So obviously the thing to do is not to go indoors, because you might miss something. Not so much out in the forest yet, where spring comes later, but here where the city breathes warm on itself, like a child blowing on its hands to warm them on a chilly day. (Warmth leaks down from windows, steams up from the transit and distance-heat tunnels and sewer lines. In the big linden-studded lawn between our apartment house and the next one, you can see in winter where the waste-water pipe goes: all season long there's a path where the warmth of our collective bathwater melts the snow and keeps the grass green.)
Time to get out, time to walk the eastern half of the little tributary glacial valley that runs into the bigger valley of the Grunewald Lake Chain. Back to Heidelberger Platz, therefore, where we started last time, and turn east this time instead of west. Under the freeway, along the tracks a bit, and here we are, on a dim and chilly morning, at the Fennsee, a narrow half-mile-long strip of water that lies at the bottom of the little glacial valley.
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| Fennsee, west end. April 2016, my photo. |
According to the weather forecast it's supposed to brighten up in the course of the morning and not pour. Not much luck with a similar forecast the last time we were out here, but let us travel hopefully.
Just as the streets are warmer than the forest, so also the bottom of this little valley--only the suggestion of a valley, only a few yards below the sidewalk level--is warmer than the streets. The new leaves have come out in clouds here along the Fennsee already, and all sorts of things are in bloom. And look, the forecast is right this time: the morning clouds ravel back and the day brightens.
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| Along the Fennsee. April 2016, my photo. |
It's pretty, but the Fennsee used to have a bad rep: it smelled to high heaven in the high summer. If you lived right along the park here, having breakfast or afternoon coffee on your balcony was impossible in summer because of the stench.
It hadn't always been such a problem. The water table in Berlin was higher when the big apartment houses with their big balconies along the park were built, around the turn of the last century, and there was more throughput through the Fennsee. As the lake got lower and more stagnant, and increasing pollution from the street runoff mixed with oxygen-consuming decay of fallen leaves in the low water, a combination of hydrogen sulfide buildup (remember your junior high chemistry class, it's rotten-egg gas) and dead fish made the place intolerable. The smaller lakes over to the west had similar problems, and a pump system was put in to feed fresh water through them from the Havel. But here we're too far from the Havel for this to be an efficient solution.
So, what to do? Clear out, leave the neighborhood for the unfortunate poor until it's so derelict that even they hardly live there any more? Nah. Get rid of the lake, drain the water off elsewhere, fill in the space and create some prime west-central Berlin real estate? Nah. Clean up after yourself, instead.
About ten years ago they dredged a lot of sludge out of the Fennsee and did some re-landscaping by the water so that less organic matter would fall in and rot. They also put in a big underground filter mechanism in the storm-water system, which would separate out the dog droppings and automobile-tire bits and other particulate matter from the rainwater before it got into the lake.
This seems to have worked. There were some protests about the tree-cutting and shrub-clearing along the water--you can never cut down a tree without causing an uproar around here--but in this season it's hard to complain about the treatment of the shoreline. A good many trees were left; and a tulip-lawn running down to the water is not the worst thing ever to happen to the landscape:
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| On Fennsee, April 2016, my photo. |
The tulips aren't quite out yet, even in the greenhouse-like warmth of these shallow slopes. But the earlier bulbs are in full outburst here:
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| Along Fennsee. April 2016, my photo. |
Let's see, here we sort of need to get up to sidewalk level again, where a street crosses the park. This is no big climb, and the mild, animal-like breath of the sheltered valley still reaches up here. It breathes on the cherries, and here they are in full bloom, weeks earlier than in more exposed places:
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| Cherry blossom near Fennsee. April 2016, my photo. |
Aagh, why do I get myself entangled in business trips in April every year? I'm going to be away this year at peak cherry-blossom time. Next year I am not leaving Berlin in the spring, I really am not .... (Did I say this last year? I think so.)
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| Cherry tree near Fennsee. April 2016, my photo. |
The lake ends, but the little shallow valley goes on. Now it's a park packed with playgrounds, and the playgrounds are packed with very small children bounding around in bright-colored jackets, as though someone had spilled a hundred packets of M&M's along the park slopes. (Compared to the US, there's more feeling here that small children should be roaring around outdoors a lot, and in a wide variety of weathers.)
The end of the park is almost the last bit of this little tributary tunnel-valley, and the last water in it is the duck-pond at Rathaus Schöneberg. (It used to have something of a stink problem too, like the Fennsee; but as it's so small that a reed-bed as a filter, along with oxygenation from a circulating pump, seem to have solved the problem.)
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| Rathaus Schöneberg and U-Bahn Station. April 2016, my photo. |
The tower in the background of the picture is the Schöneberg Rathaus, where John Kennedy made his famous "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. (And apparently no one cracked a smile, even though "Ich bin ein Berliner" doesn't mean "I am a Berliner," it means "I am a jelly doughnut.")
The arcade along the water is one of the grander U-Bahn station exteriors in the city. The roof of it is at street-level--actually the roof is a street, on a bridge crossing our little glacial valley--and the trains roll through the arcade at the level of the duck-pond water.
There's a fine outburst of classicizing sculpture on the U-Bahn-station roof/ street bridge, which is scattered with strollers and bicyclists in the mild noontime.
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| U-Bahn station Rathaus Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
I grumbled once about the lack of river-gods and nymphs and such in Berlin (compared to Lyon, specifically). But here, on the roof of the U-Bahn station, we have them in abundance--weather-battered and moss-stained and serene against the spring sky.
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| On top of U-Bahn station, Rathaus Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
Walter Benjamin wrote about the classical figures, the "caryatids and atlantes, the putti and Pomonas" that watched over the doorways and bridges--the transition points in the cityscape--in the Berlin of his childhood around 1900. "They understood how to wait," he says of the figures. "It was all the same to them, if they were waiting for a stranger, or the return of the old gods, or the child that shoved past them with his school-bag. Under their sign, the old west of Berlin became the West of the ancient world, from which the west winds come to the seamen, who float their barge with the apples of the Hesperides slowly down the Landwehrkanal to the Bridge of Hercules."
This was a bridge over the Landwehrkanal that used to have sculpture groups on it representing Hercules in battle with the Nemean Lion and with the centaurs. But time crumbles all these things away. The centaurs vanished in the chaos at the end of the war; the Nemean Lion moved east, to a scrap of park along the Spree. The old stone bridge over the Landwehrkanal was blown up in the war and later replaced by a minimalist, sculpture-free stretch of reinforced concrete. Hercules is still there in a fashion, however, a little beyond the bridge, in one of those over-muscled, heavy-breathing neo-baroque animal sculptures with which Wilhelm II littered the parks. (Small-city US public sculpture tends to go for animals and children; Imperial German public sculpture went for animals and warriors.)
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| Hercules and the Erymanthian Wild Boar, by Louis Tuaillon. Photo by Manfred Brückels, Wiki Commons. |
Louis Tuaillon, who provided the wild boar above, and August Gaul, who provided the golden stag for the imposing silly fountain on the other side of the U-Bahn station here, were fellow art students in Berlin in the late nineteenth century, in the age of fat classicizing building, of delusions of grandeur.
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| Hirschbrunnen by Rathaus Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
The delusions stood on shaky ground, in more than one sense. One reason that there has been a lot of landscape work here--a lot of effort to separate solid ground and lake, a lot of fighting back against the tendency of Berlin to revert to its natural state of stagnant marsh--is that early in the present century the ground here in front of the U-Bahn station dropped two feet and the stag fountain nearly fell over into the subsidence.
But the river-gods are still here on top of the station, crumbling gently, watching over the beginning--or the end--of the little glacial valley. As Benjamin says, they understand how to wait. (Maybe the whole U-Bahn station will sink into the marsh some day?)
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| On the U-Bahn station, Rathaus Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
This isn't perhaps quite the end of the valley: I think there's a bit more just beyond the Rathaus, though I'm not sure how to get to it in the mess of big streets and construction that I land in as soon as I'm out of the park.
Well, let's see: we could try down Dominicusstrasse. Here's a sweet patch of garden beside a nursing home--perhaps one could cut through here?
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| On Dominicusstrasse. April 2016, my photo. |
Nope; fenced off. Round the corner, then, into Hauptstrasse, which is big and noisy, rank with auto exhaust and blowing dust, and with so thick a crowd at the bus stop that it's hardly possible to pick your way down the sidewalk. (Arabic and Russian in the air, Turkish and cigarette smoke; women with long gowns and baby carriages, German workmen in blue overalls.) Colors dazzle on the building on the other side of the street:
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| On Hauptstrasse, Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
And then, look straight ahead, and here's a fragment of the eighteenth-century village core of Schöneberg, dreaming among the churchyard trees in the middle of all this racket, on the little bit of solid high ground, the Berg of Schöneberg, where they planted the village in the middle ages, above the reach of the marsh.
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| Dorfkirche Schöneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
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| Paul-Gerhardt-Kirche, Schöeneberg. April 2016, my photo. |
Incidentally, the builder responsible for the 1760 version of the village church was one "Widow Lehman, Master-Builderess, from Spandau." (The Germans still stick feminine endings onto all occupational terms, which I tend to forget--calling myself incorrectly a Professor when I should call myself a Professorin. It doesn't feel right to an English speaker, it feels like calling yourself a professorette; and someone told me that young women scholars in Germany are tending to drop the feminine endings, but I don't know.) Of course the old church burnt out again, for the umpteenth time, in WWII, but the rebuilding in the 50s was pretty much a copy of the Widow Lehman's version.
**
Well, since I have got my creaky knees up to the level of the old church, it might be good to have a look around the churchyard behind it. It's like a florist's shop: the grave-mounds are planted thick with pansies and daffodils, hyacinths and tulips.
The peasants or ex-peasants who owned land here and made a fortune in real estate development when the city pushed out this way in the 19th century are memorialized in the mausoleums that line the sunny wall of the churchyard. Franz Schwechten, the historicist architect with the giant mustache who appears in the previous post, is buried along here somewhere.
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| Schöneberg churchyard. April 2016, my photo. |
The new church--which still plants its dead in this churchyard, I think--is named for Paul Gerhardt, that fine Baroque poet and hymn-writer. If you're somewhat acquainted with Bach's choral music you will have heard Gerhardt's verse. I found it oppressive when I was a child, sitting through long Lutheran church services with long gloomy seventeenth-century hymns. Fifteen verses! Eighteen verses! All about how hard life and death are. (But as we get older we can acquire a taste for the death's-head ornateness of Baroque verse.)
Not all of Gerhard's verse is so dark, though. I was walking along the Spree in the middle of the city one summer day a couple of years ago and ran into a more cheerful bit of it. It was Angela Merkel's birthday, and a small brass band was serenading her, uncomfortably perched on one of the upper-floor terraces of the Chancellor's Office building. They were playing a mix of older popular tunes from various sources, German and otherwise, and I was wondering idly: are these locals, or is this some kind of international birthday serenade? And then, on the lovely summer day along the water, the brass band went bounding into Geh aus, mein Herz, und suche Freud, and I thought, Oh, it has to be Germans. No one knows this but the Germans.
Go out my heart, and look for Freud--oh, sorry, translation glitch: look for joy--in this lovely summertime .... The trees are full of leaves, the earth covers its dust with a green gown, the narcissus and the tulip are finer than all Solomon's silks.
Gerhard enumerates the spring flowers and the birds with Germanic exactitude (fifteen verses!) and it all ends with death (and Paradise); but in the middle he says, I can't be still, I don't want to be still ... when everything sings I sing with everything.
Ich singe mit wenn alles singt. You bet. It's a beautiful day.
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| In Rudolph-Wilde Park, Schöneberg. April 2016, My photo. |
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