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.)

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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.

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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. 

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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.