Havel 5

Around the North Shore

In the US, or at least in the Midwest, fall is sort of a parabola, an upside-down U with the peak in October. Here, fall is more of a step function. There's the mild green well-lit half of it, which is like summer with the heat turned off. Then we go thump down to the second half of the season, which is not like summer at all. The trees finally turn, and the fog and clouds start to close in: open the living-room shades on some mornings, and you can't see to the next street. The big yellowy-bronze street trees (poplars as high as the eighth floor!) glow like candle-fire in the mist, almost invisible. There are clear days, but they're chilly, and whitish around the edges; non-Germans no longer eat and drink outdoors. (Germans are made of sterner stuff.)

The day I went out to Wannsee in mid-October felt like the last day of the first half of the season. Still shirtsleeve weather, at least in the sun, at least if you kept moving.

Technically, the sub-district of Wannsee, or most of it, is an island. There are fat stretches of the Havel surrounding the top of it: the main stream of the Havel runs from upper right to lower left in the map below, and a bay, the Big Wannsee, blobs down on the right-hand side. The large streetless area that fills much of the island is forest. The bottom part of the island is  separated from the Berlin mainland by a string of skinny lakes running along the southeast edge of the island--the Little Wansee, the Pohlesee, the Stölpchensee--and another string of skinny lakes, the Glienicker Lake and the Griebnitzsee, along the southwest edge. (We were at the Griebnitzsee last fall, because it's the eastern end of the Teltowkanal: see Teltowkanal 1 post, October 2014). 

Wannsee. Map from Wiki Commons.

Today I'm starting out at the big bridge at the east end of the island and walking along the water around the northern side of the island (past Colonie Alsen and Heckeshorn on the map above), around the northern tip of the island, and then past the Pfaueninsel and the Park Klein-Glienicke to the bridge at the west end. This is 10 or 11 kilometers, a nice stretch-out for a sunny day.  (If I can judge from some of the books and websites that recommend country-walk routes, the German idea of a family Sunday outing is 16 km (10 miles) with a stop for cake in the middle, but I'm not sure I'm up to that yet.)

**

In the Wannsee S-Bahn station the signs point you out to this street and that street, or to the buses, or to the pier: there's a ferry here that makes a twenty-minute run over to Kladow. (Tempting, very tempting ... but another day.)

Let's go out the pier exit all the same; and here we are in a fabulously beautiful morning, with the first really marked color in the trees:

Along Wannsee, October 2015. My photo.

And the water--good heavens. Much of the time, even on clear days, the water in the Berlin rivers is dark, a sort of flinty brown-black. But today it's a perfectly astonishing blue, an ur-blue--it looks like the blue from which all the other blues in the world have been mixed. Bright as fire. 

What you see of the water hereabouts is limited, of course.  There's lots of rather imposing private property along the shore, lots of this:

Along Wannsee, October 2015. My photo.

The Colonie Alsen, which occupies the first stretch of the shore here, was a Villencolonie, a real-estate development where very rich people could build overbearing houses in a park on the water in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Colonie is supposed to have been beautiful in its day, but ... surely there were some unattractive elements here, even before the bulldozers came?

A number of the big houses are gone; some wrecked at the end of the war, some knocked down a few decades later to make room for apartments and a hotel. A particularly grand villa that is still here, right along the way to the forest, was built in 1914 for a man named Ernst Marlier. He had a tendency to get himself in trouble with the police for being a drunken public nuisance, but he got away with it for a while because he had grown very rich selling quack medicines. (A study by the University of Berlin verified that there was nothing in them but tartaric acid (think cream of tartar), citric acid, salt, and egg yolk; the stuff sold like the proverbial hotcakes.) 

Am Großen Wannsee 56-58.  Photo, A. Savin, Wiki Commons.

In the 1920s Marlier (who would soon find it wise to leave the country) sold the house to another industrialist, Friedrich Minoux, who was dealing on a large scale in coal and oil and electrical power and using his profits to finance the Nazi party. In the 30s he used his good standing with the party to acquire a Jewish-owned company at a fraction of the market price in a forced sale. He also used his position on the board of city enterprises like the public utilities for fraudulent self-enrichment. (Was it outright embezzlement? This is not clear to me.) The Nazis were not amused, in spite of his long-time support. Minoux ended up in the slammer, and the Nazis got the house. They used it as the site of the Wannsee Conference, which laid out the plains for exterminating the Jews of Europe. 

No, it is not so attractive here.  

Though there are better moments: before we get to the Marlier-Minoux villa we pass the house of that decent man Max Liebermann, the king of the Berlin art world in the pre-Nazi decades. For some years he was head of the Berlin Secession, the group that had livened up the Berlin art scene by opening it to modern French  influences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In his early days, the kind of painting Liebermann did was seen in Germany as ugly and radical and scandalous. (Painting poor people at their dirty poor-people occupations! Then later, painting a Jesus who looked like a Jew! Scandal!) 

Max Liebermann, Cobbler's Workshop, 1881. Wiki Commons, Hans Bug.

But Liebermann made a success of himself ... and then somehow the time had flown and somehow he had become the establishment, the old man whom the young men thought was standing in the way of progress (although in fact, before World War I, he was inviting people like Picasso and Matisse and Braque to exhibit at the Secession's annual show). Suddenly, the critique of his work was not that it was ugly and radical, but that it was weak and kitschy. When the Secession executive committee refused a set of Expressionist paintings for the next exhibition, one of the young Expressionists made such a violent attack on Liebermann in print that the Secession membership voted 40 to 2 to kick the young man out of the association. One of the two votes may have been from the young man himself; the other was certainly from Liebermann. Not, perhaps, a very great painter, but a decent man.

Liebermann turned seventy during the war, and withdrew more and more into the house on Wannsee and his garden. He painted his garden a lot. It isn't a tremendous garden, it isn't Giverny--and the family turned most of the flowerbeds into vegetable beds as wartime food shortages increased--but it was a pleasant enough place. 

Liebermann-Villa, gardener's house.  Photo by Zyance, Wiki Commons. 

Now, after the first frosts, Liebermann's garden has that dreamy after-life air that gardens have after everything has been harvested and the non-hardy flowers--the tender flowers, as gardeners say--have shrunk to black skeletons. The asters are blooming in profusion; the air smells of crumbled dry leaves, fallen leaves.

**

Well, on we trudge, along the fences, past the villas-become-yacht-clubs, past glimpses of the water.

Along Wannsee, October 2015. My photo.

And then finally we're out to the end of the built-up area, out to the edge of the woods, and how could the day be more beautiful than this?

Wannsee, October 2015. My photo.

It's good to be back in the woods, which rise from the water in the rather marked way that they do down in this corner of the city. Steps are provided here and there, more user-friendly than the steep Grunewald stairs.

Along the Wannsee, October 2015. My photo.

Oh dear, am I going to be cranky?  It's so well-ordered down here, so clean and organized.  There is one path--sort of a street, actually, the Uferpromenade--very clearly marked (somewhere up ahead it's even going to be paved).  There are public restroooms along the way, excellent things in themselves of course.  But when I think of the Berlin summer I think of the anarchic overgrown rattiness of much of the city...  is it possible to be too orderly? Perhaps.  

Everything is so, well, just so ... down here. Look at the benches at good-view spots. Available, well-kept, kitschy.

It seems a bit much. 

But this is very lovely, all the same.

Sails on the Großer Wannsee, October 2015.  My photo.

**

How shadowy it is here. It's a perfectly clear day and some of the leaves are down already, so the forest-shade isn't as deep as it might be; and the sun is still above the high shoulder of the moraine on my left. But it's so unlit here, somehow. 

It's the season; the sun has lost all its force.

But the light is bright enough out on the open water. Here we are, around the tip of the island, past the Big Wannsee, on the bank of the Havel proper (dear river, how lovely this is):

Along the Havel, October 2015. My photo.

Then we start coming to goofy things. This is a place where you have to make up your mind what to think of nineteenth-century historicism. (That is, if you're the sort of person who always has to make up your mind about things, rather than just letting the world be.) On the one hand, it's marvelous to trot along and have all these surprising objects pop up at you along the water. Here on the right, on the big island in the Havel, is what looks like a well-scrubbed medieval ruin:

Schloss Pfaueninsel, October 2015.  My photo.

Further along, where the shadowy woods rise quite high on the left, so that we hardly have any light at all down by the water, a Russian-style church beetles down from the top of the ridge, with its blue dome catching the sun high high above us.  And then, in another kilometer or so, as the height eases down on the left, we come to a medieval sort of gateway:

Gateway to Glienicke Park, October 2015.  My photo.  

This is entertaining for the exploring walker, but--on the other hand--it's all fake, as fake as hell. I almost want to say it's nineteenth-century Disneyland, but that isn't fair. It's not exactly fake; it's neo-this-and-that: neogothic, neo-various other things. It's not Disneyland, it's just culturally insecure German princes building imitations of worlds that seem better to them than their own. 

Nothing out here in Potsdam and its fringes is quite real.  A little further on is Babelsberg, where the film studios were in the great early days of German cinema. Fantasylands, of varous sorts. 

Across the water a little further on, at Sacrow, is a lovely fake Italian Romanesque church. Neo-romanesque.

Heilandskirche, Sacrow, October 2015. My photo.

Was it here that some friends told us they went to a wedding, several years ago? Somewhere herebouts.  And the bridal party arrived in sailboats, the bride in her white dress standing by the white sail in the summer evening light.

A bit of a contrast with old times, when the church was, in effect, part of the Berlin Wall, and there were sharpshooters in the tower.

**

I'm mildly tempted to shortcut through Glienicke Park--that's what the medieval gateway is the gateway to--to the Schloss and the bridge; the grounds are probably nice. But the plan was to stay by the water, and so I do; and pleasant things come along. Here is the work of a German prince wishing (like so many good Germans) that he was in Italy, and making a pretend Italy along the Havel. He does it rather well, and the Schloss outbuildings stand up finely in the autumn sun. 

Outbuildings, Schloss Glienicke, October 2015.  My photo.

It looks a bit like California, doesn't it? It looks like one of those places where everything looks like something else. (Las Vegas, in the extreme.) Do I know what I think about this? 

Is it a good idea to build (for example) an imitation Gothic chapel to house an electrical generator?  The modernists objected because it seemed dishonest. Form follows function. This is the law, said that brilliant Chicago drunk, Louis Sullivan. The function of an electrical-generator housing does not require it to look like a Gothic chapel, so it shouldn't. 

But then one might ask Sullivan, what function of a small-town department store requires this? 

Decoration on L. Sullivan's Van Allen building (Iowa).
Photo by Michael Kearney, Wiki Commons.

Not such a hard question to answer, actually, since the function of the classic department stores was not just to provide people with shirts and shoes and boxes of stationery, but to create fantasies that people could suppose would be fulfilled by shopping. (I think I'll have three pairs of socks and a half-liter of fantasy, please.) That kind of function may not have been what Sullivan had in mind when he laid down laws for architecture, but it did rather creep in when he built. His abstractions didn't match his (poured) concrete, so to speak. 

And fantasies? Yeats--who had enough sympathy with the Fascists in the 1920s to understand some of what was pushing and pulling them, said (and it applies to some of Liebermann's neighbors along the Wannsee):

     We'd fed the heart on fantasies,
     The heart's grown brutal from the fare.

And what happened to the brutal hearts? I looked them up when I got home in the afternoon. Marlier, the quack-medicine maker who built the very big villa, moved down to Switzerland in the mid-1920s, possibly because Berlin was getting too hot to hold him; and then he simply vanished. The Swiss are good record-keepers, it's not so easy for someone to vanish there, but no one knows what became of Marlier. Sleeping with the fishes somewhere, perhaps. Minoux the Fascist and big-company fraudster spent the war in prison, which pretty much put an end to him; he died a few months after he got out in 1945.

Liebermann, who was not such a fantasist, died in 1935, perhaps one should not say peacefully, but at least at home. The Gestapo prohibited attendance at his funeral, but people went anyway. After the Nazis came to power he had hardly stirred from his house and garden any more, hardly saw anyone. I don't even look out the window any more, he said, I don't want to see the new world around me. 

**

But then after a while the new world collapsed in wreckage, and the Cold War came out of the wreckage like a vampire; and here, a little farther along, we're at the western bridge from the Wannsee-Island to Brandenburg, where East and West used to exchange spies. (Friends of my age and older will dimly remember these crises.) For example, here is where Rudolf Abel, who had helped pass American nuclear-weapons secrets to the Soviet Union, walked into East Germany while Francis Gary Powers, whose U2 spy plane was shot down over Russia, walked into West Germany--Abel walking westward into the East and Powers walking eastward into the West, given the nature of the local geography. This afternoon the approaches to the bridge are full of oldies toasting their bones in the sun.

Glienicker Brücke, October 2015. My photo.

So, round the corner by the bridge, here's the main street, where there will be a bus stop--and no bus for quite a while, out in these parts, so let's stroll on to the next stop where there is a somewhat more interesting view.  Here is the entrance to Schloss Glienicke itself, splendid with fountain and gold lions. 

Schloss Glienicke, October 2015. My photo.

Hmm. Well, there's a lot more of this fantasyland out here, and some weeks more of fine weather for exploring.

Havel 4

Upstairs and Downstairs and Through the Woods

I'm heading south from Spandau, out of its relatively dense flat urbanism. Presently the land is going to heave itself up into steep forested moraines and dunes--thousands of acres of forest, the Grunewald and the Düppeler Forest and the Potsdam Forest--and the Havel will slop out into bigger lakes. Here it's just a modest well-mannered city river with little park-patches like this along the banks. How the water sparkles in the September morning light--lots of beautiful days in this early autumn, perfect days for working through the woods.

Under-bridge view, Havel in Spandau, September 2015.  My photo.

By the time I get to the next bridge (or is it the second-next?) the land is getting less domesticated. The Havel splits and sprawls: in the stretch shown below, it blobs off to the left in a big bay called the Scharfe Lanke, and blobs off to the right in a fat side-channel called the Stößensee. Down the middle comes an artificial-looking straight channel, which I think is the truck route, so to speak: idle sailboats fill the side-blobs of the river while earnestly industrial barges make what speed they can down the middle channel. (The map is from the district website for this part of Berlin: the district Bürgermeister used to lead hikes for the citizens, and the red line on this map was the route for one of them.  The big blue line down the middle of the water is the border between Berlin and Brandenburg.)

River Havel, south of junction with Spree.
From Berlin.de portal, Bezirksamt Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf.

The bridge that runs across this industrial channel and across the little neck at the top of the Stößensee is the last bridge there will be over the Havel for a long long way. We are leaving the Berlin flatlands: there's a longish stair from the bridge down to the water here. Later there will be stairs through the woods, up the moraines and down the dunes. (Horrible stairs, actually: rail-less, broken, tilted out of true, choked with sand and slithery with fallen leaves. I'm not tackling these forest stairs again without my Tennessee walking stick.)

Stößensee bridge.  My photo, September 2015.

My route here is pretty straightforward (I think, although this turns out to be mildly wrong). It's pretty much the same as the Bürgermeister's hike on the map above, and then I go further south along the water to the end of the Grunewald (the Berliner Forst in the map above). 

I always feel as if I'm missing a lot, though, along the Havel. It's such an indefinite-infinite river, it seems as though you could wander around just the Berlin stretches of it for years (happily). Attempting to proceed from north to south down one side of it is semi-impossible, and the closer you come to doing this, the more you miss.

Just before the starting-point for today, for example, is a fine water-labyrinth, nothing but water and light and green. These are the Tiefwerder water-meadows, which I missed by coming down the other side of the river in the last stretch (must come back here sometime):

Tiefwerder Wiesen. Photo, Lienhard Schulz, Wiki Commons.

Then there is the wooded high ground between the Stößensee and the central channel, which used to be an island before the Berlin water table fell so much. Numbers of hikers are disappearing up the paths there on this fine day (must come back here sometime).


But now I want to make my southing, just keep going and get some orientation along the main line of the river.  So: down the stairs to the water, and turn left.

The river here is fantastically full of boats (I begin to wonder if there are more boats than cars in Berlin, as it is not much of a car-owning city). There are a handful of sails out already on this cool weekday morning, as the breeze thins the last of the morning mist over the water. 

Sailboats on the Havel south of Heerstrasse, September 2015. My photo.

On this stretch of the river there is an ongoing controversy--not of a very violent nature--about the treatment of the banks. Some stretches of the bank are closed off for re-naturing (with very polite signs on the fences saying Dear visitors and visitoresses, we are trying to let the natural vegetation grow back here ...). The boat owners are worried that this movement will get out of hand and start taking over the boat harbors. But really, there seems to be plenty of room along the water. (Though perhaps a lot of it isn't deep-water harbor? Just shallows and numberless little coves where you can lie in the sand or swim near shore or even light a fire to heat your lunch.) 

Re-naturing means letting the reeds grow back, big-time:

Reeds along the Havel, Grunewald, September 2015. My photo.

On the right as you walk south there's this flat bit of shore--reeds, yacht harbors, coves, what-have-you--and then the Grunewald rears up on the left ... 

Fallen tree, Grunewald, September 2015. My photo.

... and rears up and rears up, and after a while the blaze for the path I am more or less following (greenway number 12, along the Havel) suddenly points up one of the stairways. 

Why should the path go this way?? It means going away from the water, which I do not especially want to do--but then, the main greenway markers are generally reliable, and we may be going off this way because there's a dead end along the water further up, at some place where there isn't a stair or any other way to go forward. 

So, up we go, clumping and slithering, and regretting the absence of the Tennessee walking stick (which is leaning up against the last bookshelves in the study, by the novels T through Z, the math books, and the old theater programs and old maps).

Ah, here we are: definitely a worthwhile detour. Maybe the path just takes us here for the view?

Havel from Grunewald, September 2015. My photo.

It turns out that the path is taking us up to the Carlsberg (second highest point in the Grunewald) and the Grunewaldturm--which is one of those silly silly objects that the pre-World-War-I generation strewed across the German landscape as monuments to national glory.  There is an over-life-size marble version of Kaiser Wilhelm I in it, and probably a very fine view from the top, but I'm not a big tower-climber.

Grunewaldturm.  Photo by Times, Wiki Commons.

So let's go down through the woods and back to the river. I hope there is some alternative to a steep stair ... and so there is. Path down, more path down, shallow steps, and then what could be more inviting than this long carpet of green through the trees? Gently, gently down.

In the woods near the Grunewaldturm, September 2015. My photo.

This is very far from being the wilderness out here, it's city forest with bus stops in it; but it's not exactly sidewalk-land either, and I do like to get out away from sidewalk-land every now and then.  Where did I get such a taste for country walks? It's not so easy to acquire in the US. But we did walk, my mother and brother and I, just ambling down roads that weren't much used, or along the tracks by the irrigation canals. Out on a fine afternoon, with the family knapsack packed with apples and crackers and sardines. (I'm sorry I lost track of the family knapsack in some move or other; it had belonged to my mother's father in World War I, and it showed every indication of lasting in good condition to the end of time.)

It's sad, in much of the US it's hardly possible just to take off across the fields and through miscellaneous patches of woods on foot. Sure, you can drive to a state park somewhere and go round on the little loop trail with its excessive signage and possible pavement--and this is better than nothing, but at some level this is stupid, it's like being in the gym, it's like being a dog that's never allowed off the leash. But here ... ah, we can go where we want. 

What a very beautiful day this has become. The leaves have started to turn, just a little here and there. They don't turn all at the same time here (one linden tree may change color weeks after another linden tree) so the forests don't do the big sheet-of-flame act that they do in the US at this season. But it's handsome enough:

Along the Havel, September 2015. My photo.

And here's a little bay, the Lieper Bucht, which looks suitable for lunch. Here's a not-too-damp fallen log where we might sit with a sandwich, admiring the impressionist-looking fallen leaves in the shallow water in the cove:

Shallow water, Lieper Bucht, Havel, September 2015. My photo.

Then here come the little white afternoon clouds, with reflections in the bay that look solid and deep, deep under water, as if you could pass over them in your boat without scraping the keel:

Lieper Bucht, Havel, September 2015. My photo.

And across the sky they look like stepping-stones to the other side of the water, a sky-route to Brandenburg in this long unbridged stretch:

On the Havel, September 2015. My photo. 

(Isn't this a wonderful river?  I love the Havel.) There's a swan far out on the water; I whistle to it and it comes. Swans will often come if you call, and will appear to listen--though with an appearance of rude swan-like skepticism--if you talk to them. (Ducks are not attentive in this way; they just bobble around hoping for treats.) However, swans like treats as well, and since I have neither treats nor conversation when the swan arrives, it pretends to be interested in other matters. 

Swan in Havel, September 2015. My photo.

So we forge on for a bit; and then the path leads back to the Havelchaussee, a small street that runs through the edge of the Grunewald not far from the river. It's not at all a busy street, especially if you don't count the bicyclists puffing on the hills. It has some rather spectacular mushrooms along the streetside, which are not without interest:

Mushroom along Havelchaussee, September 2015. My photo.

But I don't want to be on a street. Besides, after a bit it angles off the wrong way: it crosses the forest to meet the freeway on the other side, and if you follow it you have the joy of walking right beside the freeway for the last kilometer or two before the S-Bahn station where I am planning to pick up a train home.  Ugh: no freeway-side hiking for me. So ... could I just cut through the forest for the last few kilometers? 

There are of course paths. Equally of course, the map is unreliable with respect to the paths, I know this from past encounters. I also have doubts about the truth of my compass. But it isn't far; and look, there's the sun, if I keep it just at my left shoulder like this--if I can find a path straight enough to allow this--it should be easy. Besides, once I am well into the woods, I can hear the distant murmur of the freeway. It's faint, but it's there; if I don't seem to be getting where I want to go, I can always head in the direction of car-murmur and I'll come out of the woods in some quasi-useful, identifiable place.  

The great thing is to avoid long nasty stairs, so I keep on the (descending) road until I'm a little lower down, and then head off on a big track through the forest. And--oh, this is excellent, there's a sign on a tree showing a little horse icon. This is a bridle path, exactly what we want. Horses do not do stairs.  

And in a kilometer or so we come to a very handsome signpost in the middle of the woods:

In the Grunewald, September 2015. My photo.

Hmm. So if we go off one way here, we hit the freeway (that's the Avus), but if we go off the other way we land up at the back of the big Wannsee swimming beach, which is not really that entertaining either. The ideal would be to angle between the two, stay in the forest as long as possible, and come out somewhere not too far from the S-Bahn. According to the signpost and my map, this is not an option; but one can't take these things too seriously.  

It looks as if there's a species of path that goes at the desired angle here--and more spectacular fungus, this time on a load of fallen birch trunks that the foresters have been cutting up:

Fungus on birch log, Grunewald, September 2015. My photo. 

It's a bit dark here, as you can tell from the shadows in the photo. But let us proceed ... and eventually, up ahead, I can see the light getting broader where the trees thin out, and the sound of cars becomes more pronounced. It will be interesting to see just where we are coming out. 

And what is the first thing that hoves into view?  The big green-and-white S marking the S-Bahn station.  Perfect landfall. Time to go home.

Interlude on the Rhine: Cologne

In August, in the terrific heat, we went to a wedding in southwest Germany. Pleasant days at a little country hotel; at night people simply left the doors of their rooms open while they slept or while they were out dancing, to let it cool out. (Hard to imagine doing this in the US, but maybe I just move in the wrong circles there?) Supper out on the edge of a meadow the first night, at tables under little fruit trees, with leaves rustling against the swelling fruit--pears? apples? Hard to tell which, in the country summer dark. Wedding in the middle of the next day in the Rathaus, in an overfilled room in the blasting noon heat. (Lots of fun watching the formally dressed guests standing against the walls, trying not to sweat too horribly onto the baroque gilt paneling.)

Since we were going to be over on the west side of Germany anyway, Archangel and I decided to spend several days in Cologne (Köln) along the way; I hadn't been there for decades, and he hadn't been there except for the kind of one- or two-day visit in which you see nothing but meeting rooms. 

Cologne is a little over four hours from Berlin on the train, and it's in a quasi-different universe. We're back in Western Civ here. When our part of Germany was still trackless swamp, in 100 A.D. or so, Cologne was the biggest city in northern Europe. Fresh water piped in, indoor heating, mosaic-floored dining rooms with correctly drawn motifs from classical mythology. (For friends old enough to be I, Claudius fans: Claudius' wife Agrippina, Nero's mother, was born in Cologne.)

Fllor mosaic, Römisch-Germanisches Museum, Köln.  Photo, M. Seadle, Aug. 2015

Plaques in the sidewalk mark where the Roman city wall was, and provide a sketch map of the Roman city:

Sidewalk plaque, map of Roman Köln. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

All this gives the city a very different feel from Berlin, which does not have so long a past as a city and does not feel so rooted in what past it has; Berlin is more like an American city in this way. 

** 

Attitudes toward the past make a bit of a US-European divide. I remember sitting at a conference breakfast one morning between European and American colleagues; one of the Europeans said, half-ironic and half-appalled, "I have seen the end of history and it is California. People in California don't have the faintest idea what was happening fifty years ago in the place where they live." You could see the little wheels going around in the minds of the Americans on the other side of the table, with some of them thinking, "Well, that isn't really true, you know," and some of them thinking, "Good God, why should anyone care what happened fifty years ago?" (And neither group was quite willing to say what they thought.)

Why does this seem to matter? I don't know, I'm from the American West, we don't do pasts there. And yet ...

In some places in Cologne the Roman wall is still there, edging a shopping center or blocking a churchyard, or standing like this second-century tower, now tucked under the balcony of the neighboring apartment house and serving as a temporary bicycle stand.

Roman tower, Köln. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

How small the tower is; how small the city walls and their defensive towers often were in Roman and medieval times. Before the age of artillery, it didn't take much to make a town defensible. What could you do against a really thick two-story wall like this, before artillery? If you put ladders up against it, the people on top would push the ladders over or pour down boiling oil on you; if you threw stones at it with a catapult, they were likely to bounce off. It's the big guns of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century that gradually put an end to the age of city-republics and hasten the arrival of the territorial states that we grew up thinking were the only natural way to divide up the world. 

The prosperous city-republics that were a dominant political life-form in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were richer on a per capita basis than princely territorial states like France or England or Spain; but they didn't have nearly as many capita, and in the end it wasn't enough to finance the fantastic expenses of casting the big guns and hauling them around the countryside and training people to operate them. A bit like nuclear weapons, later: it drastically raised the ante for being an international power.

**
So, money ... One of the uses of history, in a place like Cologne, is that it has always made money. Total tourist revenues for the city these days are something on the order of seven billion euros a year, and mostly people come to see what the past has left behind, the cathedral and the museums. (Annual maintenance costs of the cathedral, which is the main attraction, are about five million; it's cheap at the price.) 

I had forgotten what an astonishing object the cathedral is. So many of the great urban Gothic churches are hemmed in by their neighborhoods, just poking their heads up above the neighboring rooflines; but in Cologne the neighborhood doesn't even come up to the cathedral's knees. 

Cologne cathedral, Rhine.  Photo, Wiki Commons. 

What shall we call this: the world's greatest monument to mixed feelings? Our Lady of Perpetual Politics? It's often been a site for fierce church-state divisions and for attempts to deal with them. If you look at photos of the festivities at the completion of the cathedral in 1880, it's conspicuous that this was a state event and the church wasn't taking much part. The Berlin government had given some of the impetus and some of the funds for completing the building, and Kaiser Wilhelm was there to see the results--but the Berlin government was interested in the cathedral as a German cultural monument (look, we can do Gothic too, just like the French, but bigger!); they weren't so happy with its function as a working church. 

In fact the Archbishop of Cologne was in exile at the time the cathedral was finished, because the Berlin government saw Catholicism as a danger to the state.  (Or possibly it could not distinguish between things that were dangers to the state and things that just seemed icky (foreign!)--as Rhenish catholicism, with its riotous carnivals and its armies of improbable saints, undoubtedly did seem to rational-Protestant Berlin. Berlin does not do carnival, and--as I noticed when I was out shopping the other day--its attempt at Oktoberfest is pathetic. The stereotype, not entirely untrue, is that Protestants just don't have the hang of riotous feasts; it's like being white folks and not having rhythm.) 

The Kulturkampf--the culture war, Prussia's attempt to reduce the influence of Roman Catholicism in the new Germany of the nineteenth century--was one of the last (considerably diminished) rounds of the intra-Christian religious battles--church versus state, church versus church versus state--that had torn up Europe for almost as long as there was a (post-Roman) Europe. (The long violent wrestling with church-state problems--which puts a big injection of ideology into warfare--is one of the things that makes the western world into what it is; so far as I know, there's no real equivalent in other great civilizations like China and India, which tend to more pacific religions.)

By the end of the seventeenth century a common solution was to enforce religious uniformity within a country (translate: burn the heretics) and to keep the chosen church fairly firmly under the control of the state. To the princely heads of state it seemed inevitable, logical, natural, that you couldn't have multiple allegiances in a single state--it just wasn't going to work. Either you have someone in charge who is really in charge--the prince--or you have anarchy, the war of all against all; and the seventeenth century gives everyone a well-founded horror of this latter outcome. (Either you have the Assad family, or you have the Syrian civil war, in effect. Not really true, but it seemed convincing at the time.)

The treaty that ended the first round of Catholic-Protestant wars in Central Europe in the 1550s established the rule that the prince determines the religion of his state, and if you don't like it you had better pack your bags. But what if there is no prince? In the 1550s there are still a lot of free imperial cities (for most practical purposes city-republics) in central Europe; and the rule established for cities in the treaty (a detail that does not always get into the history books) is that multiple forms of religion had to be tolerated within the city boundaries. And so they were, and it often worked, for a long time when it didn't work in the princely territorial states.

(This tradition strikes deep roots. There is a nice example from Lübeck, that classic North-German merchant-republic. In the not-so-distant past there was a move from the upper levels of the Catholic church to canonize some of its Lübeck priests who had been executed for resisting the Nazis. Some of the relevant Catholic parties in Lübeck politely withheld cooperation in the canonization process (which I think therefore did not go forward), on the following grounds: The clerical resistance to the Nazis in Lübeck was a joint Catholic-Protestant project. And okay, we completely understand that you can't canonize Protestants, but ... if not them, then not us either. The common loyalties of the city trump ideological divisions.)

**

We could run the church-state conflict movie backward several centuries and we would land in Cologne again, where the then archbishop was hammering out new ideas about church-state relations in the mid-twelfth century. --Or no, probably he wasn't doing it here, because he wasn't here very much. He had been given the office of archbishop because it was a good office, it gave him funds and status; he was a confidant and principal advisor of the emperor, who was happy to give him good things. He wasn't even a priest. He was a leader of troops in battle, an able manager, a patron of edgy satirical poets, a well-read man with ideas about how the world should run. (Eventually, several years after becoming archbishop, he was finally ordained a priest, to avoid the nuisance of the complaints that he wasn't one.)

This was Rainald of Dassell--on the right below; the man on the left is a goldsmith who did some spectacular work for Rainald and the cathedral. 

Rainald of Dassel (r) and Nicholas of Verdun, Kölner Rathaus.
Photo, Raimond Spekking, Wiki Commons.

Rainald is almost an exact contemporary of Thomas à Becket in England, and they seem, initially, to be much the same sort of person: the clever ambitious operator in bureaucracies; the king's confidant, the witty, persuasive, educated public man. The King of England and the Emperor in Germany (who were some remote sort of cousins) were both having trouble with the church at the time, and both had the same idea: I will put my best friend and most able adviser in charge of the church in my territory--surely that will solve the problem? (Becket also, like Rainald, was not yet a priest when he was made Archbishop of Canterbury; but he remedied this situation much more quickly than Rainald did.) 

Becket was in the grip of ideas, of given categories: I am a priest now, this makes everything different. He resigned his job as the king's chancellor, opposed the king fiercely in church-state conflicts, and ended up murdered.

For Rainald, who did not resign his job as chancellor and was not murdered, ideas were servants not masters. If our ideas make trouble for us, he thought, then let us create new ideas. (Which will perhaps make new troubles--what are ideas for, if not to make troubles?--but that will come later.) Rainald knew something of the Roman tradition of the emperor as a god; perhaps he knew something also of the quasi-magical aura surrounding the Frankish kings. The way to think about this, he concluded, is that the imperium, the secular power held by the emperor, is itself sacred. If this is so, if the state as well as the church is something holy, then what gives the church priority over the state? Perhaps nothing. The state is supreme. To run the empire well and expand its reach (whacking Saxons or Arabs or whoever the prevailing border-enemy is) is then as good a claim to sainthood (with all the magical privileges appertaining thereto) as converting the heathen or feeding the poor or solving theological puzzles.

To underline this point, Rainald wanted Charlemagne--that sturdy whacker of enemies and begetter of illegitimate children--to be declared a saint. (Standard reference works will tell you that Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor, but this is not quite right, since the Holy Roman Empire, as a term, appears to be Rainald's invention.) When the pope of the time would not cooperate, Rainald--a master of organizational maneuvering--got an anti-pope elected who did the job. 

Rainald and his emperor did not fall out, unlike Becket and his king. In the interests of cementing the holy-empire idea (and putting down some uppity Italian city-republics along the way), they undertook an Italian campaign, in which Rainald led his portion of the imperial army against the much larger forces of the Roman commune. And like Napoleon in Russia, he beat the local army but not the local weather. In the hot Roman summer, the northern soldiers dropped like flies (malaria, dysentery, some kind of plague). Rainald died in Rome, not yet fifty years old; the imperial army melted northward, with the nascent city-republics in the north snapping at the remains. The emperor ended up fleeing for his life, alone, in the un-godlike disguise of a servant who looked after horses.

**
The lower part of the present Cologne cathedral was built in the later middle ages, after Rainald's time. (The builders didn't finish it then; there wasn't enough money when tourist revenues dried up after the Reformation, and it was left for the Protestant Prussians in the nineteenth century to put the top on the building, in the interests of the glory of the national state.) During much of the medieval building campaign, Cologne was for most practical purposes a city-republic run by merchants and craftsmen. The archbishops, who would have liked to make a princely state out of Cologne and the environs, had been effectively booted out. They could come into town for services at the cathedral, but they couldn't try to run the place. 

There's a fine late-medieval relief sculpture in the Cologne historical museum, showing the city militia defeating an attack by the soldiers of an archbishop who was still hoping to run the place. The city's patron saints appear in the sky overhead, backing up the city troops and taking occasional whacks at the archbishop's men. The city expects its patron saints to stand with the city council, not with the church.  

But the city is under no illusions that the power of the council is holy or that the mayor is a god. 

**

Ah, but these patron saints: how omnipresent they are in Cologne--and there are a lot of them. Already in the middle ages, before the present version of the cathedral was begun, Cologne was one of the three biggest pilgrimage (tourist, if you like) centers in Europe, along with Rome and Santiago de Compostela; and most of the relics that made up the pilgrim attractions were ... oh, fakes isn't the right word. They were acquired and displayed, I imagine, in that kind of hopeful sincerity that results in the issue of nonfraudulent but implausible mortgages.

Because Cologne had been a big Roman city, it had substantial Roman cemeteries; and because it had been a capital of sorts for the Frankish kingdoms that succeeded the Romans, there were noble Frankish burials in the city as well. So when the population and the economy picked up, and people started building larger buildings and therefore digging deeper foundations, they tended to come across impressive-looking burials. (Nowadays you would probably come across unexploded bombs.) And, in let us say the eleventh or twelfth century, what would you suppose these burials to be? Not what they actually were, like some Roman slave merchant ...

Slave merchant, Roman tombstone from Cologne, Römisch-Germanisches Museum.
Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

... or thuggish Frankish nobleman, but instead a martyred saint. There were so many burials, Roman Cologne had been such a big city; it seemed to fit with stories of very large numbers of saints.

So the great ring of Romanesque churches around medieval Cologne had relics of saints by the the bushelful, saints by the hundreds and thousands. St. Gereon and the Theban Legion. St. Ursula and the eleven thousand virgins .... There is a somewhat peculiar room in the church of St. Ursula called the Golden Chamber, in which the walls are decorated with a kind of mosaic of gilded and geometrically arranged human bones. Ancient Roman citizens, mistaken for Christian virgins, presumably: stacked arm-bones, crossed leg-bones, heaped-up--what are those, kneecaps? The golden bones go on and on above the busts of what I take to be a random sample of the eleven thousand virgins.

Goldene Kammer, St. Ursula, Cologne. Photo, Hans Peter Schaefer, Wiki Commons. 

**

We were staying not far from St. Gereon, renting a little penthouse apartment just outside the ring boulevard where the medieval city walls had once been. I had been a little concerned that we were going to be steamed like lobsters, up in a top-floor place with big south windows in the central European heat wave. 

View from the living room, Bismarckstrasse, Cologne.
Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015

And we did steam a little, but the place had a fine cross-draft and a little rooftop terrace in the back; and it's surprising (to an American) how well you can get along without air conditioning when the temperatures are in the upper 90s, as long as you're in a place that's solidly built and well ventilated. As in our Berlin apartment, the place didn't really get hot until the end of the day, when the sun had been blazing at it for hours. So then we would go out and have dinner at the Afghani restautant down the street, or the Burmese restaurant down the street, sitting outdoors where it was pleasant, in the shade of the narrow street; and then we would come back and throw all the doors and windows open and sit up on the roof with a glass of wine until the place cooled out. Life could be much worse.

From roof terrace, Bismarckstrasse, Cologne. Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

I do love this kind of place. Everyone's out, on the summer nights: the street is full of pedestrians and bicyclists. The restaurant tables make the sidewalks almost impassable, but people thread through. Here is a tall young German man pushing a baby carriage with a very small baby in it; he stops for a while in front of the Burmese restaurant, to talk with the shuffling, down-at-heel old Burmese waiter, who is evidently a friend. Both men coo over the baby, in a discreet male sort of way; business comes to a stop. Someone on an apartment balcony across the street is playing sixties pop music: Will you still love me tomorrow? This is okay. 

There are people out everywhere, young people sitting on the windowsills in a bar in Brüsseler Strasse, young people sitting in doorways, older people at the couple of tables belonging to the bar by our front door. The older lot is there every night drinking Kölsch (the local beer), speaking Kölsch (the local dialect), being kölsch, that is, people from Köln. (I was trying to come up with an English equivalent for kölsch and was tempted by colognial, but thought better of it.) Why do I think that everyone who drinks in front of our door is related? They look like it. People whose families have been living here since the Bronze Age. Or at least since Agrippina's time. One evening the bar's customers are cooking their own chicken and sausages on a tiny grill perched perilously at the edge of the sidewalk.... Can we get to our front door without knocking their bratwurst into the gutter? Yes, we can. Well done, all. 

**
One day we went over to have a look at St. Gereon's church. When I was last in Köln, in 1978, it was still under repair for war damage. They didn't finish putting it back together until the mid-80s, I think. Parts of it had come through the war all right, as they had come through the fall of the Roman Empire and every catastrophe since, patched together differently after each disaster, built up and built out again in every good time. The buildings sort of accrete around people here, like shells accreting around shellfish.

The oldest part of St. Gereon dates from the fourth century. The building wasn't a church originally; it's not clear that anyone knows what it was, but it was sizable. It was eventually churchified, and from time to time other pieces were built onto the Roman core: one biggish chunk late in the eleventh century, a bigger chunk in the mid-twelfth, and then this terrific thing around 1220, the so-called decagon, which sweeps up the original fourth-century oval into an immense piece of daring, the biggest dome that Europe put up between Hagia Sophia in sixth-century Constantinople and the cathedral in fifteenth-century Florence. it takes the dark heavy Roman buiding and stretches it into this tremendous space that flies up, full of light. You could just stand there and stand there, feeling the space and the light.

St. Gereon interior (decagon).  Photo, Hans Peter Schaefer, Wiki Commons.

The decagon took some bomb hits in WW II, and it was touch and go for several years whether it would fall in--but it didn't, and good engineering and construction work have stabilized it again.

**
Center city, the old city, in Cologne was approximately 90% destroyed in the Second World War. There was some discussion, at the war's end, about whether the city should be abandoned and rebuilt elsewhere. After all, a greenfield rebuild could go faster, and then people would have some shelter in the coming winters, instead of freezing to death in the wreckage. Trying to rebuild on the old site would be slower because the ruins would have to be cleared away first--and the overwhelming question was, how can you clear this vast wreckage away, here, now, with no equipment, no fuel, no anything? 

The answer, here as in the rest of Germany, was: by hand, with little wagons, stone by stone. They rebuilt here.  A lot of postwar Cologne is plug-ugly--it was put up in haste, with limited funds--but it's here.

**

Most major European art museums began as princely collections (here is what the Hapsburgs looted from Italy, here is what Napoleon looted from the Habsburgs, etc., etc.). The Wallraff-Richartz Museum, which is the big pre-modern painting collection in Cologne, is of course not a princely collection, as the city preferred princes to keep their noses out of city affairs. 

The core of the collection is a bequest from the rector of the university in the 1820s. He had acquired a big lot of northern medieval and Renaissance art when the Rhenish monasteries were secularized in the 1790s, and stacks of altarpieces and loads of sculpture were dumped on a market that was not yet sure if this old stuff was worth having. (The eighteenth century had believed in progress and had found older art barbarous and probably worthless; how fortunate we are that the eighteenth century did not have bulldozers.) If you like North European art from the 14th-16th century, the Wallraff-Richartz is a fine place. 

One of the things you have to come to terms with in this art, however, is the Middle Ages' over-developed taste for gory martyrdoms. Here's a detail from a medieval Cologne painting of the "martyrdom of the ten thousand:" like the Theban Legion, the ten thousand were Roman soldiers who were allegedly killed en masse for their Christianity in the third century. (None of the local churches claimed to have found these bones, but then the ten thousand were supposed to have met their end in Armenia.)

Martyrdom of the Ten Thousand, Köln, 1325. 
Wallraf-Richartz Musum. Photo, M. Seadle.

It's hard to know how to respond to this kind of thing in quantity. I remember puzzling over this years ago, sitting in Freiburg cathedral, enjoying a little shade and cool on a blazing summer afternoon. (Freiburg does sort of stop you in your tracks; like some other big churches on the upper Rhine, it's red--in some lights almost purple--and if your art-history courses focus, as they used to, on French gothic, which is typically off-white, then deep purple Gothic comes as a bit of startlement.) Freiburg has a very fine set of windows that show torture and murder in beautiful sunlit color, row on row, higher than you can see. Was this entertainment, the medieval version of Grand Theft Auto or one of those movies that is nothing but shoot-em-'ups and car chases, piling up corpses right and left? Or was it there because the artistic programs in places like this aimed to show everything?--Here is the beginning of the world carved on one portal and the end of it on another portal; here are virtues and vices, here are kings and peasants, here is love, here is thuggish cruelty, here is everything.

I don't know. But the taste didn't last. By the time Cologne bought its big altarpiece for the cathedral, Renaissance prettiness had set in. On one wing of the altarpiece is St. Gereon with a subset of the Theban Legion--extremely well dressed and with good haircuts--before bad things start happening. Death has been discreetly deported from the painting.

Stefan Lochner, St. Gereon.
Photo, Yorck Project, Wiki Commons. 

On the other wing of the altarpiece is St. Ursula with a subset of the eleven thousand virgins, also extremely well dressed and with good haircuts. Pride of place in the big center panel of the altarpiece goes to the Magi, the three wise men, whose alleged relics were in the cathedral itself.

Tradition says that the bones of the Magi were kept in Constantinople (and how did they get there, one may ask?) until the mid-fourth century, when they were given to Eustorgius, the bishop of Milan, who carted them home to Milan, much to the benefit of Milan's pilgrimage industry. The sarcophagus where the bones were housed still sits in the church of Sant'Eustorgio in Milan, though without the bones in it now. The emperor Frederick Barbarossa, having looted them from Milan, gave them to Rainald of Dassell as a princely gift, and Rainald gave them to the cathedral in Cologne. (Much much later--somewhre around 1900?--the Germans gave some of them back, but Cologne kept most of the set, and the Milanese didn't put their share back in the sarcophagus, which is perhaps not very secure.)

Sarcophagus of the Magi, Sant-Eustorgio, Milan.
Photo, G. dall'Orto, Wiki Commons (cropped).

Several years ago Archangel and I were in Milan in a blazing August, traveling with the young friends to whose wedding we are now on the way. The heat was rolling through Milan that summer like a kind of natural disaster; our friends went through twenty-two liters of acqua minerale in a week. (They counted; I gave up. A shirt that you wore for half a day had salt lines on it like high-tide marks from the sea of sweat.) It was sweltering even underground, fathoms down: the Milan Metro was a hell of heat and noise. But the church of Sant' Eustorgio, dark as a cave, with that monstrous Roman sarcophagus wedged in one particularly dark corner, was not warm. There was a kind of permanent dank cold in that corner, a breath of gravestones (another reminder of the historic weight of death, different from the sunlit murders in the windows of Freiburg).

**

It's a curious thing: the patron saints of Cologne are foreigners. In so many places the local patron saint is a local: the first big-time bishop in the place, or the missionary who converted the region.  The Magi are from the (Middle) East and were never anywhere near Cologne in their lives. St. Ursula and her companions are Brits; the Theban Legion was probably from all over, but heavily eastern-Mediterranean--and allegedly St. Ursula and a portion of the Theban legion died here on the Rhine, but it was only in passing, so to speak. 

Cologne, as a trading city, a city on a big river, has often been full of foreigners. A very large portion of the population now is of non-German origin, and I believe I have read that the city takes in more refugees per capita than anywhere else in Germany. Much of the current non-German population goes back to the days of the post-World-War-II economic miracle, when Germany was bringing in workers from Italy and Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia, in enormous numbers, and a lot of the demand for labor was here in the heavy-industry Rhineland. 

I read an interview with an Italian priest who was sent up to Cologne a few decades ago to look after the southern Italians who had migrated to the city. He says, I have colleagues who are sent to America, and after three years there, they're Americans. I've been here twenty years, and I'm not a German. (He will probably never be a German.) He thinks about it a little longer.  But I'm certainly kölsch.  I'll bet any number of Italian Germans and Turkish Germans and what-have-you Germans here would say the same. Bin kölsch aber nicht deutsch. The common loyalties of the city trump ethnic divisions and national citizenship, up to a point.

**

According to the legend of the Theban Legion, St. Gereon was beheaded.

St. Gereon.  Photo, M. Seadle, August 2015.

This head, lying somewhat alarmingly in the churchyard, is by Iskender Yediler, a Turkish-born German sculptor who lives in Berlin and has a successful line in sculptures of Christian saints for clienteles in the Catholic parts of Germany.  Bismarck would probably be spinning in his grave (and it would serve him right). 

**
The Walraff-Richartz Museum's medieval collection would have been truly astonishing if the other big collectors of this art in the early nineteenth century besides the university rector, the sons of a Cologne merchant named Boisserée, had also left their paintings to the city. However, they turned down a Prussian bid and later sold the paintings to Bavaria, so the goods are in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.... Not that the Boisserées didn't do a lot for the home town. They did leave a good deal of medieval sculpture to the city; and they were principal activists in the Cologne portion of the movement to finish the cathedral, which around 1800 was an awkward half-built hulk that stood in some danger of being torn down. 

One of the spurs for finishing the building was that a fairly detailed medieval plan for the facade was discovered in Darmstadt in 1814. To be more exact, half of the original plan was discovered in Darmstadt. Someone had divided the plan in two, at some point between the thirteenth century and the nineteenth, and the other half had drifted away into who knows what eddies of historical destruction. But let us not underestimate the determination of the children of the city ... Sulpiz Boisserée found the other half in a shop in Paris and brought it home. 

This meant that it would be possible to complete the building as intended--not only steering around modern divisions of opinion about how to complete it, which might have delayed the project indefinitely, but also providing a fine sense of authenticity. (Which was of course totally inauthentic, since a medieval architect would never have stuck so slavishly to his predecessor's plans if styles and techniques had changed in the meantime.)

So Cologne, finely rooted in its historical identity, reminds us not to take this sort of thing too seriously. It's a fine thing to have a history, but (think of the eleven thousand virgins) surely we always manage to get the history wrong? 
A little nose-thumbing at the grand things is always in order.  

Cologne, Rose Monday parade.  Photo by Slick, Wiki Commons. 

**

So we went to the wedding and had a lovely time, and then I was sad, reading in the newspaper on the train home: it is expected that the linden trees in the German cities will not survive many more hot summers like this. What will Germany be without linden trees? (Think of the Schlosslinde at Augustusburg, whose crown was so large in its prime that they could put 120 dinner-tables under its branches. It's geriatric and somewhat disintegrating now, but if it lives another five or six years it will be eight hundred years old, on good documentation.)

The association of German city foresters is working on choosing replacements for the lindens and other trees that are likely not to make it through the next decades. (The chestnuts in Berlin looked like death this summer.) Gingkos are high on the list of replacement trees.  Gingkos are fine, but ... Would the grand promenade of Berlin (now hopelessly constructon-choked) be the same if it was not Unter den Linden but Unter den Gingkobäumen?  

Well, we'll see.