Havel 9

Winter and Potsdamnation

January. Bitter cold, murk, snow. (That is, bitter cold as defined by Germans, which means, "Hardly anyone eats outdoors now." This isn't serious, this isn't Minnesota.) Cold, dark, cold, ice, dark, wind, etc. The waters in Tiergarten look like slabs of marble, white and hard, and skins of ice move out into the water from the banks of the Spree.  Maybe there will be work for the city icebreakers this year, unlike last. 

But the days get lighter: by late January, if the sun is out, it shows its face over the housetops, instead of looking like a lost soccer ball lying on the ground at the south end of the street.

Our street.  Photo, M. Seadle, January 2016.

And before the river freezes solid, there is a big thaw in the night--when I open the windows one morning the snow is gone and the air smells of rain and wet earth and green leaves. Ivy, mahonia, rhododendrons, nests of mistletoe in the trees, all stay green through the winter. The hellebores--Lenten roses--are blooming in Tiergarten, bowed down under the rain.

Winter here is not like winter in the US Midwest, where the first real snow of the year is exciting, and the deep snows in the deep winter are exciting, and there are blue-dazzle days in January when you need to take your sunglasses if you're going out walking in such woods as you can find. The snow here is modest and unexciting and it doesn't last; and bright light is the least of anyone's problems for months on end. 

The winter isn't exciting here, it's a drift into dim nothingness. People resent and resist, in late November and December, saying No, no, I don't want this to happen, let this not happen, as if we could keep the sun levered up a little higher in the sky, just by digging our heels in. Of course in the US there are people who don't like winter, but I don't remember the kind of quasi-desperation that is in the air here as Nature hits the dimmer switch, and the light fades, the city goes gray, and we are all driven indoors. 

**

The last time I was out on the Havel, in Potsdam, was just that late-November kind of day when you think, No, no, I don't want this. Dim light, intermittent icy drizzle. Sure, let's go for a long walk.

Something monstrous is going up by the S-Bahn station in Potsdam (which is itself generally considered a blot on the landscape). Actually the new thing is not yet going up so much as going down, making a big muddy hole in the ground surrounded by cranes and fences and billboards. 

But we can walk away from this, toward the Long Bridge that leads into central Potsdam. There's a quiet stretch of river here, dreamy (cold, wet) with the end of autumn.  

Havel near Long Bridge, Potsdam.  My photo, November 2015.

The Long Bridge is long because the river splits here to go around Friendship Island, and the bridge must go over both channels and the fifteen-acre sliver of island as well. Basic principle of water-city exploration, never miss an island if you can get to it--and here are stairs in mid-bridge going down to the island, so let's see what is down here. ... Ah, garden; and very nice garden indeed. 

Part of the landscaping goes back to the 1930s, but of course the years following were no better for gardens than for any other form of life. (What becomes of the tulip beds when you blow up the Long Bridge in the face of advancing Russians? Probably nothing good.) The garden was patched up in East German days and stuffed with egregiously healthy socialist sculpture, which is still there:

Harmonie, by Dieter Rohde (1965). My photo, November 2015.

Landscape-gardening apprentices are at work here, among the fallen leaves, in the dark day, in the knife-edge wind. They clean out the beds and haul away the dead summer in wheelbarrows. 

Ah, but wait, here's a last outburst, before the snows come.

Chrysanthemum bed, Freundschaftsinsel. My photo, November 2015.

I've been walking up the New Channel (Neue Fahrt) side of the island, so at the downstream point of the island, where the river splits into the New Channel and the Old Channel, I have a choice. Should I stick to the water's edge, along the Old Channel (Alte Fahrt) shore, or head back down the middle of the island, checking out the garden design in more detail?  Well, somehow the Old Fahrt sounds like the suitable thing for me.

It's even more autumn-dreamy here than on the other side.

Alte Fahrt from Freundschaftsinsel. My photo, November 2015. 

Partway down the Alte Fahrt side, there's a little bridge over to center city, over to the Old Market and the Nikolaikirche and so forth, which perhaps I should have taken. But I didn't. Another day, another day.

Alte Fahrt and Nikolaikirche. My photo, November 2015.

I can't resist looking around a little more to see what's in the middle of the island. Here are long pools with stepping stones across them, past spaces where fountains play in the summer.

On Freundschaftsinsel.  My photo, November 2015.

Here's an herb garden, shriveled down on itself in the late autumn. A little chill drizzle whips through the air, and a stainless-steel fish sculpture creaks like a wind-vane overhead.

Flying Fish, by Gabriele Rosskamp und Serge Petit (2001). My photo, November 2015.

The flying fish sculpture has a partner, a flying bird--which looks more like a scorched and falling bird.

Flying Bird, by Gabriele Rosskamp und Serge Petit. My photo, November 2015.

It was, perhaps, easier to put the gardens back together again than to put the city back together again after the war. In Potsdam they say that there were three waves of destruction of the city: First there was World War II, with the British Air Force taking a rather Taliban-like approach to the unrighteous local architecture: this was not a big military target, this was a cultural target, the point was to wipe out the architecture.

Potsdam Nikolaikirche, 1947.  Photo, Bundesarchiv. Wiki commons.

Already in 1914, George Bernard Shaw had inveighed against Potsdam as emblematic of everything militaristic and illiberal; he saw World War I as a justified endeavor to put an end to the Potsdamnation (his word) of Europe. Allegedly he said, "There are some cities that deserve to be obliterated, and Potsdam is one of them." (At least the Germans believe he said this (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13489426.html), although the statement is not so easy to trace in GBS's collected works.) In any case, Bomber Command acted on the idea in '45. 

The second wave of destruction of the city was the Communist tear-down of much of what was left after the war, and the cramming of stark concrete boxes into the city. Drive a stake through the heart of the old architecture and put something heavy on top so that it can't rise again! (We see more of this as we get farther into town.)

Finally there was the capitalist land-grab after reunification, with further destruction of historical substance. Not in the name of principle this time, however, just in the name of a quick Deutschmark (or euro, depending on the date).  

The latest phase (here as elsewhere in Germany, including the old West) has been rebuilding historic buildings, or replica-building if nothing of the original is left. It is possible to have mixed feelings about this. (Is this restoration or destruction, or can we even tell the difference?)  

One of the most unnerving examples of replica-building I have come across is in Braunschweig (old West), where the Schloss in center city was considerably damaged by the war. The Braunschweig city council decided in 1959 to tear down what was left rather than restore it. The city council leaders thought: look, the Schloss was built as a demonstration of absolutist princely power in the seventeenth century, and then it was used by the SS during the war--put a stake through its heart!

A substantial portion of the local population wanted to have the building restored, pretty much as it had been, so there were a lot of protests--and the protesters were not necessarily fans of absolutism or the SS. The Schloss was just a big (and fairly handsome) piece of what the city looked like, and people wanted to keep it. 

Ah, but then, times change. In the mid-2000's, when a property development company offered to rebuild the Schloss in Braunschweig as a shopping mall with a big parking ramp, the city took them up on it; and there were protests again. Is this too Disneyland, is it kitschy to fill a place like this with shoe stores and fast food joints? 

Who knows--but here it is, and we have all seen much worse-looking parking ramps.

Schloss, Braunschweig. Photo, Heinz Kudalla, Wiki Commons.

When Archangel and I were tramping around Braunschweig a few summers ago, the Schloss seemed like good object in the cityscape.  But admittedly the close-up experience of the mall-parking-ramp aspect of it was a little creepy. (Princely absolutism was a little creepy too--but more than fast-food joints are, or less? Is this even an askable question?)

A long time ago, when I lived in Munich--which had rebuilt some medieval bits in center city--an American visitor said to me: Funny that they would just want to put up a copy of the old stuff, when they had the chance to build something new.  D'you know why they did that?  

Yes, well, sort of.

If you lost a big part of your face in a terrible accident and had to have a new one built up with plastic surgery, how different would you want to look? Sure, maybe trim the nose or build out the receding chin a bit, but--would you want to look like a completely different person? The cityscape is our collective face, we don't normally want it wiped out and replaced with something altogether different. 

**

A lot of private money has gone into these palace reconstructions. You may have contributed indirectly to the Potsdam Stadschloss yourself, without knowing it. If the organization you work for uses SAP to integrate and manage its information (and if it's a biggish organization, it's more likely to use SAP than any other comparable piece of software), then your organization has put money into the pocket of Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP. About twenty million euros came out of Hasso Plattner's pocket to insure that the historical facade of the Stadtschloss in Potsdam was properly replicated, whatever might be behind it. (Here it's the Brandenburg state legislature, rather than a shopping mall.) 

Plattner wasn't the only major contributor. A big German television personality (talk show host and such) gave money for the rebuilding of the Schloss's Fortunaportal, originally built for the grand entry of Friedrich I after he had crowned himself king in 1701. That's the goddess of fortune in gold on the top, reminding everyone that careers like king and television personality are vulnerable to chance.

Fortunaportal, Potsdam city palace.  Photo by Prussianblues, Wiki Commons.

**

After you cross the Long Bridge, the roadway becomes Breite Strasse, and the new Stadtschloss stands up handsomely and almost unphotographably on the right. (You can't step back from it without ending up a long way away, tangled in the trolley lines or lost in the middle of another construction site or obstructed by the truly vile hotel across the way.)

Stadtschloss (Brandenburger Landtag) from Lange Brücke.
Photo,  Adrian Fiedler, Wiki Commons.

Down the street a little farther is a quasi-separate part of the palace complex (also rebuilt), the Marstall (stables).

How can you not love this north-German baroque--these long low grand facades, the sober classicizing, the color? 

Marstall, now Film Museum, Potsdam.  Photo by Klabauter2, Wiki Commons.

The Marstall has had a diversity of lives. The original building here was put up for the Great Elector (1685) as an Orangerie (greenhouse, winter-garden) for the palace. Friedrich Wilhelm I, practical and military-minded as always, turned the Orangerie into a stable, as an accompaniment to turning part of the palace gardens into a military exercise ground. (We don't need exotic fruits and flowers, we need well-trained cavalry!) Friedrich II, aware of the need for both cavalry and gorgeousness, had the stables made bigger and grander (1746), and it is his version of the Marstall that has been rebuilt (and turned into a film museum).

Friedrich II's trouble then--after the Stadschloss had been modernized and dignified, and Sanssouci built as a summer retreat--was that the route from one fine palace to the other was so clearly not fine. It's like seeing how shabby your carpet is after you've bought new furniture. Friedrich, who was not one to leave problems unsolved, had another of his architects, Georg Christian Unger, build a grand  facade to cover and join some of the unimpressive houses along the way.

Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Breite Strasse.  Photo, Arild Vagen, Wiki Commons.This photo makes t

I think this photo makes the place look more overbearing than it is in real life (or at least than it seems to me). Let's get a more amiable close-up look.

Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

How Frederician, how classical, how stolen from northern Italy (by way of the seventeenth-century plans for Whitehall Palace, which Friedrich told Unger to use). How impractical, originally: the vertical structure of the facade didn't match the vertical structure of the houses behind it, originally, so the house windows didn't necessarily look out through the facade windows. 

The unimpressable locals called these Frederician facades (this is not the only one in Potsdam) Vorhemdchen--false shirt fronts, dickeys.

The semi-nude figures disporting themselves with music and drink on the balustrades look as though they are pretending to be in sunny Italy but are not convincing either themselves or the onlookers, in this freezing winter-edge. Potsdam is not exactly the capital of la dolce vita. (It's starting to rain again.)

Top of Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

This building was empty for a good while post-reunification. The city owned it but didn't have the money for sorely needed fix-ups. Then an investor bought it and, like many post-reunification investors, didn't seem to get anywhere very fast with the project. A permit request was eventually put in to turn the building into a hostel, but then the request was withdrawn; and after a long public silence about the building, it emerged as a set of luxury apartments.

**

And speaking of Italy, as we go down Breite Strasse we suddenly find ourselves in the Veneto. Isn't this some Palladian villa plucked up by a winter storm and stuck down in front of a big muddy hole in the ground?

Langer Stall facade.  November 2015, my photo.

Yep, this is another of Friedrich II's false shirt fronts--designed, like the one on the other side of Breite Strasse, by Georg Christian Unger. This shirt front not only has nothing in front of it (it stands a long way back from the street); it also no longer has anything behind it. It used to conceal the Langer Stall--the long barn, which was a sort of big shed to be used for military exercises indoors when it wasn't exercise-weather outdoors. The hole in the ground in front turns out to be a much longer-stalled rebuilding project than the big brick facade across the street. 

The Garnisonkirche (garrison church), built in the 1730s, used to stand here. Its tower was the tallest thing in the Potsdam skyline: Fontane, who didn't like the building much, said that the tower was like a giraffe's neck stuck on the body of some much smaller animal. 

Garnisonkirche and Breite Brücke, Photo by Max Bauer, 
sometime pre-1945. Bundesarchiv, Wiki Commons.

The tower of the garrison church dominated the city not only visually but also in sound: it had a big carillon that marked the time in prewar Potsdam life. On the hour it played Lobet den Herren, one of those mighty seventeenth-century chorales that make their way into the Bach cantatas. On the half-hour it played a tune which had righteous and patriotic words put to it in the nineteenth century (Don't deviate a finger's-breadth from God's ways) but was actually the tune from Papageno's lust-struck aria in The Magic Flute. (If a girl would kiss me, I would feel really good!) (And one may ask, which words went through the head of a musically literate soldier when the bells rang in Potsdam?)

The church survived the big bomb night in 1945; it wasn't hit at all. But the Langer Stall nearby--the building itself, not the Palladian shirt-front--had a lot of wood in it and burned like a torch through the end of the night. The windows of the church had been broken out by the concussion of the bombs, and finally in the morning sparks from the Langer Stall blew in and caught the wooden galleries in the church; sparks caught the wooden louvers of the bell chamber. The interior blew up in flames, and the carillon bells plunged to their deaths. 

So the roof and the interior furnishings were gone, but the walls stood, and the tower stood. The roof over the nave was gone, but services could be held in the base of the tower, after a bit of cleanup.

Garnisonkirche remains, 1966.  Photo, Wiki Commons. 

Ah, but it was a wicked wicked building, and the East German government wanted it to be obliterated. The Garnisonkirche had been a sort of high holy place of the old Prussian military. Moreover--and for this reason--it had been the stage-setting for the handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler in the spring of 1933 that signaled the backing of traditional conservatives for Hitler and thus the turning over of Germany to the Nazis.  

So the Potsdam city council voted in 1968 to blow the place up--a split vote, which was unusual in the coerced unanimity of the time. The building took a lot of killing: the charges that were supposed to have taken the whole tower down only took half, and another set of demolition charges had to be scheduled.

And so, decades later, some people in Potsdam wanted to rebuild the Garnisonkirche (and gave money for it) because it was part of the face of the city. Some people in various parts of Germany wanted to rebuild it (and gave money for it) because it was a monument of Prussian culture. (Hear GBS spinning in his grave.) Some people in the Brandenburg Protestant church wanted to rebuild it (and gave money for it) because they wanted to use it as a sort of international peace and reconciliation center, to cancel out its old and objectionable cultural connotations. Their efforts in this direction outed some of the Prussian-culture donors as apparent right-wing baddies, who objected to this approach. (They argued that a memorial service at the church site for victims of the Nazis was "too one-sided.")

So some of the Potsdam residents and the church authorities stepped back, thinking: we don't want a common project with these people! In 2014 a local citizen initiative started up, calling itself "For a Potsdam without the garrison church," and the militantly anti-militarist wing of the church started an initiative called "Christians don't need a garrison church."  A proposal not to rebuild the church passed in a local referendum; and while these referenda are not binding in Germany, politicians ignore them at their peril. The city council voted (split vote, numerous abstentions) that the Oberbürgermeister should use all legal means to dissolve the foundation that had gathered a lot of the money and provided much of the leadership for the rebuilding project.

And so here we are in 2016, and the foundation for financing the rebuilding of the church still exists. Its spokesman has recently told the Brandenburg General News that it hopes construction will be underway in 2017. Who knows. 

Meanwhile there is a big hole in the ground, which will collect the rain and snow and empty pizza boxes for some seasons yet.

**
After the East German authorities blew up the remains of the Garnisonkirche they built a data center for the regional government more or less on the site. I think the very East-German-era building next to the big hole in the ground was part of this, but hereabouts it's harder to find information on post-1945 buildings than on ones from the eighteenth century. At any rate, the place is adorned by a terrifically Cold-War-era mosaic called Man and Science. Not a great piece of art, but how it does brings the era back .... (The mosaics were put up in 1971; the comparable flavor in US vintage would probably be about 1961.) Here's the lab:

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

Here's what we can do with lab science, build big rockets:

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

And here are the (wonderfully museum-ready) computers that we use to steer the rockets.  

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

A subsequent panel shows something that I took to be a combine harvesting grain and Archangel believed was a space-alien gunship. It was hard to tell from the picture.

Here we are clearly in second-half-of-the twentieth-century Potsdam, with its massive weight of highrises jammed into the landscape.

Along Breite Strasse. November 2015, my photo.

The views from these places, up toward Sanssouci and out along the Havel, must be fabulous.  The buildings sort somewhat oddly with the pre-war cityscape--for example, as they surround the apparent mosque below, which is actually the fanciful nineteenth-century coverup for the pumps that work the Sanssouci fountains. (Friedrich II had abundant fountains in the gardens at Sanssouci, but the hydraulics never worked very well in his time, one is told. The waterworks had troubles until they got a Borsig steam engine (that triumph of German applied science; see Havel 3 post for a bit on the Borsig works). The minaret is covering up the smokestack for the steam engine.)

Pump-works for Sanssouci.  November 2015, my photo.

Lots of people take offense at all the Soviet-era concrete in Potsdam--the way it comes smashing into the gracious courtly ensemble that accreted on the sand dunes out here between the two Thirty Years' Wars (one in the seventeenth century, one in the twentieth). But you can't avoid thinking, out here: doesn't the Soviet-era stuff follow, somehow? Pursue some of the logic of Friedrich's (courtly) Enlightenment, and you end up smashing the courts--having a revolution in the name of reason and of the people. And then more revolutions.

**

Well, there's far too much to think about out here; I want to go home and read. On the way back to the station I cut through a bit of the old center city, which is flourishing and lively. Here is a bit of the eighteenth-century court city, interleaved with asphalt and autos:

Potsdam Altstadt. November 2015, my photo.

Here is a square that used to be a garden designed by Lenné, and then became a parking lot, and now is sort of usable public space again. At present it is occupied by a protest against factory farming. (The text on the pig says, Try vegan ... For the sake of animals, the environment, and your health!)

In Luisenplatz, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

And what is this Italianate object up ahead, a loggia with military-looking sculptures on top?  Mars presides over one portal, Bellona over another: there are piles of arms heaped as trophies in between. This is the Alte Wache (old guardhouse), built in the eighteenth century, damaged on various occasions, patched up minimally and not so well in the 70s and 80s, more thoroughly rehabbed in a long-term job that finished a couple of years ago.  

Alte Wache (Commerzbank), Potsdam.  November 2015, my photo.

I read in the city's press release about this rehab job (https://www.potsdam.de/content/136-sanierung-von-denkmalgeschuetzten-gebaeuden-der-innenstadt-abgeschlossen) that the facade was so damaged by air pollution that it had to be calmed down (beruhigt). Sure, air pollution gives me stress too, I think, but how does a building get nervous and how do you calm it down? 

Ah, a German-vocabulary failure on my part: beruhigen does usually mean calm down, but it also means de-oxidize. Always good to learn something new.

The occupant and source of financing for this building (bless their capitalist hearts, they did a nice job here) is the bank where Archangel and I have our accounts. Should I stop and pick up some cash? Is Mars or Bellona the right figure to preside over the entrance to the ATM lobby?  Who knows.