Arcadias
The autumn has been slow and mild and mellow this year. It's late December now, as I write, and a couple of weeks ago there were still chrysanthemums in bloom in little streetside gardens, even an occasional rose against a sunny wall or geraniums on a balcony. There have been a few snow-days, and more cold-rain-and-wind days, when the Syrian refugees (and Iraqi and Afghani and Balkan refugees) were shivering in the lines outside the office in our neighborhood where they have to register. (We buy coats for them, we buy school supplies for the children.) Our shopping street, where we go to the drugstore and the bank and the dentist, has always had a strong Middle Eastern flavor; in the fall, some days, it's been Little Damascus, so thick with people you could hardly get down the sidewalk, heavy with cigarette smoke when the wind was down. Old country women in long black gowns try the escalators in shops and stations warily, not sure how to time their getting on and off.
**
In November I went out to Wannsee (yet again) on the S-Bahn, determined to make it to Potsdam at last this time, after so many sidetracks around lakes and islands at the edge of Berlin. (How can you resist the forest in the fall?)
This time I left myself enough time to grab a sandwich at the bakery by the Wannsee S-Bahn station before I picked up the bus over to the far side of the Wannsee-Island.
In the bakery I thought, good heavens, I'm not in Berlin any more, I'm up on the Baltic or the North Sea, where they eat and drink strong stuff. Or at least it has been my impression that they eat and drink strong stuff up there. The impression started with strong tea, which is far from universal in the German-speaking world. If you're a member of the cultivated middle classes in Germany, you are, or were, supposed to prefer a delicately flavored tea like Darjeeling and to prefer it not made very strong. You could read a newspaper through your glass of tea in a genteel cafe, back in the day when tea always came in glasses. (The first time I lived here, back in the 70s, I remember bringing a cafe waitress to a dead stop when I asked for a cup of tea. We don't have cups of tea! she said. This didn't mean you had to buy a whole pot of tea, it meant you had to order a glass of tea. If a cup came to your table, it was going to have coffee in it.)
Archangel and I used to groan about the Darjeeling when we visited his father and stepmother. His stepmother was a very dear woman--one of my favorite people--and very proper. (She was a pastor's daughter from a German-speaking community in the US, and my father-in-law said: When I met her she had never been in Germany, but her German was absolutely perfect. Except that she didn't know any bad words. He grew up in the Berlin theater-and-cabaret world and knew lots of bad words.) When we were with them there was always afternoon tea, straw-pale and delicately tasteless; Archangel once ventured to hope for more tea leaves in the pot. Oh, you don't want to drink tea like East Frisians, said his stepmother. East Frisians were poor fishermen, strong coarse people drinking strong coarse black tea against the wet and the cold. ... What would she have thought of our breakfast-cupboard here, with the big red bag of East Frisian tea stowed behind the teapot? Terrific stuff, gets you going on a chilly morning.
Don't you love the localness of food and drink?--how insistently the bread and the wine, the cherries and cheeses, differ from one place to another. For example, Archangel's favorite cheese, Tilsit, is another strong Baltic-coast product, one of those types that the cheese industry calls aromatic and my mother calls stinky-foot. In a sense it's really just transplanted Emmentaler, a very mild-mannered variety of Swiss cheese. The area around Tilsit (then in Prussia, now in Russia) was colonized by Swiss immigrants a couple of hundred years ago, and they made cheese just the way they used to make it back home. But the local micro-organisms that had colonized the cheese in the Swiss Alps were not at all the same as the ones that colonized it in the swampy woods on the edge of Lithuania, around Tilsit (excuse me, Sovetsk; like so many things in Eastern Europe, the town has been renamed, though the cheese hasn't). So the same basic ingredients and procedures give you cheese that is sweet and mild in the Alps and stinky-foot up in the northern swamps of Prussia.
But it wasn't tea or Tilsit that caught my eye in the Wannsee bakery, it was Mett. Mett certainly exists in many places in Germany, but up on the Baltic coast is where I remember seeing it in all the bakery windows, and remember lots of people coming into the cafes in the morning and asking for that sturdy seacoast breakfast, a cup of coffee and ein halbes Mett. Aaagh. Ein halbes Mett is half a roll, thickly spread with minced raw pork.
The little advertising placard for raw-pork breakfast in the Wannsee bakery says (eek, bilingual pun): Heavy Mettel. Nonono. Baguette with tomato and mozzarella for me.
**
It's a funny place, this big sweep of Prussian-palaces-and-gardens in Potsdam, that laps over a little into western Berlin. The British dumped a big payload of bombs on it a couple of weeks before the end of the war in 1945, not because it had any military importance whatever. They wanted to kill the buildings, to drive a stake through the heart of Prussian-ness. (They tended to conflate Prussians and Nazis, although calling Hitler a Prussian is sort of like calling Strom Thurmond a Yankee.) The Brits' aim wasn't a lot better than their concept; they missed most of the major palaces that were the emblems of Prussian royal power, but they did some sad damage in Potsdam town itself, wiping out houses and churches and the Potsdam city palace, the work of that rather Dutch-burgher-like character, the Great Elector, who can hardly be mistaken for a proto-Nazi.
The heart of the palace-and-garden complex is Sanssouci, the Prussian answer to Versailles. Ah, I'm not so comfortable with this; we aren't going there for a while.
Versailles is so suburban. Louis XIV built Versailles because he didn't like Paris, and Friedrich II built Sanssouci because he didn't like Berlin. (Cities are dirty, commercial, full of poor people, politically unreliable.). Versailles and Sanssouci are gated communities, absolutists' dreams. They're beautiful in their way, but ... aaugh, give me some fresh air.
What we are heading for today is Babelsberg, part of the half-ring of nineteenth-century palaces and gardens that stand like satellites around the west side of Sanssouci. These weren't, for the most part, meant as such primary power centers. They were built as summer houses for Friedrich II's great-nephews, the ones who spent childhood summers on Peacock Island [see Havel 6 post]: Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the wannabe architect; Wilhelm Friedrich, who succeeded him as king and then as Kaiser Wilhelm I; and the third brother, Prince Carl, who was an artillery officer (of sorts: was he ever actually on the front lines in a war?) and an art collector with a voracious appetite for antiquities. He tended to stick them onto his houses, like Colonel McCormick in 20th-century Chicago sticking stolen bits of the Pyramids and Notre Dame cathedral onto the Tribune building. (I understand that there's a piece of the Berlin Wall stuck onto the tower now as well.) Up at the north end of the half-ring is a late addition, the palace Wilhelm II had built for his son. (This is a piece of bloat, a sort of half-timbered cottage with 176 rooms.)
The earlier places are not very Schlossy, really. Prince Carl's Schloss Glienicke was an eighteenth-century doctor's house, expanded into a pleasant sort of Italian villa [see Havel 5 post, October]. Friedrich Wilhelm IV's Schloss Charlottenhof was an eighteenth-century country house, transformed into something a bit bigger and more architecturally ambitious in the 1820s.
How classical these places are, simple and frugal and pure.
They're meant to be simple and frugal and pure: what the architect and the gardener and the crown prince think they are trying to create out here is Prussian Arcadia--a new world, a better world after the Napoleonic wars. (The three of them work together well, they have similar ideas; in moments of enthusiasm they refer to the river Havel as the Alpheus, the river that runs through Arcadia in Greece.)
Can you make Arcadia in Prussia? Well ... Arcadia was a bleak chilly poorish part of ancient Greece. As for Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Bleak? Check. Chilly? Check. Poorish? Check.
What doesn't match is that the human figures in the Arcadia of the Greek and Roman poets were simple poor folk as idealized by the rich; the human figures in Prussian Arcadia are mostly the rich and powerful as idealized by themselves. This can lead to awkwardnesses.
On the near side of the little canal that we have to cross to get to Babelsberg Park, we pass the Swiss Houses. Prince Carl had nine or ten of them built along here, as outbuildings of his establishment at Glienicke; I think four survive.
**
In November I went out to Wannsee (yet again) on the S-Bahn, determined to make it to Potsdam at last this time, after so many sidetracks around lakes and islands at the edge of Berlin. (How can you resist the forest in the fall?)
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| Griebnitzsee from Wannsee-Island, October 2015. My photo. |
This time I left myself enough time to grab a sandwich at the bakery by the Wannsee S-Bahn station before I picked up the bus over to the far side of the Wannsee-Island.
In the bakery I thought, good heavens, I'm not in Berlin any more, I'm up on the Baltic or the North Sea, where they eat and drink strong stuff. Or at least it has been my impression that they eat and drink strong stuff up there. The impression started with strong tea, which is far from universal in the German-speaking world. If you're a member of the cultivated middle classes in Germany, you are, or were, supposed to prefer a delicately flavored tea like Darjeeling and to prefer it not made very strong. You could read a newspaper through your glass of tea in a genteel cafe, back in the day when tea always came in glasses. (The first time I lived here, back in the 70s, I remember bringing a cafe waitress to a dead stop when I asked for a cup of tea. We don't have cups of tea! she said. This didn't mean you had to buy a whole pot of tea, it meant you had to order a glass of tea. If a cup came to your table, it was going to have coffee in it.)
Archangel and I used to groan about the Darjeeling when we visited his father and stepmother. His stepmother was a very dear woman--one of my favorite people--and very proper. (She was a pastor's daughter from a German-speaking community in the US, and my father-in-law said: When I met her she had never been in Germany, but her German was absolutely perfect. Except that she didn't know any bad words. He grew up in the Berlin theater-and-cabaret world and knew lots of bad words.) When we were with them there was always afternoon tea, straw-pale and delicately tasteless; Archangel once ventured to hope for more tea leaves in the pot. Oh, you don't want to drink tea like East Frisians, said his stepmother. East Frisians were poor fishermen, strong coarse people drinking strong coarse black tea against the wet and the cold. ... What would she have thought of our breakfast-cupboard here, with the big red bag of East Frisian tea stowed behind the teapot? Terrific stuff, gets you going on a chilly morning.
Don't you love the localness of food and drink?--how insistently the bread and the wine, the cherries and cheeses, differ from one place to another. For example, Archangel's favorite cheese, Tilsit, is another strong Baltic-coast product, one of those types that the cheese industry calls aromatic and my mother calls stinky-foot. In a sense it's really just transplanted Emmentaler, a very mild-mannered variety of Swiss cheese. The area around Tilsit (then in Prussia, now in Russia) was colonized by Swiss immigrants a couple of hundred years ago, and they made cheese just the way they used to make it back home. But the local micro-organisms that had colonized the cheese in the Swiss Alps were not at all the same as the ones that colonized it in the swampy woods on the edge of Lithuania, around Tilsit (excuse me, Sovetsk; like so many things in Eastern Europe, the town has been renamed, though the cheese hasn't). So the same basic ingredients and procedures give you cheese that is sweet and mild in the Alps and stinky-foot up in the northern swamps of Prussia.
But it wasn't tea or Tilsit that caught my eye in the Wannsee bakery, it was Mett. Mett certainly exists in many places in Germany, but up on the Baltic coast is where I remember seeing it in all the bakery windows, and remember lots of people coming into the cafes in the morning and asking for that sturdy seacoast breakfast, a cup of coffee and ein halbes Mett. Aaagh. Ein halbes Mett is half a roll, thickly spread with minced raw pork.
The little advertising placard for raw-pork breakfast in the Wannsee bakery says (eek, bilingual pun): Heavy Mettel. Nonono. Baguette with tomato and mozzarella for me.
**
It's a funny place, this big sweep of Prussian-palaces-and-gardens in Potsdam, that laps over a little into western Berlin. The British dumped a big payload of bombs on it a couple of weeks before the end of the war in 1945, not because it had any military importance whatever. They wanted to kill the buildings, to drive a stake through the heart of Prussian-ness. (They tended to conflate Prussians and Nazis, although calling Hitler a Prussian is sort of like calling Strom Thurmond a Yankee.) The Brits' aim wasn't a lot better than their concept; they missed most of the major palaces that were the emblems of Prussian royal power, but they did some sad damage in Potsdam town itself, wiping out houses and churches and the Potsdam city palace, the work of that rather Dutch-burgher-like character, the Great Elector, who can hardly be mistaken for a proto-Nazi.
The heart of the palace-and-garden complex is Sanssouci, the Prussian answer to Versailles. Ah, I'm not so comfortable with this; we aren't going there for a while.
Versailles is so suburban. Louis XIV built Versailles because he didn't like Paris, and Friedrich II built Sanssouci because he didn't like Berlin. (Cities are dirty, commercial, full of poor people, politically unreliable.). Versailles and Sanssouci are gated communities, absolutists' dreams. They're beautiful in their way, but ... aaugh, give me some fresh air.
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| Marble colonnade at Sanssouci, watercolor by J. F. Nagel, about 1792. Wiki Commons |
What we are heading for today is Babelsberg, part of the half-ring of nineteenth-century palaces and gardens that stand like satellites around the west side of Sanssouci. These weren't, for the most part, meant as such primary power centers. They were built as summer houses for Friedrich II's great-nephews, the ones who spent childhood summers on Peacock Island [see Havel 6 post]: Friedrich Wilhelm IV, the wannabe architect; Wilhelm Friedrich, who succeeded him as king and then as Kaiser Wilhelm I; and the third brother, Prince Carl, who was an artillery officer (of sorts: was he ever actually on the front lines in a war?) and an art collector with a voracious appetite for antiquities. He tended to stick them onto his houses, like Colonel McCormick in 20th-century Chicago sticking stolen bits of the Pyramids and Notre Dame cathedral onto the Tribune building. (I understand that there's a piece of the Berlin Wall stuck onto the tower now as well.) Up at the north end of the half-ring is a late addition, the palace Wilhelm II had built for his son. (This is a piece of bloat, a sort of half-timbered cottage with 176 rooms.)
The earlier places are not very Schlossy, really. Prince Carl's Schloss Glienicke was an eighteenth-century doctor's house, expanded into a pleasant sort of Italian villa [see Havel 5 post, October]. Friedrich Wilhelm IV's Schloss Charlottenhof was an eighteenth-century country house, transformed into something a bit bigger and more architecturally ambitious in the 1820s.
How classical these places are, simple and frugal and pure.
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| Schloss Charlottenhof. Photo, Jochen Teufel, Wiki Commons. |
They're meant to be simple and frugal and pure: what the architect and the gardener and the crown prince think they are trying to create out here is Prussian Arcadia--a new world, a better world after the Napoleonic wars. (The three of them work together well, they have similar ideas; in moments of enthusiasm they refer to the river Havel as the Alpheus, the river that runs through Arcadia in Greece.)
Can you make Arcadia in Prussia? Well ... Arcadia was a bleak chilly poorish part of ancient Greece. As for Prussia at the beginning of the nineteenth century: Bleak? Check. Chilly? Check. Poorish? Check.
What doesn't match is that the human figures in the Arcadia of the Greek and Roman poets were simple poor folk as idealized by the rich; the human figures in Prussian Arcadia are mostly the rich and powerful as idealized by themselves. This can lead to awkwardnesses.
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| Swiss House, Klein-Glienicke. November 2015, my photo. |
Why Swiss houses? Because in Prince Carl's time Switzerland, like Arcadia, represented a world of freedom and naturalness, simplicity and equality; and cultivated people were supposed to value all these things, though perhaps not always to realize them in their day-to-day life. If you were a cultivated person, you had probably wept buckets over Rousseau's novel Julie, which was set in Switzerland and advocated passionately for social equality and simplicity of life. (And is said to have done more to bring on the French Revolution than Rousseau's political writings did, influential though they were.)
And you almost certainly knew Schiller's William Tell:
The ground under tyrants is hollow, the days of their rule are numbered ....
Germans know their Schiller (or used to) the way English-speakers know their Shakespeare (or used to): it was something you had to memorize by the yard in school. The chant in the Monday demonstrations that eventually brought down the East German regime at the end of the 1980s started out as Wir sind das Volk, we are the people. (This was partly to remind the East German police, the Volkspolizei, that they were supposed to be serving the Volk, not banging the Volk on the head with nightsticks; but it was also a line from a song that was popular in the 1848 revolution, which had tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to create constitutional monarchies and representative governments in the German states.) Then at some point in the Monday demonstrations, the chant changed to Wir sind ein Volk, we are one people--which had overtones of German reunification but is also a line from Schiller's William Tell: Wir sind ein Volk, und einig wollen wir handeln. We are one people and will act as one (meaning, make common cause against tyranny, in spite of our diverse interests).
So Prince Carl, who is a convinced absolutist and (like his older brothers) loathes the ideas of the 1848 revolution, builds Swiss houses, the charm of which was that they invoked sentimental attachments to liberty and equality. (Can buildings be insincere? Perhaps.)
Here we are on the other side of the canal, looking back at the Glienicke hunting lodge, which has been rebuilt so many times, in so many ways, to say so many different things to the world, that any question of sincerity is more or less lost in the babble.
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| Jagdschloss Glienicke from Babelsberg. November 2015, my photo. |
What we see from this side of the water are the outbuildings behind the Jagdschloss itself, handsome in the bright-and-dark of the November woods.
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Jagdschloss Glienicke from Babelsberg. November 2015, my photo.
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Somewhere across the water is Prince Wilhelm's Schloss at Babelsberg, which is very fake-English, a kind of Windsor Castle scaled down for home use. It invokes the English constitutional monarchy which the 1848 revolutionaries wanted to imitate and Wilhelm wanted to prevent.
Wilhelm, who was a middle-aged hothead at the time, wanted to pull the army out to Potsdam, thus avoiding costly street-to-street fighting in the city. Close the gates of Berlin, he thought, and shell the revolutionary city into submission. (If Wilhelm had had airplanes, he would probably have wanted to bomb the place.) Senior members of the family, who were less extreme, packed him off to London to keep him out of trouble and see how a constitutional monarchy worked. (Older brother Friedrich Wilhelm wasn't against a constitution, he just didn't want the Volk telling him what kind of constitution it ought to be. That was his decision, he thought.)
There's a lot of renovation going on out at Wilhelm's Babelsberg palace this year, so when we come to the little fake fortress housing the pump machinery that gets water up to the palace itself, higher on the hillside, we can't get around the front of the building or even see it very well from this side. We can slither around the back of the silly object, however.
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| Behind the Maschinenhaus, Schloss Babelsberg. November 2015, my photo. |
Well, poor Wilhelm. We don't get a lot of what we want in life, and this is the case even for emperors. (He didn't want to be emperor: tomorrow will be the unhappiest day of my life, he said the night before the coronation.) Some of not getting what you want is failure, some of it is better second thoughts, and sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference.
Then again, sometimes it's just history having its little jokes. When Wilhelm was young he believed in royal absolutism and fought to prevent democracy. He lived to be ninety and ended up in a country without either royal absolutism or democracy, exactly: a kind of ministerial autocracy under the Prussian chancellor, Bismarck, who more or less ran everything, including Wilhelm. (It's hard to be emperor under a chancellor like Bismarck, Wilhelm said; you can almost hear the old man sigh.)
When he was young he had been deeply in love with a Polish princess, Elisa Radziwill, but there were questions about whether her rank was high enough to allow them to marry. Legal opinion was gathered at great length--they waited years for a determination on the matter. The quibbling sounds fantastic now, but the logic of the situation was compelling for Wilhelm and his family. We have an absolute right to rule the country, and what gives us that right is biological inheritance from people of our own rank. If we say biological inheritance from people of our own rank doesn't matter, then what are we doing here? If it doesn't matter, then we have no more right to run the country than any competent individual who wants the job. But if it does matter, then Wilhelm and Elisa can't marry. (And who knows how arbitrary our own compelling political logics will look in a hundred and fifty years.)
Elisa's mother was a princess of Prussia, and her father's family were very old nobility in Poland, vastly rich and powerful, intermarried with assorted ruling houses in Europe. Hence legal opinion on one side said yes, Wilhelm and Elisa could marry. But legal opinion on the other side said no because Elisa's ancestors had never sat in the Princes' Council of the Holy Roman Empire. This Council had been formed in the fifteenth century and neither it nor the Holy Roman Empire existed any more by the 1820s, when all this discussion was going on; but it still provided the legal criterion for a royal marriage in Prussia.
Wilhelm's father, Friedrich Wilhelm III, wanted his children to be happy. Modest public scandal notwithstanding, he had let his oldest son marry a Catholic princess without insisting that she convert before the wedding. In order to make things right for Wilhelm, the king tried to arrange for his son-in-law, the Czar of Russia, to adopt Elisa, thus raising her to royal rank. But the Czar worried about the long-term consequences. (Could it mean that some day Berlin would inherit all the Russias? This wouldn't do.). And anyway the legal experts said in the end, Adoption doesn't change her blood. It can't be done.
So, poor Wilhelm.
It mattered very much whom Wilhelm married, because his older brother and the ex-Catholic princess (eventually converted after all) were happy together, apparently in bed as much as elsewhere, but they had a fertility problem. They never had children. Wilhelm was next in line for the throne, and he needed to provide an heir whose succession was unquestionably legitimate. If the succession was disputed, the country could fall apart, there could be civil war ...
So Wilhelm did his duty and married Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, whose ancestors were in the Prince's Council of the Holy Roman Empire, and who seems not to have been a very easy person to live with. They did have the required children. Elisa Radziwill died a few years later of the standard romantic heroine's disease, tuberculosis. Wilhelm kept her picture on his desk for more than fifty years.
**
Well, let's go up and have a look. The palace is not visible from down here by the water, but it must be somewhere higher up, on the big sand dune that stands above this stretch of the river. Here's a long stair under an arbor, which looks as if it might have a significant destination.
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| Arbor stairs, view to Havel, Babelsberg Park. November 2015, my photo. |
Ah, these gardens out here are fine. Buildings may be insincere, but can gardens be? Not so easily, perhaps.
Much of what looks good out here--as in central Berlin--is the work of two men, the heroes of every right-thinking local patriot in these parts (my heroes too): Karl Friedrich Schinkel the architect (responsible for the beautifully classical Charlottenhof palace shown above) and Peter Joseph Lenné the garden designer.
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| Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Portrait by Franz Kruger, 1836 Wiki Commons. |
What tremendous people these were. Heroes of bureaucracy--thus more a Continental than an Anglo-American type of hero. They were government employees all their lives: not only good artists but also large-scale managers, and reasonably skilled players in the complicated politics of the time. Daniel Burnham and Frederick Law Olmsted, who are more or less analogs of Schinkel and Lenné in America, a generation later, are private-sector men, with their own firms, not government bureaucrats.
Schinkel not only designed some excellent buildings himself, he also--as a sort of Chief Building Officer for Prussia--examined, modified, and signed off on the plans of every substantial building project in the country, as well as signing off on the training of every new architect in the country. Since "the country" stretched from the Rhine to what is now Russia, and the work included on-site negotiations and inspections (pushing through better safety conditions for the workers on the completion of Cologne cathedral), he spent much of his life on horseback or in rattling coaches and leaky boats, in all the inclement weathers of the North European plain. Lenné had somewhat similar responsibilities with respect to landscape architecture: create, maintain, organize, train ... turn the provincial garrison town of Berlin into "Athens on the Spree," bring some visual grace to back-country Prussia, turn this scrubby stretch of sand and swamp into Arcadia.
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| Peter Joseph Lenne, bust in Botanical Garden, Bonn. Photo, Raimond Spekking, Wiki Commons\ |
Still, we don't get a lot of what we want in life. The Babelsberg project was a big failure for Schinkel and Lenné both. They drew up the original plans for the house and garden and started building and planting at Babelsberg, but things did not go well. It's possible to get the impression that Augusta did not like either Schinkel or Lenné very much. They were her brother-in-law's men, and they weren't her style, in all sorts of ways. (Perhaps this isn't fair, but one wonders if she was uncomfortable with the power of men like this in Berlin: not well-born courtiers but entrepreneurial bureaucrats with artisan backgrounds.)
Augusta certainly did not like Schinkel's plans for the house. The sort
of sober classicism that was his main stock in trade was not what she wanted.
She and Wilhelm wanted something romantically medieval-English; Schinkel gave it to them, but it was modest and restrained, and she picked at the design, changing bits here and bits there, ending up with
something that neither she nor Schinkel liked. (Wilhelm was presumably keeping
his head down somewhere, having no strong artistic opinions.)
What she wanted--and, over Schinkel's dead body, got--was this sort of thing.
What she wanted--and, over Schinkel's dead body, got--was this sort of thing.
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| Schloss Babelsberg, November 2015. My photo. |
it's a silly building. But as an object in the garden, as an end-stopper to the lines of sight in the landscape, it works very well. The landscape is a marvel, and it's the right marvel for the place: a little more fanciful, more eccentric, than one of Lenné's pleasant, practical scenes.
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| Schloss Babelsberg, November 2015. My photo. |
The big problem with the garden that Lenné put here at first was that this hill by the water, with its fabulous views, was nothing but raw sand dune, and steep sand dune at that. (If the Hohenzollerns casually wandered all these garden paths, then the Hohenzollerns had better knees than I do. Some of the downhill stretches are killers.)
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| Babelsberg Park, looking toward the Havel and Glienicke Bridge. November 2015, my photo. |
Lenné was used to working in better soil, and he was used to getting a good effect fast by transplanting well-developed trees and shrubs--big ones that tended to take the move hard. At Babelsberg, in the unforgiving sand, the plants mostly (as we would say out West) just up and died, leaving the park a disaster. Augusta, like the sand, was not forgiving.
Schinkel was dead well before Augusta was done with the building, done with adding wings and curlicues to it. The last big projects of his life had never been built, or had displeased people if they were built. His new Bauakademie, the school for architects in central Berlin, was inspired by his latest enthusiasm, English factory buildings: stark and pure and functional. Modernists later admired it, but the taste of the city was turning toward fat and frills, and the Bauakademie did not play well. Schinkel was an ambitious man, and the feeling of failure shadowed his later years; he died at sixty.
Lenné was, in effect, fired as garden designer at Babelsberg. He kept responsibility for the older Potsdam gardens, but much of his attention in later life went to city planning in Berlin. Bless the man, he gave us wonderful green space, wedging in parks and water and lines of trees everywhere a wedge could be driven. (A little bit of Arcadia for the poor after all.) The plan for city development in later nineteenth-century Berlin--rather like the Burnham plan in Chicago, but legally binding--adopted much of Lenné's landscape planning, although it's called the Hobrecht plan after the man who made the final version of the plan and included a system of semi-modern sewerage and water treatment. (Bless him also.)
Augusta, in any case, had another landscape architect in mind for Babelsberg, a prince (whose family would have been qualified to marry with the royals), a somewhat financially unreliable charmer, a military officer and brilliant landscape designer, Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. (He's not a familiar name in the English-speaking world, but he is in the German-speaking world, if only because his name was attached to what English speakers call Neapolitan ice cream, the vanilla-strawberry-chocolate layer stuff; here it's called Prince Pückler ice cream.)
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| Hermann von Pückler-Muskau. Steel engraving by Auguste Hüssener, 1837. Wiki Commons. |
Sometimes Augusta got it right. Pückler did something with the Lenné plan --besides drastically improve the topsoil--that turned it into magic.
It's quasi-impossible to go through the garden systematically. (I wandered around it for half the afternoon and seem to have missed some large objects.) The place is a network of curving paths that pull you this way and that like the paths in enchanted forests that take you somewhere you didn't mean to go. Phony medievalisms suddenly pop into view, in heart-stoppingly lovely views, then disappear behind a grove, and then reappear transformed from a different angle.
This, which sits on a piece of high open ground in the garden, is a genuine medievalism; it may be the oldest secular building in Berlin (technically no longer in Berlin now, since we're over the water and into Potsdam, but this used to stand in center city). It was an annex to Berlin's medieval Rathaus; the city gave the annex as a present to Wilhelm I when they tore down the old Rathaus and built a new one in the late nineteenth century.
This annex, the Gerichtslaube or court arcade, had been a meeting place for city council and court. In such an arcade you can get out of the weather somewhat but you can't shut the public out. Like the colonnades in the Athenian agora, it's an emblem of the common life of the city. The Gerichtslaube in Berlin was, in its day, a symbol of the city's independent administration--defended with varying degrees of success against the Hohenzollerns in the Middle Ages.
The city lost that one, however. The city was captured by the princes, and the little court-arcade ended up as a garden ornament in the prince's palace grounds.
It's a marvelous thing to walk round and round, and through in all directions, as the old arches frame the river-view or the fiery trees:
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| Gerichtslaube, Babelsberg Park. November 2015, my photo. |
The landscape can lull you into thinking it's all natural, it all just grew this way ... But hah, this is not natural, nature does not frame a weeping birch in pines like this and then wrap the pines in red-gold beeches and cushion the trees' feet with little soft masses of shrubbery.
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| Babelsberg Park, November 2015. My photo. |
And nature doesn't always provide this sort of sight-line, or such marvelously silly objects to have sight-lines toward.
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| View to Flatowturm, Babelsberg Park. November 2015, my photo. |
This is the Flatow tower, named for the Hohenzollern estate, now in Poland, that provided the money to build it (scaring up the money for these big projects was always a bit of a challenge). It has a view platform, I think closed at this time of year; it has a little moat. It used to have a drawbridge over the moat, and decorative (but genuine) cannon.
The cannon platforms came from the fortress at Rastatt, where Prussian troops under Prince Wilhelm soundly defeated the last of the revolutionary forces remaining from the 1848 uprisings. The other day I was down in a part of central Berlin, which has streets named for Wilhelm's assorted victories in this campaign. The neighborhood is embarrassed by the names: there are displays here and there explaining the names and saying, All this was not really a good thing, this set back democracy in Germany by generations ...
The republican movement was duly put down, with executions and imprisonments following, and waves of refugees and exiles following. (Who was it who said, An exile is a refugee with a bank account? I can't remember.) There were Germans by the shipload headed for Australia (where they planted the Barossa valley with vineyards), and more shiploads, bigger shiploads, headed for America (where they became Northern generals in the Civil War, and writers and politicians and musicians and brewers: Cincinnati and Milwaukee were big Forty-Eighter cities). Back in the day before border controls, you could just up and go. The Midwest looked enough like home to be bearable.
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| In Babelsberg Park. November 2015, my photo. |
The roses will be gone now, after Christmas: the winter has set in at last, with dark days and bitter winds.
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