Havel 3

Tegel-place and Humboldt-land

At about the latitude of Tegel Airport--where you still fly into Berlin if you aren't arriving on something like EasyJet or Aeroflot--the Havel bulges out to the northeast in a long, be-islanded lake, the Tegeler See. 

This is a favorite place. The east shore of the Tegeler See is where we start for that happy summer ritual, walking up the Tegeler Fließ (see Tegeler Fließ posts, Sept-Oct 2014). The edge of the Tegeler See is where I got my first Berlin hiking map (Hiking in the Green North of Berlin!) at a kiosk in the street that runs down from the U-Bahn stop to the harbor, where the big Havel cruise-ships start. (These include the egregious Moby Dick, which I think goes downriver as far as Potsdam (we should end up there before the snow flies) and upriver as far as Brandenburg city (not this year).)

Cruise ship Moby Dick, docked at Greenwich Promenade, Alt-Tegel.
Photo, Havelbaude, Wiki Commons.

I've never been over on the west side of the lake, which is mostly occupied by the Tegeler Forst. I'm thinking maybe this is the time to see the west side at last, and to give some thought to Wilhelm von Humboldt, who grew up by the lake along with his brother Alexander. (Alexander appeared in the first Tegeler Fließ post from last summer, but not Wilhelm.) I admire Wilhelm; I've spent most of my adult life in the house that Wilhelm built, so to speak: the modern research university. 

He didn't build it all by himself, of course; he didn't even build the University of Berlin--that original and model of the modern research university. He wrote up some plans for it and got started with things like hiring and funding (in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, not an easy time). These activities got him into wrangles with higher-level people in government, who kicked him upstairs into a diplomatic position before the school was very far along. But he had ideas about what the institution should be, and these ideas have stuck.

Here's poor Wilhelm, trapped in a late-Victorian marble chair by the front gate of the university on Unter den Linden. Brother Alexander is trapped in another one on the other side of the gate, looking somewhat less oppressed by the situation than Wilhelm is--unsurprisingly, since (as far as I know) all Alexander had to do with the place was to drop in and give spectacular guest lectures. He didn't have to wrangle with faculty about hiring and with government about budgets.

Wilhelm von Humboldt monument on Unter den Linden,
Photo by Christian Wolf, Wiki Commons. 

Here they sit guarding the entrance to the university, like lions at the entrance of a temple, like allegorical figures of Naturwissenschaften (Alexander) and Geisteswissenschaften (Wilhelm)--that is, natural sciences and ... oh dear. The intrepid young German possessed of a dictionary will translate Geisteswissenschaften as "sciences of the spirit," but of course this is not English: no university catalog in the US or UK includes a section on "sciences of the spirit." The Geisteswissenschaften certainly include history and literature and linguistics and religious studies, maybe philosophy and law--and maybe, in the most capacious view, almost everything that isn't natural science and math. (I observe that English Wikipedia sensibly translates Geisteswissenschaften as Geisteswissenschaften.) 

In English we think we can divide up the scholarly world fairly neatly between natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities; but here in Germany the concept of social science is rather wobbly. (As perhaps it should be. Do we really know what we mean by social sciences, or how they are supposed to work?) In the US, we would classify psychology and sociology and economics as social sciences, but in Germany this is not so obvious. In the current college (Fakultät) structure at Archangel's university, psychology has been put together with agriculture and biology to make a life sciences college, which lives near the medical school. Sociology has been integrated into a single department with political science and belongs to the same college as art history, music history, education, archaeology, and the study of sports. (This combination is non-standard, but I don't think it has seemed quite as bizarre here as it would in the US.) Economics is a college unto itself, including what would be called business in the US but often isn't in Germany. (In people's minds here, "business school" wobbles back and forth between meaning something glamorous like Harvard Business School and meaning something sub-academic like secretarial school.) 

Well: labels, names ... Wilhelm thinks a lot about this, he's a linguist. “The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world,” he says (famously), in his Essay on the Comparative Study of Languages--which he writes in old age, sitting up here in the family house at the head of the lake. He's one of the first people to grapple seriously with the idea that different languages are not just code-books that attach different labels to the same pre-defined pieces of the world. Instead, the world as we experience it is truly different in different languages; we ourselves are different in different languages, because language gives us a non-trivial part of our self-understanding. Language is what makes us more than just incoherent lumps of appetite, he says. And so an understanding of how language works must be involved with any systematic investigation of distinctly human activities: the Geisteswissenschaften as opposed to the natural sciences. 

Wilhelm understands the differences among languages more than many of his peers. Other scholars are also interested in comparative languistics at this time: some of them, especially in France, are trying to identify a Universal Grammar. It has an unfortunate tendency, however, to come out looking like French. Unlike his peers, Wilhelm is not Eurocentric. He has some acquaintance with Chinese and Japanese and Arabic; he has written a Coptic grammar and has translated the Bhagavad-Gita from Sanskrit to German. His Essay on the Comparative Study of Languages is written as an introduction to an analysis of one of the Javanese languages; in his old age, looking out over the islands of the Tegeler See, he is studying the languages of the Pacific Islands. When he was younger, it was Native American languages. He does not expect them to be much like French. (Or German either.)

**

Here's a little puzle of place-names. We're starting out in a place called Tegelort, which means "Tegel-place." It's right on the shore of the Tegeler See but is not in Tegel, the sub-district of Berlin that wraps around all of the Tegeler See except this little bit. (Why isn't Tegelort in Tegel? Don't ask me, I just live here.) We start off nicely by the water and then run whack into a fence with a locked gate, but it doesn't take too long to go around and get back to the water again.

The Havel at Tegelort, July 2015. My photo.

Tegelort itself is a little scrap of late-nineteenth-century suburb at the edge of the Tegeler Forst. Houses and restaurants were built out here in the boom times after the Franco-Prussian War, and in the next few decades all the usual institutons followed: the school, the fire department, the streetcar connection into the city. 

End of the streetcar line, Tegelort. Postcard, 1913, Wiki Commons.

In the 1920s and 30s people came out here from central Berlin a lot on the weekends, and entertainments sprang up: besides the boating and swimming and restaurants, there were bowling alleys and carnival rides, theaters and movie houses. There is an idiomatic phrase in German, mit Kind und Kegel, which means with the whole clan or the whole household (kids, pets, baggage--the whole kit and kaboodle, Americans might have said at the time); the popular advertising slogan addressed to the weekenders was: mit Kind und Kegel, out to Tegel! 

Much of the old weekending business is gone now; the main public-transit line and thus more of the action is on the other side of the lake nowadays. There's still a fine swimming-beach on this side, and a scattering of small guesthouses and restaurants, and of course there's a lot of boating; but the neighborhood seems quiet and housey. No more carousels and bowling alleys. Nice roses along the path.

Roses, Tegelort, July 2015. My photo.

The south end of the lake is full of islands, large and small, and variously occupied. There's a boarding school on the biggest one; there are camping places and Kleingärten and such on the others. If I have been paying proper attention to my map, which is questionable, this island is Lindwerder, which is a curious little place. It started out as a patch of sand about 300 meters square;  it's more than twenty times that size now. 

Island in the Tegeler See.  July 2015, my photo.

On the other side of the water was (is) the Borsig works--Borsig was the biggest locomotive producer in Europe in the nineteenth century, when railroads were the new technology that was blowing the old social organization to bits, rather like computing technology in more recent times. The Borsig works dumped the slag from its foundry onto Lindwerder, gradually enlarging it.  Fairly clean slag, fortunately: the water-testers say that that there are no toxics coming from it into the lake water or the well on the island.

Small world, up here. In 1858, when the Borsig works produced its thousandth locomotive, there was a big celebration. Alexander von Humboldt was invited (Wilhelm was long dead by then), and he showed up; he was almost ninety but still interested in the latest technology. 

**

The University of Berlin, as Wilhelm von Humboldt planned it around 1809 and as it grew up in the course of the century, was different from places like Oxford and Cambridge. One important difference was the larger role that it gave to the natural sciences and to research in general. The English were still wrangling in the 1850s about whether universities should expand their scope of studies very far beyond Greek and Latin literature. (Should Modern History--that is, the history of the world after the fall of Rome--be a university subject? Should chemistry be a university subject? Maybe not chemistry, it seems too commercial. Solving practical problems with commercial consequences is not consistent with "the dignity of the university," as an Oxford Fellow of the time put it.) 

It was also not clear to the English that it made sense to try to pack into one institution the task of advancing the frontiers of knowledge and the apparently very different task of civilizing the young--keeping them from drinking themselves into oblivion and running up debts their parents couldn't pay. Many people in mid-nineteenth-century England thought that research belonged in London, as part of grown-up city life, and teaching belonged at small-town Oxford and Cambridge, where there was some hope of limiting the students' dissipations and turning them into gentlemen by way of sufficient immersion in the classics. 

The Humboldtian ideal, in contrast--and you can hardly have a discussion of university policy in Germany without someone invoking this phrase--was die Einheit von Forschung und Lehre, the unity of research and teaching. Odd as it may appear, Wilhelm thought, the two tasks did go together. And it seemed to work, the Humboldtian university. After mid-century the English universities were re-modeled to be more like it; and new institutions on the Berlin model, like Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago, sprang up in the US.

The university turned out to be a fine place for the sciences, for research, in spite of English skepticism. The English worries, about civilizing the young and about dangerous commercialization, were and are legitimate concerns; but still, it was a fine time for the sciences here in Berlin before the Nazis. In the generation between the first Nobel Prizes (1901) and the Nazi takeover in 1933, nineteen of the prizewinners in the sciences (chemistry, medicine, physics) were people with Berlin connections. (Harvard picked up one prize during this period.) 

It was new, new science, kicking to pieces the old understanding of the physical world. (The Harvard prize was for a more accurate measurement of the atomic weights of some elements.) Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger were working on the beginings of quantum theory in Berlin. Albert Einstein was working on relativity theory in Berlin--or working on it out here along the Havel, which he said was a better place for thinking than the middle of town. He and his family had a Kleingarten a little downriver from here. (The Einsteins' garden was so messy that the neighbors complained and they almost lost their lease. When he was out here he wanted to be thinking or sailing--he was a passionate Havel-sailor--not pruning the shrubbery.) 

On the Tegeler See, July 2015. My photo.

**

We're getting north along the lakeshore, closer to the Humboldts' property. It's a pleasant stretch of woods and water here--fine young oaks on the woods side:

Oak trees along the Tegeler See, July 2015. My photo.

and on the water-side, sometimes little coves full of green reflection:

Along the Tegeler See, July 2015. My photo.

There are open stretches of shoreline here and there--doesn't this look Midwestern?  Somewhere in Wisconsin, somewhere in Michigan.

Tegeler See, July 2015. My photo

**

After Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt were dead, their heirs sold a couple of islands in the northern part of the Tegeler See--Big Heron Island and Little Heron Island--to the Borsig heir. He filled in between the islands and the shore to make a peninsula and built a big villa there, close to the new home of the Borsig works. It had just moved out from center city and was about to start expanding little Lindwerder with its slag. 

Villa Borsig on Tegeler See, July 2015. My photo.

In the 1920s an engineering intern at the Borsig works, who was probably supposed to be working on locomotives but was obsessed with the idea of liquid-fuel rockets, slipped off to Lindwerder when he could, to fire off his experiments. On the island, after all, there was not so much danger of setting the neighborhood on fire.

Later he would get his Ph.D. at the University of Berlin, then at the peak of its Humboldtian success. Later he would be a Nazi party member and SS man and would make the V2s that terrorized London. Later still he would be adopted by the American military and would develop the rockets that took Americans to the moon. (As Tom Lehrer sang in the 1960s,  "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?/ 'That's not my department,' says Wernher von Braun.")

**
Things change, things change. The Borsig Villa belongs to the German diplomatic service now. The Borsig manufacturing operations in Tegel belong to some firm headquartered in Kuala Lumpur. They make complex production equipment for the chemical industry and ship it out from the little harbor on the Tegeler See to Asia and elsewhere. (They have to transfer to bigger vessels in Hamburg harbor, of course, but it still beats trying to move twenty-ton pieces of equipment in trucks.) 

**

We've come around the top of the lake, through the edge of the woods that run up to Schloss Tegel. Wilhelm, who perhaps would rather have been in Rome, spent the last decades of his life here, writing. (My feeling is that work is as much a human need as food and sleep, he said.) There had been a period when he had not had so much time for languages, and he was happy enough when that time was over. When the university project ran into difficulties in 1810 he had been sent to Vienna as a diplomat. He did background work helping to bring Austria into the coalition against Napoleon, which finally (unlike the previous five coalitions) marched into Paris in 1814. Then Wilhelm was one of the Prussian representatives at the Congress of Vienna, which re-drew the map of Europe, post-revolution, post-Napoleon. 

Then he was ambassador to London, then a minister in the Prussian government, trying without success to create a liberal constitution for the country. Central Europe was descending into authoritarian reaction; Wilhelm finally lost his job for standing out against the expansion of censorship and the removal of liberal university professors. Time to go back to the study of languages. You act when you can act, and when you can't act you retreat up the Havel and think .... 

After Wilhelm died, in the 1830s, Alexander (who would certainly rather have been in Paris) took over the family house at Tegel and spent the last decades of his life here, writing. The figure in the print below, half turned away from the view of the house and the lake, is perhaps meant to be Alexander.  

Schloss Tegel, 1855. Engraving by J.G.F. Poppel, in 
Das Königreich Preussen in malerischen Original-Ansichten, British Library.
Wiki Commons.

The lawyer who owns the house now is Wilhelm's great-great-I-do-not-know-how-many-greats-grandson. Wilhelm and Alexander are buried under the centuries-old oaks west of the house, under classicizing monuments, rising one near the other, like the marble chairs by the university gates.

**

Round we go, around the north end of the lake and a blobby extension of it called the Große Malche, which makes a good boat harbor. 

Boat Harbor, Grosse Malche, Tegeler See. July 2015, my photo.

There's a bit of park here, with a scattering of old ladies (like me) taking the summer-morning air, and a sculpture called The archaic angel of Heiligensee ...

Hannah-Höch-Denkmal, Tegeler See. July 2015, my photo.

... which is a memorial to a German Dada artist of the 1920s, Hannah Höch, who lived up in Heiligensee, north of here along the Havel. (Lovely dune-woods in between: I've walked from from Tegel to Heiligensee in other summers, guessing my route through the unmarked network of forest paths. Woud I do this with more confidence now that I have my mobile-phone compass? Probably not; Archangel and I compared our compass apps the other day and found that even under the most favorable circumstances they had substantially different views about where north was.)

Then we're in Tegel town, Alt-Tegel, where the main transit lines to center city run now. Through a patch of Kleingärten, bursting with summer flowers (what a year for the roses--mounds of roses, streams of roses); and then down to Tegel Harbor.

Tegel Harbor,  July 2015. My photo.

This used to be industrial territory; it was cleaned up and developed residentially in the late 1980s. The design (including the metal whale in the water) was provided by Charles Moore, whose work may have a vaguely familiar look to people who hang around American universities. He is also responsible for the carillon tower on North Campus at the U of Michigan, the Haas Business School at Berkeley, and pieces of UC Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and Irvine (to say nothing of Williams College). If you wander around the Tegel Harbor project you can see some similarities to the Berkeley business school.  Berkeley did not get a whale, however. (So far as I know.)