I'm headed for a place called Kladow in southwestern Berlin, on the right bank of the sprawly, multi-part river Havel. (Last fall I was on the left bank, which in some places is a long way from the right bank.) The Berlin public transit website says I should go out my front door and down to Bahnhof Zoo, and there pick up the express bus that runs along the main highway westward through the city. It will cross the river at Spandau and then run south to the point where I want to start.
Oh right, let's sit there sweating in the stench-traffic for three quarters of an hour or so.
I have a better idea: let's go out the back door and catch the S-Bahn to Wannsee, and then take the ferry upriver ... which needs a little more careful timing, because the ferry doesn't run as often as the bus, but it takes about the same amount of time altogether and will be wonderfully fresh on the water, on a sweet summer morning.
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| From the Wannsee ferry. June 2016, my photo. |
Most of the Berlin public-transit ferries are small, and I was alarmed to see almost a hundred people lined up at the Wannsee pier when I got there. But the ferry here is a refitted cruiser from one of the big tour lines that infest the rivers and lakes around Berlin. (There seem to be more of them every year: I was down around Museum Island last Sunday afternoon, and the big tourist-cruisers were lined up almost nose to tail, shooting the one-arched bridge at the end of the island.)
Refitting a tourist cruiser to make a public ferry consists mostly of ripping out a section of seats in the center to make room for bicycle stands. There are dozens of bicyclists headed across the water for cross-country runs in the woods and fields.
Ah, summer in Germany .... The ferry stop at Kladow is ringed with beer-gardens, and there's a little park where you can sit by the water and watch the sailboats. An elderly trombone quartet is practicing under the trees in the park, with their bicycles and trombone cases piled around them. They have some good riffs on Hey, Jude, marred by an unwanted bloop now and then.
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Here's a little street, the Imchenallee, headed in the direction I want to go (Imchen is a small island in the river just off Kladow, which we sail around in the ferry on the way to the Kladow pier):
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| Imchenallee, Kladow. June 2016, my photo. |
So many sidetracks are possible. Here is a path going off to the left into a little Naturschutzgebiet, a protected natural area--what might this be? It's a dry grassland: an area of such pure sand that it doesn't hold the rainwater, and so it makes a little steppe or semi-desert in the midst of the general Berlin swampiness. There's a wandering, semi-disappearing track through it ... Well, we can't go very wrong here, this is quite a small area and we're bound to come out on the other side eventually.
What perfect summer it is here, with the smell of the dry-country grass in the sun. Insects buzz, and fair-weather clouds float in the intense blue behind the trees that fringe the grassland.... This looks hard to beat as a place for lunch.
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| Oak in dry grassland, Kladow. June 2016, my photo. |
How like home this is, how like home: the outdoor summer, the sun-on-dry-grass smell in the countryside. When I was growing up, we used to walk cross-country on days like this, stopping in spots like this to sit on a fallen tree and eat apples and cheese, to listen to the insect-buzz and watch the little clouds, to talk about this and that.
I am not sure that this would be so possible now in the US, in the same places. At any rate the experience would be different now. Some of the places we used to walk are chemical-drenched monoculture now. Some are exurban developments unfriendly to pedestrians. One of the places became a Wal-Mart parking lot, and then Wal-Mart moved on. (Not only did they pave paradise and put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell used to sing; they didn't even take good care of the parking lot.)
But here ... let us eat our sandwich in the pleasant shade and let it feel like home.
Heimat, the Germans say; and English-language Wikipedia has an article on Heimat, saying that although the dictionary equivalent is "home," it is an untranslatable term. Heimat is an interweaving of place and people: landscape, language, social customs, weather, characteristic kinds of work and culture. You're woven into all this yourself, and you can't be taken out of it without feeling as if pieces of flesh were being torn out of you and left behind.
It's harder for this sort of feeling to develop in the US because the mobility is so much greater. (My mother, growing up in the US, lived in Florida, Colorado, California, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, and then Colorado again. My husband's family has lived in eastern Germany since the thirteenth century.) I remember an energetic debate among German and American friends over the meaning of the question, "Where are you from?" The Germans insisted it meant, "Where were you born," because that would normally also mean where you grew up and were socialized in certain ways and got a certain identity. And the Americans said, No, but what if you leave when you're five, or even when you're eighteen, and have decades of adult life in some quite different place? Then that becomes the place where you're from. (The Germans rolled their eyes, thinking: Of course it means, where were you born.) Anyway, is it so different to be born in Kansas rather than Nebraska? Nah, probably not.
Part of the trouble with Heimat is that the idea appeals to the wrong people and lends itself to misuse. The Nazis loved it. When Stalin wanted to go after the Jews in Russia in the later 1940s, he denounced them as "rootless cosmopolitans"--that is, exactly the opposite of people with a Heimat, the opposite of patriotic blood-and-soil Russians.
The other part of the trouble with Heimat is that, at least in the extreme, it isn't even a good idea; it's too much of a closed world. If everything is so closely woven together, then you end up in the cultural equivalent of one of those mountain valleys where most people marry their cousins and have two-digit IQs.
Total rootlessness isn't an ideal either, of course. (Think of all those sad American suburban developments where the walls are white and the carpets are Merrill Lynch beige, because the inhabitants aren't going to stay long and heaven forbid there should be anything distinctive about the house that might put off the next buyer.)
Anywhere you would actually want to live, anywhere that offers a humane existence, has to be a mix of people who are rooted like trees and people who just got off the boat.
The German community in Brandenburg and points east in the 19th and early 20th century probably fancied themselves as occupants of a Heimat that was separate from Berlin, and quite separate from its Slavic and Jewish surroundings; but if they did, this was fantasy. Prussia without Berlin, Berlin without the Jews, would have been something quite different, and not nearly as attractive as these folks imagined.
Look, the street names almost always tell us something here, and when we come to the end of the path through the sand we are on Mascha-Kaléko-Weg:
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| Mascha-Kaleko-Weg, Kladow. June 2016, my photo. |
... and Mascha Kaléko was a German poet--someone whose Heimat was clearly the German language, but not exactly Germany. Her parents were Galician Jews (Galicia is now in Poland and the Ukraine); her father was a Russian citizen, her mother an Austrian. When she was a child in the 19-teens, her family was on the run from pogroms and war; there were several stops, the last of which was Berlin.
I was born an emigrants' child ...
The old "where-am-I" angst,
The hostile bed in nowhere,
The foreign soap-smell on the pillows,
So many bridges burned behind you,
And out of their ashes again and again
The new, the false phoenix-home.
I could scream. (I can, thank God.)
M. Kaléko, Notizen
Berlin was good, for a while. For a few years she was one of the celebrated poets of the neue Sachlichkeit, the style that swept through the arts (painting and architecture as much as literature) in the Weimar years, the 1920s and early 30s. (The standard Englishing of die neue Sachlichkeit, "the new objectivity," is one of those awful translations that come from looking words up in a dictionary. It's maybe something more like "the new realism," or "the new getting-to-the-point" or "the new sobriety," after all the bloated fantasies of the run-up to World War I. Think of the historicist villas that show up in the posts earlier this year about the Grunewald lake chains; and there are, in a way, literary equivalents of this overdecorated bloat in literature.) The new poetry was to be understandable by everyone, to be singable in cabarets; it was often satirical, often political--and in Kaléko's case there was a good deal of witty love poetry. (An American may be reminded a little of Dorothy Parker, though Kaléko is a better poet.)
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| Mascha Kaleko. |
Her first book was published in 1933, just as the Nazis were coming to power. It was well received, and she published another, and they sang her songs in the cabarets for a couple of years before it was officially noticed that all this should not be happening, because she was Jewish, and her work was banned. She cleared out with husband and child to New York, where she made a living for them by writing advertising copy.
In one verse from her New York days, (Der kleine Unterschied, "The Little Difference") a German emigrant answers a well-meaning local who seems to have asked how the emigrant is getting along in English. The languages aren't so different, after all.
Sure, says the emigrant, it's the same if I just substitute one word for another: homeland instead of Heimat, poem instead of Gedicht. Certainly, I'm happy here ... but I'm not glücklich ("happy" in German).
sag ich für Heimat homeland,
und poem für Gedicht.
Gewiss, ich bin sehr happy,
doch glücklich bin ich nicht.
The countries that take in the emigrants, the refugees, tend not to have a very good grip on this. They think, You ought to be so happy to be here--and of course one is in some sense happy (possibly not glücklich or its Arabic equivalent), to be alive and not dead, or not in a camp somewhere. But the locals don't think how traumatizing it is to be ripped out of even a semi-Heimat.
A few weeks ago, a Berlin acquaintance was telling me about her son the social worker, who has responsibility for some unaccompanied-minor refugees who have landed in the city, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds from Syria and Iraq. The trouble, says the social-worker son, is that they just shut down. In some cases their families are dead, in some cases they have no idea what has happened to their families. They have no connections to the world any more, nothing makes sense; they sit and stare at the wall. Nothing is good or bad any more, nothing is anything.
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This country around the Havel is a characteristic piece of northeast-German Heimat: the pine-woods, the grain-fields silver-gilt in the summer sun, the sober classical country houses, the gardens going down to the water. These are the places where a lot of science and literature and philosophy and history were made in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Not so much now, perhaps.
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| Gutshaus (manor house) Neukladow. June 2016, my photo. |
Otto von Bismarck's mother grew up in this house at Neukladow, which we come to if we keep going down Mascha-Kaléko-Weg. It's in process of restoration, according to the "your EU contributions at work" sign on the other side, but at the moment no one seems to be doing anything. No one's around.
Frau Bismarck's family didn't own this property very long, I think; it changed hands a lot. (There's always more change and disintegration going on in the Heimat than the ideal would allow.) In the 1880s the property passed into the hands of a cement-factory owner; and it was the cement-man's son (an art historian) who spiffed up the house and laid out the gardens and filled the place with guests in the early years of the 20th century: theater people, painters like Max Liebermann [see Havel 5 post, October 2015], writers like Gerhart Hauptmann from the Friedrichshagen group [see Spree 10 post, July 2014], and political figures like Walter Rathenau [see Grünewald Lake Chain 2, March 2016].
It didn't last, nothing lasts. The people who used to meet out here were scattered--variously murdered, heartbroken, compromised, exiled. The house was used for this and that, and then stood empty for a long time.
How unironically idyllic it is here, in spite of everything. Here are fine views of the river (from the terrace of the manor house where you might have had afternoon tea in the summer, or from the places in the garden where you might pause in a stroll):
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| River Havel from Gutspark Neukladow. June 2016, my photo. |
Here is a noble array of trees, in vaguely English-landscape style, with tall poplars for punctuation in the rambling sentences of the garden:
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| Gutspark Neukladow. June 2016, my photo. |
There are wild roses blooming among the trees; and then there is a mass of mock-oranges rising like a wall beside the path on an uphill stretch. False jasmine, they call it here. (Why does this poor plant get accused of imitating another, no matter which language you use to name it? A sort of plagiarist-plant.) The flowers are like a great burst of white light.
The summer-green is so intense here, in this half-tended place. You feel planted among the lives of the plants, feel yourself breathing in what they breathe out.
The first red poppies are in bloom, down at the foot of the mock-orange hedge. In Flanders fields the poppies blow, and so forth. Wars were made here, over the years, as well as books and barley harvests.
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Brecht (famously) wrote, in the thirties:
What kind of times are these,
When to talk about trees is almost a crime,
Because it’s a silence about so many atrocities? ….
These three lines are carved on the wall at one of transit stations near us.
Brecht goes on:
It’s true, I’m still earning my living,
But believe me, that’s only an accident. Nothing
Of what I do gives me the right to eat my fill.
By chance I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost.)
Yep.
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Back to Imchenallee, a terrifically muddy stretch of it. The whole street in some places is puddle, and so the whole street is full of sky.
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| Street in Kladow, June 2016. My photo. |
Back to the park by the water, where the trombone quartet is still at it, an hour and a half after I heard them first. They've switched from Hey, Jude to some lugubrious Lutheran hymn-tunes.
Time to go home, past the somber poetry on the S-Bahn station wall. Time to stop for sweet apricots, or ripe strawberries that perfume half the street, and talk a bit with our Turkish greengrocer about Turkish politics. Not good news, these days.
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German version of Brecht's An die Nachgeborenen:
Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist.
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! ...
Es ist wahr: ich verdiene noch meinen Unterhalt
Aber glaubt mir: das ist nur ein Zufall. Nichts
Von dem, was ich tue, berechtigt mich dazu, mich sattzuessen.
Zufällig bin ich verschont. (Wenn mein Glück aussetzt, bin ich verloren.)
German version, Kaléko's "Notizen"
Die alte Wobinichdennangst
Das feindliche Bett im Nirgendwo
Fremder Seifengeruch auf dem Kissen
So viele Brücken hinter dir verbrannt
Aus ihrer Asche immer wieder die falsche, die neue
Phönix-Heimat. Ich kann ja schreien. Gott sei dank.
