn't last past the fine days of early summer. Prussia, as guardian of order in the Germanic world, sent troops. The revolutionary and Grand Ducal amateurs were no match for the Prussians, who mopped them up in a month, trapping the last holdouts in the fortress at Rastatt. Schurz had been at Rastatt, but he and a friend slipped out of the fortress by way of a drain and made their way safe to Switzerland.
They had left behind an older friend of Schurz's, a professor of art history and small-time poet named Gottfried Kinkel. (For the musically inclined: Robert Schumann provided a setting for one of Kinkel's poems.) Kinkel had more luck than many at Rastatt: he was not put in front of firing squad and did not die of typhus in the insalubrious conditions in which he and the other prisoners were held. But he was sentenced to life imprisonment, and after a few interim stops, he ended up in the prison in Spandau.
Kinkel's wife (poet, composer, friend of the Mendelssohns, moderate live-wire in the intellectual world of 1830s Berlin before she went back to Bonn and married Kinkel) wrote to Schurz: Something has to be done, and done soon, before prison life destroys the last of his mental and physical strength. What is needed is a friend with courage, persistence, and skill.
Schurz looks more or less like the man for the job:
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| Carl Schurz as a young man. From a book by C. Legler, Leading Events of Wisconsin History. Wiki Commons. |
He made his way to Spandau with money and false papers, and organized some friends. Some of this (the money and probably some of the friends) had been set up by Frau Kinkel--but on the spot, how do you actually get your old professor out of jail? Schurz and the friends debate. Surprise the guards with a quick show of force by a handful of armed men, grab the professor and get out? No, too many soldiers within call; Spandau is crawling with soldiers. Smuggle a good file in to Kinkel and have him file through the bars of his cell window? No, says Schurz, Kinkel is too much of klutz, he can't do things like that. (Of course he does not say klutz; he says, in good German abstractions, the problem is Kinkel's Ungeübtheit in handlichen Verrichtungen.) Bribing a guard looked like the way to go, and after some false starts a bribable guard was found.
The bribee was supposed to steal the key to the cell and bring Kinkel out to the street door in the middle of the night. Schurz waited in the street, but it didn't happen. The keys weren't where the guard expected them to be, he couldn't find them, he couldn't do anything tonight, and all the difficult arrangements for getting out of Berlin and out of the country tonight would have to be canceled. (Persistence! as Frau Kinkel says.)
The guard is willing to try again, but apparently he has got cold feet about bringing a prisoner right out the door: too conspicuous, too much chance of getting caught. But he's willing to let Kinkel down from a high window of the prison on a rope. Professor Klutz doesn't have to do much, just allow himself to be let down. And it works, albeit with much too much noise, as rope and professor knock out loose bricks and masonry on the ill-kept wall of Lynar's old palace.
They make it safely away, in spite of all the noise--north to the Baltic and across the sea to Britain. Kinkel founds a German newspaper in London that flourishes, under other management, until 1914. Most of his time is spent creating the discipline of art history in Britain--the British haven't really been looking at it as a Wissenschaft yet. He lectures first at the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert, now run by a German) and then at the University of London.
Schurz clears out to America ... What lives these people lead. He sells real estate in Wisconsin. He becomes an important figure in the Republican party. He makes campaign speeches in German for Abraham Lincoln, and Lincoln makes him the US ambassador to Spain. (Lincoln's Secretary of State is somewhat horrified--this man is a European revolutionary! What will the Spanish think?--but Lincoln doesn't back down.) In any case, the ambassadorship doesn't last long. When the Civil War starts, Schurz comes back to the US to fight for the North. He is a divisional commander at Chancellorsville, at Gettysburg, at Chattanooga. Industrially slaughterous battles of a kind that will come to Europe fifty years later. Europe, not having paid much attention to the American Civil War, has no idea what is coming. (Exception, for the musically inclined: listen to Vaughan Williams' settings of some of Walt Whitman's Civil War poems in Dona Nobis Pacem--most of this was written in the 1930s, but some just before World War I, and the music sounds as if it knows what is coming.)
Later Schurz is a journalist, later he is a Senator from Missouri, later he is Secretary of the Interior. He takes steps to reduce corruption in the Bureau of Indian Affairs and get policy toward Native Americans out of the hands of the military, away from warfare as the primary policy instrument.
Marion Countess Dönhoff [see previous post] tells a story about her father as a young man on an adventurous visit to America, riding through the Utah mountains with a small group including Schurz, to rescue captives and defuse tensions after an Indian raid on a white settlement. What conversations shall we imagine around the campfire, between the East Prussian nobleman, the anti-Prussian revolutionary, and--of all people--Walt Whitman, who had had a job for a few years at Indian Affairs and had been fired but was invited along anyway?
**
Another of Schurz's activities as Interior Secretary was to try to convince the American population of the need for forest preservation. (You can take the German out of the forest, but you can't take the forest out of the German.) It was a little early for this to have much resonance in America, perhaps, but it was a nice try.
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| Along the Havel, June 2015. My photo. |
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This is pleasant enough, along the river--the new residential building does not mostly hog the shore, and in places it even beflowers the public path handsomely:
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| Along the Havel, Spandau, June 2015. My photo. |
But here I have got myself down into the Havelspitze, the peak or point of the Havel, which is a sort of peninsula extending south between the Havel on my left and a sizeable little bay on my right. It will be necessary to go back up the edge of the bay, around the top of it and down the other side; and this will land me up against a bridgeless side canal which will also have to be circumnavigated.
Oh well, it's a nice day.
And voilà--it's not so far around the bay as I thought, because there's a new footbridge across a narrow place, a drawbridge, to let the sailboats through. (Chicago memories again: bridge after bridge opening along the Chicago River, like pairs of cockroach legs unfolding and waving in the air; and that queasy feeling when you were on foot in the middle of a (closed) bridge and saw a yacht coming--the bridge isn't going to open now, is it, before I get to the other side?)
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| Maselakebucht, footbridge. My photo, June 2015. |
On the other side of the bay is a raggedy stretch of park. There are noble chestnut trees, and grazing geese (not as common here as in the US, not such a public plague):
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| Geese, Maselakepark, June 2015. My photo. |
Where the foot-traffic has not been heavy, the paving stones of the path are rimmed with midsummer flowers :
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| Maselakepark, June 2015. My photo. |
So, up the little canal we go on one side, down the canal on the other side, and back to the river, where the boats are starting to come out in the fine afternoon, full of the noisy and hilarious young.
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| On the Havel, Spandau, June 2015. My photo. |
On down the river for a bit, and then it's going to be time to pick up a bus and get home. We're out of the woods, out of the new building projects, into a more urban world. Here is older housing, with tempting glimpses of inner courtyards from the street.
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| On Parkstrasse, Spandau. June 2015, my photo. |
A different world, to pick up on another day. I go to the bus-stop street, which is a bit shabbier, and ... good lord, what IS that knock-you-flat-on-the-sidewalk perfume in the air?
Oh, of course--it's summer. Linden-blossom overhead.
**
Kein Mensch muss müssen is from Act I of Lessing's Nathan der Weise.
The story about Kinkel's escape from Spandau prison is from Schurz's memoirs, as recounted in an article in Die Welt: http://www.welt.de/print-welt/article216019/Die-Flucht-aus-dem-Zuchthaus.html
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