Grunewald Lakes 5

Summer, feast of light. According to the almanac, nautical twilight, when there's still a little light on the water, changes to full night at almost midnight; and the first semi-light--when the birds start racketing in the trees under our bedroom--comes back at half past two. 

The (huge) windows are open all day; the apartment (stone floors, open space) feels like outdoors. In May, when I threw the windows open first thing in the morning, the apple-blossom fragrance would come rushing into the room from a dozen floors down; and one day I found that a storm wind had blown petals all the way up to our level, so that the edge of the bedroom (in this no-windowscreen world) was scattered with pink apple-blossom.  It is June now; soon there will be linden-blossom scent, stronger and sweeter, summer-deep.

So here we are at the last couple of Grunewald lakes. Back to Uncle-Tom Street [see last post] and into the wetland of the Riemeisterfenn. Down we go into the glacial valley, in the green-gold light of an early summer morning. 

Stairs down to Riemeisterfenn.  May 2016, my photo.

Oh, I'm such a sucker for this. I love the woods. Does anybody else remember particular trees they knew in grade school? Particular trees from everywhere they've lived?

Here we come down to a lower-level path--and there's always a joker in the crowd, of course. Someone's decorated a stump down here.

Stump, Riemeisterfenn.  May 2016, my photo.

Almost everything that flowers in the woods now is white, as white as light. There are chestnuts blooming here and there, sometimes standing at the water's edge lit up by the sun, like candelabra packed with fat white candles. There is hawthorn: the Germans call it whitethorn, as do the English sometimes--though in England they also call it (or used to call it) mayblossom or maythorn or just may. If you lived in hedgerow country the lines of it all turned white in the beginning of the summer: white as may was a usable phrase in Tennysonian English.  Brandenburg isn't hedgerow country; the whitethorn  shines rather shyly in the edges of the woods--as here, where we have come to the next lake, the Krumme Lanke (crooked stream). 

Hawthorn at Krumme Lanke.  May 2016, my photo.

The crooked stream angles along: at one angle the water is blue as blue (see above)--and then at the next angle, at some little beach in the woods, it's green as green:

Krumme Lanke. May 2016, my photo.

On a summer weekend all these micro-beaches along the lake will be full of people, with their bicycles stacked against the trees (no, you can't drive your car right down to the water), picnicking and dangling their feet in the lake, taking the occasional swim. The other shore is a free-run zone for dogs (you can hear them bounding and barking on the far side of the water), and more of the shore on that side than this side has been planted with new reed-beds to filter the city runoff and keep the lake clean.  

The water is supposed to be pretty good for swimming, though there are things in the lake that are better not disturbed. Somewhere here on the lake bottom is a British bomber that crashed into the water in 1944, complete with remaining bombs, half-full gas tanks, and so on. About 1970 there were some preliminary moves to dredge it out; but the costs were too daunting, as the bits seemed considerably scattered across the lakebed, and the mud had settled fifteen feet deep on it in the years of comparative peace. (The water is horribly full of old munitions here in the north. On the Baltic beaches, where the storms roil old seabed material, you can pick up what look like pieces of amber--one of the treasures the sea does sometimes toss up--but they're really phosphorous lumps from old munitions. When they dry out they will ignite and kill you, or perhaps only burn you horribly. We hope there is nothing so hazardous here; and it's not so easy to disturb the meters of Berlin mud.) 

At the south end of Krumme Lanke, the little Wolfschluchtkanal--the wolf-gulch canal--leads us on to the next long and crooked lake, the Schlachtensee. Schlacht in German means battle, and one imagines at first some medieval fray down here, perhaps Heinrich the Illustrious and Otto-with-the-Arrow [see Teltowkanal 5 post, January 2015] having at each other, looking like the knights in medieval German miniatures who appear to be wearing buckets over their heads. But no, in a 13th century document (legal stuff, no pictures of bucket-heads), the lake appears as the Slatsee; and like so many Berlin place-name terms, slat is an early Slavic word that probably means swamp or morass (the other typical local place names come from words meaning mud) but then again it might mean something else. (If we wanted a fine literary phrase for this landscape, something like the garden of forking paths, or the wood at the world's end, could we call it the morass of uncertain meaning? Not that the Schlachtensee is so morass-like any more; the water is a good twenty-five feet deep and almost clean enough to drink. Not quite.)

Schlachtensee.  May 2016, my photo.

Oh,if you look in the right direction, it looks finely wild-woody out here, but it's really not. Berlin is good at maintaining this illusion of countryside in what is still really city, or at least dense suburb.

The path by the water is full of strollers and runners, and waterside villas peer down through the trees.

Villa on Schlachtensee. May 2016, my photo.

Not quite everything flowers white in the woods in May. The buttercups are in bloom in all kinds of odd little spots--in a patch of earth blown into the hollow of a tree, or between pieces of long-ago-fallen log.

Buttercups, fallen log.  May 2016, My photo.

The Japanese are said to have a term, "forest-bathing"--going out into the forest to let your mind soak in the forest-ness of it, to share the calm of the trees and bring your blood pressure down, and so forth.  This wouldn't be a bad place for it, where the summer woods fill the lake with green:

Schlachtensee. May 2016, my photo.

Doesn't always work, of course, to clear the spirits. The Germans, who suffer a bit from north-world gloom (not as badly as the Scandinavians, but it's the same sort of thing) tend to see the forest as a nice place to do away with yourself, if you are so inclined. Here where the lake-chain is coming close to the river Havel, there is just a little strip of the Grunewald between us and the Wannsee, the big bay of the Havel where Heinrich von Kleist--that renewer of German literature--shot himself and a woman acquaintance who wanted to be out of the world but hadn't learned to shoot. (How wonderful the language of Kleist's novellas is, simple and hard and natural as stone, in an age of often overstuffed prose.) She didn't want to go through with the last phases of cancer in a pre-anesthetic world; he was tired of his family beating on him for being a failure. (He knew he was too thin-skinned, he minded criticism more than was reasonable.)

Evening Mood (Abendstimmung), Schlachtensee, by Walter Leistikow, ca. 1895.
Photo from Wiki Commons.

The painter Walter Leistikow shot himself down here near Schlachtensee, as an alternative to going through the last phases of dying of syphilis in a pre-antibiotic world. He was a friend of some of the great painter-princes of his day, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, but he wasn't as much of a success himself. He was a bete noire for Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose tastes in art ran to big animal statues and the like. The Kaiser grumbled about Leistikow: Er hat mir den ganzen Grunewald versaut. He's messed up the whole Grunewald for me, with his ugly pictures. --Though the verb versaut is a bit more picturesque: the Germans use pig-words to be expressive--it's pig-cold (schweinekalt) out there, or the prices at this store are pig-cheap (saubillig).  The Kaiser says, He's pigged up the whole forest for me. (People are sad in the woods for so many reasons.) 

We're at the end of the lake, not far from the next S-Bahn station; time to go home.