Havel 7

"Fountain-head and source of rivers" 

If I were rigidly sticking to a down-the-Havel route--if there were any such thing to stick to--I would head on into Potsdam today. But I would like one more walk in the woods (real woods, not palace gardens) before the leaves are gone. When we walk, says Thoreau, we naturally go to the fields and the woods: what would become of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall?  The gardens are wonderful, but I want another walk in the woods in these last mild days, under the last leaves, before winter and age and necessity catch up with us again and stomp on us with their heavy boots. 

**

The late October days were beautiful, one after another after another, and my desktops (both wooden and electronic) were stacked with tasks that kept me indoors. But finally I finished a couple of reviews and some large editing jobs and the assembling of our German income tax documentation, and (how perfect!) the next day was forecast to be mild and sunny again. 

But when I opened the window in the morning, all I saw was The Fog that Ate the Universe, and the forecast for the whole day had been switched from Sun to Fog, and then to Overcast and chill. (Yes, I realize this is a picture of nothing: the apartment windows look out in three directions, and the nothing was staring in at us from all sides.) 

View from living room. October 2015, my photo.

Well.  Fountain-head and source of rivers, Thoreau calls the mist, Drifting meadow of the air. All very fine, but in this murk, can you even see where the river is, so as not to fall into it? 

By ten in the morning you could see your hand in front of your face, however, and by eleven the fog had thinned back even more, so I wrapped up and got the train out to Wannsee. 

Out across the west side of Berlin, watching out the train windows—Savignyplatz, Charlottenburg, Westkreuz--and the light came and went, as the rents in the cloud-cover opened and closed. Light sliding like theater spotlights over the heavy old classicizing apartment houses, with their gods in the gables and their balconies balanced on the heads of caryatids. And then the train turned south into the forest, into the Greenwood, and the wet gray closed in again.  When I got out and headed up to the Wannsee bridge, I was wishing that I had put on something warmer, against this bone-penetrating autumn chill. 

Ah well, let’s go briskly.

**

The first of the lakes that separate this side of the Wannsee-Island from the Berlin mainland (see map at beginning of Havel 5 post) is the longish, stringy Little Wannsee. It's villa-land here along the Little Wannsee, neither as grand or as sinister as along the Big Wannsee, on the northern route from the Wannsee bridge (see Havel 5 post).  

Am kleinen Wannsee. October 2015, my photo.

Some of the old villas here have become part of a hospital; some have been split into apartments; one is a sport-school for the (currently scandal-plagued) Football Association. Some are still single-family houses. 

I went a long way without meeting another living soul. No public face-to-face out in these parts: people, if existent, are locked up in their houses or cars. 

Thoreau, who had a vigorous dislike of large houses and fenced property and of a world in which walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean trespassing on some gentleman's grounds, said--perhaps incorrectly--that the word villa is related etymologically to the word vile.  

Well, this is a little cranky and unfair, perhaps.

Sometimes you can see the lake along here, but not so often.

Kleiner Wannsee. October 2015, my photo.

After the Little Wannsee comes the Pohlesee, and then the Stölpchensee, mostly blocked off by house property on this side of the water. (There's better walking on the other side, but then I'd be on the mainland, and I meant to stick to the island side on this stretch, to see what it was like.) Between the latter two lakes the neighborhood half-melts into village: instead of the big 1900ish neo-this-and-that villas there are older-style farmhousey houses, outer-Berlin vernacular architecture, somehow comforting (though just as given to building fences).

On Alsenstrasse. October 2015, my photo.

I pass a doctor's office and see from the plate on the fence that the doctor's name is Traugott Vogel. Trust-God Bird, in translation. An old-fashioned name for an old-fashioned-looking part of town. The owner of the name could, of course, be a young man just out of school, with his hair in a neon-green mohawk. But it's unlikely.

Isn't it curious that the stream of linguistic history runs at a different pace for names than for the rest of the language, and that this difference varies across languages? In (US) English, the general written language hardly changes between the Debbie-and-Mike era and the Ashley-and-Josh era, but the name landscape has certainly changed. And the name landscape gives you a certain feel for what the social world is like: you know that an Ashley has probably been having a different life than a Debbie did, and you have a rough idea of what the differences are.

As for differences between English and German--well, my sensitivity to tone and nuance in German isn't all it should be, but I don't think that English in general has changed a lot more than German has over the last couple of centuries, while the historical change in names in the two languages has been different. Seventeenth-century Pietist names like Traugott lasted much longer in Germany than the comparable seventeenth-century Puritan names in England, for example. To a present-day English speaker it seems comic or bizarre that a notable political figure in the 1650s was named Praisegod Barebone; these names dropped out of use quickly in England in the following generations. But here they didn't: Archangel’s great-grandfather, who lived into the 1950s, was named Praisegod (Gottlob), and the name was common enough still in his time. Traugott was still a moderately common name in the nineteenth century. Here, by now, these names sound old-fashioned, but not strikingly comic or bizarre. 

Much of difference between the political and social history of England and Germany for a couple of centuries is embedded in the fact that in 1850 you (if male) might well be named Gottlob in Germany but not Praisegod in England.

And what does it do to the tone and feel of our lives, to have different name-landscapes around us? Old names are like old trees in the landscape.

**

Up on the high ground above the Stölpchensee is a church that I have to walk around for a bit, thinking. On the one hand, it does something to liven up this largely dreary suburban landscape. On the other hand--must he use this yellow brick? Berlin just isn't yellow-brick country: yellow brick is sore-thumb-like, here. This thing looks as if it belongs somewhere in Ontario.

Kirche am Stölpchensee, October 2015. My photo.

"He" is the designer of the church, the passionate amateur architect who was king of Prussia in the 1840s and 1850s. This was Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who had spent childhood summers on Peacock Island early in the nineteenth century and caught the bug of building faux-medievalisms along the Havel (see previous post). (He also built them elsewhere: he was, for example, active in the decision to save and complete Cologne cathedral (see Cologne post, October 2015); and he is also responsible for another out-of-place-looking yellow-brick neo-Romanesque church in Berlin, over in the north central part of the city.) 

He didn't do the detailed architectural work for the Berlin churches, of course, but provided the design sketch and supervised the detailed planning. There are certainly worse-looking nineteenth-century churches in Berlin: the yellow brick, in situ, is vile; but the basic design has some dignity.

**

I turn off, away from villa-land, onto the Stölpchenweg, which starts off as a very bad street of a very Berlin type (one lane, broken pavement and lots of mud) with biggish houses on one side and rising woods on the other. 

Watch the DHL van struggling to get down the street! 

Watch me struggling to get past the DHL van when he stops to deliver boxes! This is not easy! (It looks straightforward in the picture, but by the time I got up to the van the driver had his doors open on both sides and was off discussing something with the package recipient, which made for more of a challenge.)

Stölpchenweg, October 2015.  My photo.

The more sizable trees at the streetside are protected with skirts of wooden slats to keep passing vehicles from gouging or stripping the bark when the vehicles have to squeeze up into the trees, like the van that has just let the DHL truck by. (How carefully the woods are kept here: this is certainly no wilderness. But it isn't garden, either; it's a very special (happy-making) kind of intermediate landscape.)

Along Stölpchenweg.  October 2015, my photo.

At last and at last, I'm past the houses and into the woods, with the fogcloud thinning and some pale sunlight dazzling on the path. Fallen leaves have collected the water from the morning mist, making sun-mirrors just a dewdrop deep along the path.

Into the woods. October 2015, my photo.

And here we are at the Griebnitzsee, a long thin lake shaped like a check-mark: first we go southwest, and then the lake turns a corner and we go northwest.  Several nice km, forest all the way. 

A number of big trees are down here—not recently, by the look of them; it might have been last March in hurricane Niklas.

Along the Griebnitzsee, October 2015. My photo.

Presently the sun vanishes again, and the clouds come trailing over the water:  eek, this is cold and damp.  

Griebnitzsee. October 2015, my photo.

It makes me think of reading Walden in junior high school. One takes away such odd and partial things from books at that age (and perhaps always): the part that fascinated and bemused me then, as a semi-desert dweller, was Thoreau's description of the mist rising from the water in the morning. 

The what rising from the what? When there are waters at all out in the semi-desert, mist does not rise from them. There was a seasonal pond in the pasture across from our house, but the water looked hard as glass and the air above it as bright as glass in the mornings ...  So I was much occupied with puzzling over what the rising mists might have looked like, and I missed most of what Thoreau really had to say.  

Portions of what Thoreau had to say were stolen (borrowed, translated) from Berlin.... The Anglo-American world cribbed so much from the Germans in the nineteenth century. Darwin’s conclusion to The Origin of Species is said to have borrowed heavily (without credit) from Alexander von Humboldt.  Emerson and Thoreau, who were pounded into our heads in junior high school as American originals, got a lot of their ideas from Coleridge, who quasi-plagiarized them from Schelling. (What non-specialist even knows who Schelling was, these days? But when he succeeded Hegel in the chair of philosophy at the U of Berlin in the 1840s, it was a huge event, there was a crowd at his inaugural lecture--and what a diverse and connected little world it was at that lecture: Friedrich Engels rubbing shoulders with Soren Kierkegaard, Alexander von Humboldt with Jacob Burkhardt ....)  

And then, like a circulating current in the Atlantic, the ideas came back, from America to Germany, having suffered various sea-changes along the way. Nietzsche, who overtly had little use for Schelling, was an intent reader of Emerson, who had got his ideas (at one remove) from Schelling. Nietzsche said that he had never "felt so much at home in a book" as he did in Emerson's Essays (in German translation, which may well have made something rather different of them). 

Presumably Emerson would have been horrified by Nietzsche and vice versa if they had met. When the two of them wrote the same thing, it often didn't mean the same thing at all .... (This is why Socrates mistrusted writing and wanted all intellectual discussion face-to-face: let's talk to each other in the street, let's not sit alone and read what people have written (maybe in another country, maybe long ago). Writing will always be read out of context and misunderstood, Socrates thought. And this is true, but .... Socrates is a bit of a control freak about his own ideas. Taking things out of context makes the world go round, it makes the world new; and of course we can't help doing it. (Nietzsche and Schelling were both named Friedrich Wilhelm, by the way: apparent shortage of male names in Prussia in this period, as noted last time. I don't suppose either of them would have been happy at being named Gottlob.)

The light comes and goes. Veils on the water sometimes, light on the leaves sometimes, shifting and flowing.  

Along Griebnitzsee, October 2015. My photo. 

The season is getting on, though; the leaves are starting to pile up on the ground between the beech trees' toes.

Beech tree roots and fallen leaves. October 2015, my photo.

**

No boats out today.  Sailing in the fog is not such a smart thing to do, and the joint-stiffening cold is undoubtedly worse on the water.  --But no, I hear something coming. Not a pleasure boat but something big, bound upstream on business. Something very slow. I stand at a gap in the woods and wait (and wait) for it (I love barges, never miss a change to watch a barge).  

What is this? It’s rather glittery, as the light swells for a few minutes: it must be some kind of garbage barge, with the heaped glass and plastic picking up the light.  Ah: it’s one of those big floating dumpsters they have at demolition sites, shoved along by a push-boat behind it. There’s a large quantity of knocked-down building in it, broken up small to pack efficiently into the floating dumpster. No wonder it’s slow, though the push-boat is a big one: an ex-building is a heavy thing to shove along the lake. 

Dumpster barge on the Griebnitzsee, October 2015. My photo.

The trees get brighter and brighter, even if the day doesn't. Much of the north side of the Wannsee-Island forest is a mix of oak and pine, which makes an attractive woodland; but just now it's hard to beat the beech and maple forest here on the south side.

Along Griebnitzsee, October 2015.  My photo.

And then here we are at the end of the path, where a big solid apartment house by the water announces the beginning of the built-up area again. 

End of the path along Griebnitzsee. October 2015, my photo.

The water narrows for a bit, and then widens out again in the Glienicker Lake. We’re in or near Klein-Glienicke, where the Hohenzollerns built houses for a longish time.  The way goes along the walls of the Jagdschloss (hunting lodge) Glienicke grounds.

Wall, Jagcschloss Glienicke. October 2015, my photo.

What a history-battered place this is. Almost every generation wanted to remake it, to kick the poor building into some new shape suitable for the age. Originally it was built in the 1680s for the Great Elector (see last post) as a fairly modest hunting lodge. Friedrich I, trying to play the grand monarch, expanded it and made it more elegant. Friedrich Wilhelm I, the frugal army-builder, indifferent to elegance, turned it into a military hospital. Friedrich II, who was interested in growing the economy out in Potsdam--he didn't like Berlin--gave the property to a successful Jewish silk manufacturer in Potsdam, to be used as factory space when he expanded his business into making luxury wallpapers. 

The wallpaper factory didn't last forever; a couple of generations later the property came into the hands of a philanthropic type who used it as an orphanage. Around 1860, a Hohenzollern younger son (one of the children who had played on Peacock Island early in the century) acquired the hunting lodge and renovated it for family use.

Gate, Jagdschloss Glienicke.  October 2015, my photo.

Later the property came into the hands of another Jewish businessman, who was then squeezed out through some unsavory maneuverings by a local Nazi and one of the large German banks in the 1930s.  After the war, it was used as a youth hostel and then a more generalized youth center, and Max Taut, in a moment of misguided modernism, stuck this black glass bay onto it (what can he have been thinking?).

Jagschloss Glienicke, October 2015. My photo.

Part of the Jagdschloss burned, early in the 2000s (faulty electrical cable, no fire alarm, insufficient pressure in the hydrants, typical local chaos).  It took years to raise the money for repairs, to get the contractors, to settle disputes about whether to remove Max T's hideous (and deteriorating) glass front or not. Probably the wrong decision was taken here, but who knows? These days the place is used as a continuing education center for social workers. 

**

I trail vaguely around the grounds, as the light fades in the misty afternoon. Here we are on the Glienicker Lake. (The name is not a sudden invasion of English into Berlin place names: "Lake" in northeast-German is a variant of Lanke, a word of Slavic origin that means lake or bay or stream and appears often on maps of this stretch of Berlin-Brandenburg.)

Glienicker Lake. October 2015, my photo.

I make my way down to the water to get a better look at the machine-house of Schloss Babelsberg on the other side, barely visible in the mist. (This object, which looks like a medieval baron's castle on the Welsh borders, houses the engine that pumps water uphill to the Schloss and its fountain. Another Hohenzollern faux-medievalism: Wilhelm Friedrich's project this time, however, not Friedrich Wilhelm's.)

Maschinenhaus, Babelsberg, October 2015, my photo.

A heron flies past, close and low and loud.

In the cloud-grey mornings

I heard the herons flying

… I have seen many Autumns

With herons blowing like smoke

Across the sky.

... says Amy Lowell, with gross disregard for biological reaiity. Herons don't blow like smoke across the sky, they flap and squawk and bang around. This one lands in an oak tree overhanging the water and continues to bang around, unsettled and dissatisfied with the perches it tries. It shakes down a shower of big acorns that plop into the water like rocks and conk the ducks passing below. The ducks withdraw in a flurry. 

A few of the acorns fall from the landward side of the oak tree, on my head. This is why I wear a good solid hat outside in the fall. Walking through the oaky stretches of the woods and parks in an autumn breeze is like being pelted with small stones. 

**

Then here we are back to the Glienicker Brücke, which has lately become more prominent in the public eye, thanks to the Steven Spielberg/ Tom Hanks movie that came out in October (Bridge of Spies). Some of the movie was shot in Berlin, of course, and some longish time ago Archangel stumbled over the production crew covering the front steps of his office with artificial snow on a mild un-wintry evening. But I'd forgotten all about it until a few days ago, when he sent me a link to the German trailer for the film. His office appears briefly in the trailer, looking just like his office where I pick him up for dinner sometimes, and at the same time looking glamorously sinister and Soviet. (It must be the artificial snow that does it.) Of course it is a bit sinister and Soviet in some ways. They finally got a decent roof on it last year (there had been some disquieting moments when you could see the sky through the old roof); and then the plumbing, which was renovated only nine years ago, collapsed again. (What does the university think is going to happen if they always just take the low bid? Archangel grumbles. This is not exactly a Sovietism, however.)

Glienicker Brücke, October 2015. My photo.

Well, over to the other side next time, at last. This means out of Berlin into Potsdam, but it's still on Berlin public transit, so we can go a little further before packing in the Havel project for the year.

Havel 6

Rabbits and Peacocks and Friedrich Wilhelms

The Tourism Board of the Kingdom of Jordan has bought advertising space on some of the S-Bahn trains and has repainted the train exteriors completely. So when I look down from the bedroom window in the morning, sometimes the Jordanian desert is rumbling by between the tree-tops, on the elevated tracks. Or perhaps the classical ruins at Petra or Amman are sliding up to the station platform in the misty chill of a Berlin morning. 

So I take a desert-fantasy train out to Hohenzollern fantasyland: about twenty minutes on the S-Bahn from our back door, and then ten minutes on the Peacock Island bus to the ferry pier. In a few more hours there will be crowds out here, on a fine autumn Saturday--people coming out of the Peacock Island bus, and coming out of it and coming out of it endlessly like clowns coming out of a phone booth in a comedy routine--but there isn't much of anyone here now. (What are these people doing in little boats by the end of the island: fishing? testing the water?) 

From the Peacock Island ferry. October 2015, my photo.

The fantasyland out here, a vast complex of palaces and gardens created by generations of Prussian rulers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is a UNESCO World Heritage site and is more than a little overrun with tourists in the summertime. (Peacock Island is just a little outpost: most of the complex is downriver in Potsdam.) But now, with the autumn mists and shadows closing in --and fine days shining out now and then in between--it's possible to wander around out here in some degree of quiet.

What are we to think of all this, in the autumn quiet, without voice-overs from tour groups?  I feel as if the map should say--in the manner of Here be dragons on medieval maps--Here be allegories.  Here be a big freight of historical meaning, heavy enough to sink half a dozen sailboats on the Havel. 

The Hohenzollerns, who built all this out here, have an unpleasant rep because the non-German world mostly remembers the last one, the bombastic militarist with the comic mustache, Kaiser Wilhelm II. Not fair, really; but the Hohenzollerns are a difficult lot. They're often talented people, artists more or less manqués; they're often trapped in impossible positions and flail around in the net of historical circumstance, breaking things. They work very hard, sometimes at destroying themselves. They're "like the human condition, only more so," as someone once said about life in Eastern Europe generally.

**

It's all very pretty out here, to be sure ...

Fountain on Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

... but these people, these builders and gardeners out here, are a little 
disquieting. 

Where to begin, with the disquiet? .... Let's say you're standing out here in the swampy, sand-hilly woodlands of northern Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, when Europe looks like a world of failed states, devouring themselves with viciously ideological civil wars. If you're the twenty-year-old who has just become the Elector of Brandenburg, a few years before the end of the Thirty Years War, what are you inheriting? A depopulated, ravaged country occupied by a hostile power; a mercenary army that is about to revolt because it hasn't been paid; an empty treasury; and a government of sorts run by a powerful minister who has been using his position to feather his own nest for decades and has no wish to be disturbed in this practice. 

The twenty-year-old is our first Friedrich Wilhelm. (Most significant male Hohenzollerns appear to be named Friedrich Wilhelm--or occasionally Wilhelm Friedrich--from here on, as were many other people of significance in this part of the world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Alexander von Humboldt's full name is Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander, and his brother Wilhelm's name is Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Carl Ferdinand. Nietzsche's given names of course are Friedrich Wilhelm, and Hegel's are Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.  ...  Is there a name shortage out here, or what?)

The young Friedrich Wilhelm who inherited in 1645 did not have much experience with government--his father, with whom he did not get along so well, had mostly kept him out of the family business. But he had spent his later teens in the Netherlands and studied at the University of Leiden; he had seen how one of the most successful states in Europe worked and was determined to build up Brandenburg on the Dutch model. When he became Elector, he promptly removed the all-knowing minister who had had his hand in the till; he concluded a truce with the hostile power, married a rich Dutch princess whose dowry plugged the budget deficit, and brought in immigrants to populate the empty land and build up the economy. Artists and skilled workers from the Netherlands, religious refugees from France, Jews who had been driven out of Vienna. 

This all works well: he goes down in history as the Great Elector, and gets a very baroque-prince type of statue, on horseback with armor and wig (surely people didn't wear these long curled wigs into battle--or did they?).

Elector Friedrich Wilhelm,  equestrian statue by A. Schlüter (copy in the Bode Museum, Berlin).
Photo Miguel Hermoso Cuesta, Wiki Commons.

Friedrich Wilhelm loved the countryside along this stretch of the Havel; he came down here to hunt, in this water-world of abundant wild boar and deer and water-birds. He built a hunting lodge about a mile downriver from the island, and some modest palaces further on. Ever mindful of the economy, he started a rabbit farm on what is now Peacock Island, under the old oaks. He could raise 800 rabbits a year on the island, and selling them made a nontrivial contribution to the treasury. (Henriette's dowry wasn't going to cover expenses for ever, after all.)

Oak on Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

The rabbits seem to have been undisturbed by another of Friedrich Wilhelm's commercial projects, an alchemist's laboratory in the open-meadow space on the east end of the island. (Kunkel, the alchemist, came to Brandenburg after a bad experience with the Elector of Saxony, who had employed him for a couple of years, promising a high salary. But the salary didn't get paid and didn't get paid, and finally the Elector refused ever to pay it, saying:  If he can make gold, then he doesn't need money from me. And if he can't make gold, then what am I paying him for? (The baroque prince feels entitled to be witty at the expense of the help.))

Friedrich Wilhelm was not so much interested in turning lead into gold as in turning the endless Brandenburg sand into a profitable product by developing superior, exportable glass. Kunkel's experiments led to some moderate success in this line, especially in the making of a deep red glass. (This was, in some ways, nontrivial science: in 1925 the Nobel Prize in chemistry went to a U. of Berlin grad and sometime glass-factory chemist who nailed the explanation for the chemical processes that Kunkel learned how to control but could not--in the 1680s--explain in a theoretically grounded way.)

Here we are on the alchemist's end of the island, looking in the faintly misty morning toward a little droplet of an island called Kalberwerder.

Looking toward Kalberwerder from Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

In the Great Elector's day, what is now Peacock Island was called Rabbit Island, Kaninchenwerder.  (The name brings back memories. Kaninchen was not a word that I knew in my student days, the first time I came to Germany. When I arrived at the Goethe Institut, where I was supposed to be learning the language, they assigned me housing in a little quasi-apartment in the house of a nice family, who inquired when I showed up whether I was afraid of Kaninchen--the place might not be so suitable if Kaninchen alarmed me. I didn't have a clue what Kaninchen were, but the quasi-apartment looked like a fine place to live, and the Goethe Institut seemed likely to be annoyed at having to do a reassignment. So I said that Kaninchen were fine, hoping silently that they weren't pit bulls or the living dead; but they were only the caged rabbits in the back garden.)

**

A social historian says that in this period in Europe the closest personal relation, the tenderest affection, was often between father and son, especially father and oldest son. Marriages and friendships might be matters of convenience and economic advantage, love affairs might be just matters of scratching an itch; but love between father and son went deep. 

Against this background, the Friedrichs and the Friedrich Wilhelms--whose father-son relations ranged from the chilly to the near-lethal--look even more desolate. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, as the man said, and for a long time this was the Hohenzollern way of being an unhappy family. 

Friedrich Wilhelm, in a rather unprincely moment, planned to divide his territory among his six sons after his death, as if it were a bank account and not a country. His oldest son Friedrich, who had expected to get the whole property and turn it into a significant kingdom, argued furiously with his father against this plan--and when his last surviving full brother died suddenly, Friedrich fled Berlin, thinking that his stepmother had gone into the poisoning business and that he himself would be next, to clear the field for her four sons. 

As it happened, Friedrich's stepmother was (probably) not in the poisoning business; Friedrich Wilhelm was deeply angry that his son would have thought so. Things were patched up, however, and Friedrich inherited a fairly intact property. With some complicated diplomatic maneuvering and a bit of luck he promoted himself from Elector of Brandenburg to King in Prussia; and he worked very hard at one of the recognized tasks of the baroque ruler (whether king or well-endowed lesser prince)--that is, to display. The prince is obliged to live sumptuously, to clothe and house himself with magnificence. He must feast and dance, he must have fine music and theater, court scholars and elegant mistresses. Conversation at court must be polite and witty and ornamented with references to the classics. (The French court had been working on this since the sixteenth century at least, supporting elegant poetry at a time when the amusements of the Brandenburg court consisted of watching the elector getting drunk and his wife throwing plates at him.) The prince must gain military glory--which did not mean big wars mobilizing the citizenry at large, but rather, selective, professional wars in which the prince could sometimes appear to advantage in armor, on horseback. 

The model for all this, of course, which any self-respecting German prince wanted to imitate, was Louis XIV. 

Louis XIV in Roman dress. Statue by Jean Varin
at Versailles, Salon de Venus. Photo by Urban, Wiki Commons.

The German princes rarely had much luck when trying to be Louis XIV, however. (This is the part of the human condition where we get stuck with jobs that we can't possibly do.)  Friedrich worked hard at magnificence without being altogether convincing. Here he is on the Charlottenburg Gate in our neighborhood, just beyond the Burger King, obviously doing his best, and somehow looking shorter than his wife Sophie Charlotte on the other side of the gate. (Surely the statues are the same size, for architectural symmetry?  But Sophie Charlotte looks terrifically imposing and Friedrich looks like a shrimp.)

Friedrich I, statue by H. Bauke on Charlottenburger Tor.
Photo, Axel Maruszat, Wiki Commons.

Poor Friedrich. He was not a big man, and someone had dropped him when he was an infant, damaging his shoulder and giving him a slightly hunchbacked look that the sculptors did their best to conceal. (The Berliners, who have never been mealy-mouthed, called him "Crooked Fritz.") He tried to do what kings do: he built churches and palaces in the grand style--much grander than his father's buildings--works that would leave his mark on the landscape more or less forever. 

He paid for a lot of nice work, but it wasn't forever. This was a room he commissioned in the Berlin city palace:

Bernsteinzimmer (Amber Room), Tsarskoye Seloe, 1931.
Photo by Branson DeCou, Wiki Commons. 

His grandson, who did not think much of Friedrich and did not like the city palace, took this room apart and gave it as a diplomatic gift to Russia (possibly on the theory that the Russians would like heavily ornate, out-of-fashion stuff). It was reconstructed in Russia in the eighteenth century; and like many valuable things in eastern Europe, it vanished mysteriously in 1945.

--But Friedrich did his best: he founded a university, an academy of arts, an academy of sciences. Sophie Charlotte, who fancied herself as an intellectual and was unimpressed by her husband's capacity in this respect, tended to be the decision maker here. She dragged in Leibniz, who was employed by her family's court in Hanover, to be the first head of the academy of sciences in Berlin. (Leibniz, incidentally, had a fairly serious go at trying to explain calculus --as recently invented by himself and Isaac Newton--to Sophie Charlotte. It's the mathematics that tells us how one variable will change as the result of an infinitesimally small change in another variable. Hmmph, said Sophie Charlotte, Why does Leibniz think he has to explain the infinitesimally small to me?  After all, I'm married to Friedrich, she said. It wasn't as bad as throwing plates at him, perhaps, but ... poor Friedrich.)

When he died, the state was massively, terrifyingly bankrupt. The skills of the ideal baroque prince did not include being able to read the accounts.

**

So what do you do if you inherit now? The question is not only how you can pay off the debts and cover ongoing expenses, but also how you can be, what you should do with your life. If the model of baroque princeliness is as bankrupt as the Prussian treasury, what is your model instead? What should fill your life, if not courtly display?

The answer here (not in France, not so much elsewhere in Europe, but deeply important in Germany) is: you should work. (When you learn German as a foreigner--at least this was true for a long time, and it still may be so--one of the first words you learn is fleißig, which means hard-working.  Die Deutschen sind fleißig. Sind die Menschen in Ihrem Land fleißig? Germans are hard-working. Are the people in your country hard-working?)  Hard, efficient, endless work toward a goal that slithers on the knife-edge between the promotion of the general welfare and the acquisition of power. Work, responsibility, duty. The next two Prussian kings are monsters of responsibility, in their different ways: pure superegos stalking the rooms of Charlottenburg Palace. 

They don't get out to Peacock Island much; they hardly have time for messing about in boats. There isn't so much out on the island any more, in any case: the alchemist's lab burned down long ago, and Friedrich I probably did not attend to harvesting the rabbits.

And how people's best-intended actions turn against them, tipping the boat over into the river ...  Friedrich I had founded a university at Halle; his son Friedrich Wilhelm went there as a student and came back with values absolutely antithetical to Friedrich's. (Opportuntely so, under the circumstances.) Simple piety, frugality, practical competence. When Friedrich died, Friedrich Wilhelm cut three-quarters of the court budget, sending unemployed courtiers flying in all directions within a week of his accession (artists, scholars, ceremonial experts, musicians--J.S. Bach picked up a couple of good ones cheap, under the circumstances). He sold off or leased three quarters of the royal palaces. What money he could scrape together as king went to building up the army--and to some extent the economy at large, because this is the ruler's responsibility and you can't have much of an army without an economy to support it.

As time went on, Friedrich Wilhelm showed some inclination to reduce support for philosophers and humanists at the universities. He established the first university chairs of Kameralwissenschaften, the sciences of administration: a practically oriented mix of law and economics which insured that graduates could read the accounts. Not altogether a bad idea, under the circumstances.

Tabakskollegium at Königs Wusterhausen. Attr. to G. Lisiewski.
Photo, Wiki Commons.

Here is Friedrich Wilhelm I with his drinking-and-smoking buddies at his favorite residence (contrast this to the splendor of his father's room in the previous picture). The unhappy-family tensions are as thick here as the tobacco smoke must have been in real life. Friedrich Wilhelm is sitting at the end of the table nearest to the viewer of the picture; his first and third sons, Friedrich and Heinrich, are the tiny figures coming in on the left, perhaps to say good night before the party gets too raucous. (Surviving sons, perhaps one should say: there had been a Friedrich Ludwig who died in infancy, and then a Friedrich Wilhelm who died in infancy, before the surviving Friedrich came along.) On the king's right is his favorite son (second surviving son, eleventh child), August Wilhelm, who gets to join the party because his father likes him better. 

Poor Friedrich Wilhelm. He knew that some people lacked respect for him because he did not make princely displays; he knew they thought he was grotesque because he was so miserly, when a prince was supposed to be free-spending. When he was old, he said that his life was dominated by passions for money and soldiers that were not his own passions but were forced on him by circumstances. He spent his life wearing a mask, he thought. (The mask grows into the face; no one believed that his passion for soldiers was not real.) 

He would have liked to paint, and especially in the last years of his life he did, but by then it was late for him to acquire much skill. Court staff drew the designs for him, and he filled them in: a kingly coloring-book, a royal paint-by-number. He could afford a little amusement by then; the treasury was full and the army was substantial and competent: Both [treasury and army] are there, he wrote; now my successor will no longer need a mask. But what is his successor, Friedrich II, but a great mask? 

Friedrich Wilhelm had been terrified that his son was going to be another Frenchified wastrel like Friedrich I, who would ruin the country and destroy everything that he himself had built up so painfully, with so much self-sacrifice. He beat on his son frantically, trying to terrorize him into being a responsible adult (not one of the great strategies for this purpose, of course). When Friedrich II was young, as every German knows, his father made him watch the beheading of his best friend for the crime of helping him try to escape his father. Friedrich Wilhelm-- who was probably, at this stage in his life, not altogether in his right mind-- openly considered beheading Friedrich and replacing him as Crown Price with the more biddable August Wilhelm. But he was argued out of it ...

Friedrich II does become a responsible adult, in his own rather terrifying way. He is not a baroque prince--not like Louis XIV who says, I am the state--but an Enlightenment prince who says, I am the first servant of the state, and more or less works himself to death in what he conceives to be the rational interests of the state. (But are they the interests of the state? Who is the state?) He no longer has friends. 

Friedrich II, Portrait by Anton Graff.  Photo, Wiki Commons.

Also, he has no children. His brother and right-hand-man Heinrich also has no children. (Heinrich has rather a liking for attractive young men but not for women. Friedrich does not have much of a liking for anyone.) Deeply responsible, hard-working, devoted to the national welfare though they are, neither Friedrich nor Heinrich can bring themselves to do that utterly essential thing for national welfare in an era of hereditary monarchies: beget an heir. (Both were married, but it is not clear that either marriage was consummated, and there is no record of mistresses.)

August Wilhelm, however (his father's favorite), does at least do his duty in bed. He has a healthy son, another Friedrich Wilhelm, and thus a succession crisis is averted. (August Wilhelm himself dies young, after being publicly disgraced and removed from princely responsibilities by his brother Friedrich II--king by then--following a military failure. There is some debate as to how much of the failure was August Wilhelm's fault. People say, at the time, that he died of the disgrace, but this is a time when young people die miscellaneously, like Friedrich I's brother; it isn't always the result of family malice, although there's plenty of family malice to go around.)

**

In his instructions to his successor, Friedrich Wilhelm I had written (in antagonism to the principles of baroque princely display):

No mistresses--you might better call them whores ... no guzzling and gobbling ... no permission anywhere in your lands and provinces for theaters, operas, ballets, masquerades, or casinos.

His successor Friedrich II was not so crude; he understood that cultivated public display like theaters and operas still had its political uses. But no mistresses; and not much gambling--except with the country itself, in high-stakes wars.

And after Friedrich II, the question arises again: how should you be, as the head of state? It would hardly be possible to be another Friedrich, and admired though he was, would you want to be such another? Should you? Could the state survive another such great man? 

It doesn't have to undergo the experiment, beause Friedrich's successor, Friedrich Wilhelm II, is no great man. He is a tubby animated id walking the palace corridors, after two generations of ferocious superegos: he gobbles and guzzles and goes to the opera with abandon. 

He comes back to Rabbit Island and stocks the place with peacocks--hence the island's name change--and a rather splashy mistress. 

Wilhelmine Enke, mistress of Friedrich Wilhelm II.
Portrait by Anna Dorothea Therbusch, 1776. Photo, Suse, Wiki Commons

Friedrich Wilhelm II is Prussian history's bad-chocolate-ice-cream binge after a long diet of savage kingly virtue. (The popular nickname for him in Berlin is "the fat good-for-nothing.") He wastes money, does not tend to business, and reintroduces boneheaded censorship after the relative freedom Friedrich II had allowed the press. (His people tell Kant to shut up on certain subjects, which is surely one of the low points in German political-intellectual history.) As if to make up for his un-amorous uncles, he is hopelessly entangled with women: two (sequential) official marriages, two additional bigamous marriages, innumerable rolls in the hay, and a lifelong best-friendship with the clever mistress for whom he made the Peacock Island retreat. 

He flails about thoughtlessly in diplomatic and military matters. He is taken in by occultists who make the spirits of Marcus Aurelius and the Great Elector--to say nothing of Leibniz--speak to him in seances, giving him worse advice than one might have expected from such exalted personages. His clever mistress, who does not like the occultists, fights fire with fire: she tells Friedrich Wilhelm that their beloved son, who had died in childhood, is appearing to her and providing different advice. This works, up to a point.

**

So Peacock Island is first of all Friedrich Wilhelm II's place. The ferry from the bus stop lands at the island just a little upriver from the Schloss, which is fake to the nth degree and is actually quite sweet.

Schloss Pfaueninsel. Photo by E-W, Wiki Commons.

Is this really medieval (or--what it was originally supposed to represent--a decaying Roman country house)? No, it was built in the 1790s. Is it really stone? No, it's painted wood. Is that really an open arch with a portcullis in the center, looking through to the landscape on the other side? No, it's a sort of trompe-l'oeil painting which isn't going to trompe anyone except at a considerable distance and in bad light.

Schloss Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

Friedrich Wilhelm II built it, of course. Like some of his descendants after him, there is more to be said for him as an architect than a king: he designs the buildings here on the island himself, without employing an architect or even the state Building Authority; the court carpenter puts the little Schloss together based on a design by Friedrich Wilhelm himself (who seems have cribbed it from a magazine picture). Wilhelmine does the interior design.


Friedrich Wilhelm and Wilhelmine are older by the time they have the Schloss built--not sleeping together any more, it seems: Friedrich Wilhelm is so busy elsewhere on this front. But they are still best friends, and they come back here to be comfortable together. Besides the Schloss, they have a pleasure dairy on the island--a fashionable thing at the time, a place to come and have fancy milk drinks from your own cows and play a bit at being rustics (Marie Antoinette had one at Versailles). The dairy here is built (aaaagh) in the form of a ruinous Gothic chapel.

Dairy (Meierei), Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

Does Friedrich Wilhelm bring his cello out here? He's an enthusiastic amateur cellist (possibly because you can sound a lot better on a cello without actually being very skilled than you can on a violin or a viola). Haydn sends him some symphonic manuscripts; the king sends Haydn thanks and a gold ring; and Haydn sends back a set of string quartets with prominent, mostly non-difficult cello parts.... But Haydn is such a joker: the opening of the first movement of the first quartet is an exposed cello part that consists of the same single note over and over again. Even the king can play this one! Joke. 

Portrait of Friedrich Wilhelm II, by Anton Graff.
Photo, Peripitus, Wiki Commons.

**

Of all the Brandenburg-Prussian rulers after the sixteenth century, who adds the most square miles to the state territories? The shrewd Great Elector? Glory-bound Friedrich I? Military-mad Friedrich Wilhelm I?  The great European military strategist of the age, Friedrich II?  

Nah, it's Friedrich Wilhelm II, who spends his time rolling in the hay on Peacock Island but happens to be in the right place at the right time when certain international treaties are drawn up and territories are exchanged. History's a joker too, like Franz Joseph Haydn.

**

Well, let's proceed around the island, first along the south shore and then back along the north, with some incursions into the interior as occasions present themselves.

What a lovely day it is, chilly and bright in the full sun--

On Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

--but where there is shadow, the shadows are enormous, and dark and cold. 

The landscaping here is post-Friedrich Wilhelm II. He had left much of the island in its original forested state, as a hunting ground; he even brought in a bark-covered hunting-blind from a more remote hunting ground in the forest south of Potsdam. 

Hunting blind on the shore of Peacock Island. October 2015, my photo.

It is his son and successor, Friedrich Wilhelm III, who sees to the landscaping. He is the first of several Hohenzollerns to turn the great Peter Joseph Lenné loose on the landscape, and surely that is greatly to his credit. Lenné is a magician.

On Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

But what are you to be, besides a landscape-gardener's patron, if you're the next Friedrich Wilhelm? Back to severe military virtue? More silliness and mistresses and censorship?

Friedrich Wilhelm III was a shy and hesitant man. Unlike the standard-historical-model kings, he did not even pretend to be a war leader. "Everybody knows," he wrote in a family letter, "that I abhor war and that I know of nothing greater on earth than the preservation of peace and tranquility as the only system suited to the happiness of human kind." Of course great-uncle Friedrich II said fine things about peace as well, and in some sense meant them; but starting major wars was a duty with which he reconciled himself. This Friedrich Wilhelm means it more seriously. 

But what a hard time it is for such a man. He may abhor war, but this is the age of Napoleon, and war is hard to avoid. Friedrich Wilhelm tries to create a neutral zone in northern Germany, bringing together a collection of smaller states. (Let's all try to keep out of this while the great powers whack each other.) But as his great-grandmother's house philosopher Leibniz said: being neutral in combative times is like living on the middle floor of a house, where your downstairs neighbors smoke you out and your upstairs neighbors drench you with piss. This is pretty much what happens: the Napoleonic Wars roll over Prussia, bringing difficult times and breaking up old institutions (sometimes to the beneft of the country, sometimes not). 

If you're not a war leader, what are you going to be? Well, the age of the middle classes is coming, and this Friedrich Wilhelm is the model middle-class family man. He and his wife Luise, whom he adores, try to spend serious time with the children, to bring up the children in a kind of normal and affectionate way. They're the Victoria and Albert of Prussia, at a time before Victoria and Albert were born. (They take the back-to-nature of the pleasure dairy a little more seriously than Marie Antoinette seems to have taken hers: everyone in the family who is old enough learns to milk the  cows.)

But being the model family man is hard too, because Luise dies, quite young, of typhus.  Here is her memorial on the island.

Luisentempel, Pfaueninsel.  October 2015, my photo.

Friedrich Wilhelm and the children still spend time on the island, later, in the pleasant garden-space, with a growing menagerie: not just the peacocks and the cows but now pheasants and reindeer and monkeys, lamas and a kangaroo or two.  And farm animals, some of which are still here, though most of the exotics are gone. Besides the sheep, there are still some water buffaloes that keep the grass down in the meadows in summer. 

Sheep on Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my photo.

Does it matter? Does it help? Do the children turn out any better as rulers (two of them will be kings of Prussia) because they had happier childhoods? Perhaps; it isn't obvious. 

The only thing that is obvious is that the children and grandchildren are all bitten with the bug of building and landscaping out here along the Havel, between Peacock Island in the east and Friedrich II's great palace in Potsdam on the west. They don't build like Friedrich II; they build mostly fake-medieval things, like fat Friedrich Wilhelm II's fantasies on Peacock Island (only bigger), and they have Peter Joseph Lenné drape the raggedy Brandenburg sandhills with dreams. (Landscape gardening is a more powerful art than we usually imagine.)

**

Of course the peacocks are still here on the island, descendants of the ones that Friedrich Wilhelm II and Wilhelmine brought.

Round the island we go: glades and arbors, views of sailboats on the water, autumn crocus blooming among the fallen leaves. Round the point of the island, looking downstream where the Havel narrows in between Klein-Glienicke and Sacrow (see last post).

The Havel from Pfaueninsel. October 2015, my phot

And here we are back to the Schloss ...

Schloss Pfaueninsel.  October 2015, my photo.

... almost back to the ferry, time to head for home. 


**
Much of the historical material is from Christopher Clarke's excellent book, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1917.