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.)
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| View from living room. October 2015, my photo. |
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).
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| 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.
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| 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).
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| 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.
**
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.
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| 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.)
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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.
A number of big trees are down here—not recently, by the look of them; it might have been last March in hurricane Niklas.
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| 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.
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.
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| 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.)
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.
The season is getting on, though; the leaves are starting to pile up on the ground between the beech trees' toes.
**
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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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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.
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| 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?).
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| 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.)
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| 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.)
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| 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.)
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.)
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| 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.
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