In the summer of last year I walked down the river Havel on the west side of Berlin, starting at Hennigsdorf, which is way up at the northwest corner of the city, just over the border into Brandenburg. It seemed like a reasonable starting place; but actually it's not the farthest north you can go and still re-connect with Berlin transit.
So, on one of those marvelous green high-summer days that make you want to get out of even so green a city as Berlin, I went back up to Hennigsdorf and headed north.
You may have had more contact with Hennigsdorf than you imagine. If you've traveled by train in Europe or Asia (or the US or South Africa) you're likely enough to have been traveling in trains built here in Hennigsdorf. If you've had the misfortune to run into thyroid problems, the diagnostic tests used to figure out your problem (as well as tests used for analyzing tumors and for prenatal screening) may well have come from Hennigsdorf.
People have been out here making stuff--all kinds of stuff--for a long time. AEG, the German version of General Electric, built trains here a hundred years ago, and a VEB (a Volkseigener Betrieb, a People's Own Company, in Communist days) built them here fifty years ago. The Canadian firm Bombardier builds them here now, shipping them out on the river Havel and onward to the rest of the world.
There's a steel works here that's also about a hundred years old, modernized by an Italian company in the 90s and apparently doing well. The diagnostic tests come from a firm called B.R.A.H.M.S. (which works with a French firm called Cezanne--is this getting culturally complicated?)
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| B.R.A.H.M.S in Hennigsdorf. Photo, Skatz-Nelstar, Wiki Commons. |
There's a biomass plant along the river here that produces distance heat for the area. (Note for friends in more thinly populated parts of the world: we don't do individual-building furnaces here. Your heat is piped to your building from some central plant. The idea of an individual little furnace not just in each building but in each apartment, popular in newer American buildings, would strike the locals with horror here, because little furnaces are likely to be inefficient.)
The industrial stuff is on the west bank of the river here. On the east bank, north of Hennigsdorf, there's a stretch of woods and heath-land, the Stolper Heide, about two km wide and--how long? maybe 8 km?--that looks like good walking territory. I should be able to reconnect to transit at a little town at the other end of the woods.
Here is the coat of arms of Hennigsdorf: two sickle blades at the bottom (that's for agriculture, which also exists in these parts), an anvil (that's for the heavy industry), and a heron that has just caught a fish (that's for the quasi-wild east side of the river).
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| Hennigsdorf coat-of-arms. Wiki Commons. |
On the way over to the east bank of the river, you (or at least I) end up going through a park dominated by a clumpy Soviet-style memorial to the Hennigsdorf workers who were killed in the Kapp-Putsch. The inscription says, "Honor to the fallen heroes of the working class in the Kapp-Putsch 1920."
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| Kapp-Putsch memorial, Hennigsdorf. August 2016, my photo. |
The Kapp Putsch was an attempted military coup, a march on Berlin by some Army veterans who weren't happy about the changes in the Germany that had occurred after World War I. Democracy, ugh! Civilian rule, Jews in the government, cutbacks in army strength! Ugh! We need to make Germany great again! (This is essentially pre-Nazi, but some of the marchers on Berlin painted swastikas on their helmets.)
The government wanted the army to put down the coup, but the commander-in-chief of the army refused to give the order and called in sick for the duration. Neither the army nor the police resisted in any very serious way. Most members of the elected government fled from Berlin.
Ach, these people. What did Kapp and his friends think they were going to do when they took over? How did they think the rest of the world was going to respond if Germany started building up a big army again, so soon after the war? How did they think they were going to pay for it? Did they think everyone in Germany was going to be enthusiastic? (I ask Archangel, who has a PhD in modern German history, and he says, "The word 'think' is not very applicable to this group." And indeed the group around Kapp fell apart fairly promptly due to internal disagreements about these and other matters. Once they took over, they found that they didn't have the same views about a lot of things, nor did they have much skill at resolving their differences. This was awkward, since they hadn't put together plans about practical matters like who was to be in charge of what in a new government.)
So who put an end to this idiot coup, apart from the confusions of the participants themselves? Lots of ordinary people. The (unionized) workers who went on strike, cutting off the transit and the telephones and the telegraph so the putschists couldn't communicate with each other easily. The (unionized) bureaucrats who refused to recognize a new government and prevented the putschists from getting their hands on the money they needed. The workers who fought in the streets against the soldiers supporting the coup.
There are monuments scattered around Germany for the people who were killed in this fighting against the putschists: the picture below shows the one that Walter Gropius put up in Weimar in 1922, in one of his more imaginative moments. (Work like this did not endear him to the Nazis, who later put up monuments to the dead putschists with their swastika-helmets. Gropius ended up in the US, perpetrating things like the Pan Am (now Met Life) building in Manhattan.)
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| Monument to the March Dead (Walter Gropius). Photo from Wiki Commons. |
The coup attempt fell apart after five days; Kapp, one of the most conspicuous leaders, fled to Sweden, and other leaders gave up and made their peace with the government.
Lots of people didn't like the peace that was made. It was very conciliatory: the commander-in-chief who had called in sick stayed on as commander-in-chief, and most of the people who were active in the coup attempt got away with it. Some of them formed terrorist cells, and in a few years they got busy assassinating politicians they didn't like. (These were the people who shot Walther Rathenau, downriver in Koenigsallee, in 1922; see Grunewald Lakes 2 post, March 2016).
Still, it stayed true for a long time that you didn't want to get on the wrong side of the Hennigsdorf workers. In 1953 they sent a contingent of five thousand who marched the twenty or so km into East Berlin to join in the uprising against the East German government. There's a plaque on a wall in Tegel, just downriver, that says, "Here the Hennigsdorf steel workers marched past toward center city on the 17th of June 1953, and demanded the reunification of the German people through free elections."
The Hennigsdorf workers lost in 1953, and they didn't win much in 1920, in the short term. But the long term is another story.
I'm headed away from the factories, away from the organized workers, into the world of the fish and the herons. But let's give a nod to the heroes of labor, as we make our way toward the river.
There's a good deal of miscellaneous wetland on the east side of Hennigsdorf: there's the river somewhere, and a lot of other water seeping and sloshing around in the Havelniederung, the Havel low-land, the marshy bottomland here where the river spreads out in high-water times.
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| On the edge of Hennigsdorf, near the Havel. My photo, August 2016. |
There's some dry ground farther on, where a traveling puppet theater has set up. Here's the box-office (Kasse) wagon, and there are other equally kitschy wagons circled around on the grass, which carry the theater and the properties and the puppeteers.
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| Augsburger Figurentheater wagon, Hennigsdorf. My photo, August 2016. |
This is the Augsburger Figurentheater, run by a family that started in the puppet-theater business in 1822 and has been running this particular version of the theater for three generations. (Go four and five generations back, you're in the era of the World Wars, people would have been otherwise occupied.) Everyone seems to be asleep or away at the moment; the wagons are all shut up.
Here we are at the river proper, which is looking pretty regulated and channeled at the bridge:
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| River Havel at Ruppinerstraße bridge. My photo, August 2016. |
The east side of the river belongs to the Berlin Water Works. The water that spills over from the river into this wetland is, in effect, filtered by the sand that it sinks through. The water-works pumps it out from about a hundred feet down, from a series of wells that I pass along the path, and it's pretty clean. They do a little further filtering at the water-works nearby, and then pipe the water off to northern Berlin.
Here's the path north through water-works-land; here are dreamy lost stretches of water, full of late-summer cloud.
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| Havelniederung, north of Hennigsdorf. My photo, August 2016. |
Sea eagles live here; cranes, fish otters, I don't know what all. There's a little banging from the metal-recycling plant on the other side of the Havel, but the wildlife doesn't seem to mind. Here's mullein in bloom:
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| Mullein. August 2016, my photo. |
The water works has made an effort to foster the wildlife in these wetlands, and they've put some cheerful, slightly dopey murals on the walls of the big sheds they have here and there in the woods in this deep-well district.
Here are a gigantic sea eagle and crane, looking as though they're about to attack a small water-works employee climbing out of one of the wells, presumably after doing a maintenance check.
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| Berlin Water Works mural, Havelniederung. August 2016, my photo. |
On the other side of the woods from the river is a little town called Stolpe (whence the name Stolper Heide for the forest-and-heath stretch), where they made bricks for centuries from the local clay. --And brick is one of those wonderfully local things like wine or cheese that is different everywhere. Don't you love things like this?
Think of the salmon-to-terra-cotta shades of the old Chicago Common brick. (And think of the days, which for all I know may still be going on, when robbers would come along during the night and strip unoccupied buildings of their Chicago Common to sell to the suppliers of vintage architectural detailing. Or maybe even strip an occupied building, if the neighborhood was bad enough.) High-organic clays from northeastern Illinois make this kind of brick:
Or think of that rather peculiar shade of buff-yellow brick that southwestern Ontario towns are built of. (The towns are pretty, but I've always thought this was sort of an unhealthy-looking color.) Iron-poor, limestone-rich clays in Ontario make this kind of brick:
Brandenburg clay is red, though not the same red as you get farther north, up near the shores of the Baltic, where they built enormous Gothic churches out of really bright red brick. (Pictures in another post or two, if I pull myself together to catch up.) The Stolper Heide product is like this, a cooler shade that looks almost bluish if you set it side by side with the flaring orangey red of the Baltic-coast brick. Ah, we're cooler and quieter and more withdrawn in ourselves, out here in the Brandenburg woods ...
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| Old farm buildings in Hohen Neuendorf. My photo, August 2016. |
And we are definitely out in the woods now: Brandenburg sand-country summer forest, oak and pine. Here are the oaks with their twisty branches:
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And here are the pines with their red trunks in the sun, red as Brandenburg brick:
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The path in the woods is one you (and even I) can't lose: much of it is paved. Some of it is part of a transnational bike route that runs across the north edge of Europe from somewhere in the Netherlands to somewhere in Poland.
Waterworks employees use it also, to get to the wells.
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| Berlin Water Works mural, Havelniederung. August 2016, my photo. |
It isn't possible to lose the path, but I don't really have a proper map of this territory, so I'm vague about where I am in this longish stretch of woods. It's nicely orienting, therefore, to come out of the trees and under the railroad line ... This is good, meeting the railroad is always helpful in figuring out where you are.
It's a bit remote out here, but not so remote as to keep the graffiti artists from jazzing up the underpass. This is arguably livelier than the water-works murals.
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| Graffiti in the underpass in Stolper Heide. My photo, August 2016. |
And now that we've gone under the tracks, it isn't far to the freeway. Getting to the other side of a freeway on foot in the middle of the countryside is not a sensible project in some parts of the world; but here we can do it. The path, which has been at a little distance from the Havel, goes to join the river just where the freeway crosses over it, and there's space by the water, under the bridge, for the footpath as well.
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| River Havel near highway 111 bridge. My photo, August 2016. |
How small the river is here. The Havel has moments of looking mighty in Berlin, where it muscles out into a broad space and is full of barge traffic--but this is just a little country stream. (The barge traffic may have peeled off onto a canal: there's one that splits off from the river a bit south of here.)
If I'm going to re-connect with transit, I need to head eastward here, to Hohen Neuendorf. (This means High New Village; we passed Low New Village, Nieder Neuendorf, downriver, last summer: see Havel 1 post.)
As the path comes out of the woods and heath, it comes into a sort of subdivision that has been tacked unto Hohen Neuendorf in recent years. The path becomes a street, which splits into Havelstrasse (what else?) and Schillerpromenade. Ah, we're being literary out here, even in this district of recent building.
I don't take Schillerpromenade, but I start wondering: how much do people really read Schiller any more, once they're out of school? Or even when they're in school? It used to be so obligatory. The Rathaus of the Berlin district just north of ours has lines from Schiller running around the outside in gold, lines of the every-schoolchild-used-to-memorize kind:
Arbeit ist des Bürgers Zierde,
Segen ist der Mühe Preis.
Work is the ornament of the citizen/ Blessing is the prize of toil .... It sounds so, well, German nineteenth-century ... do they still memorize this in schools? (If not, is this unfortunate? I'm not sure.)
I follow Havelstrasse, which crosses ... heavens, we are literary out here. Here is Gottfried-Keller-Strasse (there was a time in my life when I read Keller's big nineteenth-century Bildungsroman over and over--it seemed so much more grownup than Dickens, so much less evangelical and clumpy than George Eliot). Then here's Theodor-Storm-Strasse (when I was learning German at the Goethe-Institut, there was a rather simpery passage from one of Storm's novellas that we had to read over and over again to work on pronunciation, which I never got quite right--mixture of discomfort with the text and incompetence with accents). Here's Friedrich-Herder-Strasse ... Wait, wait. Friedrich Herder? The literary person is Johann Gottfried Herder. Friedrich Herder is a company that makes knives. Joke?
We go on to philosophers, in any case. Johann-Gottlob-Fichte-Strasse. (You need a lot of space on forms for your street address in these parts--and think of learning to write your address when you're six years old or so and your address is on Johann-Gottlob-Fichte-Strasse.) Then Immanuel-Kant-Strasse ... Someone has a fine cottage garden here, in front of one of the new houses:
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| In Hohen Neuendorf. My photo, August 2016. |
There's a spot in between the subdivision and the old town where Havelstrasse shrinks to a path again, through a patch of woods dense with summer-green. Red pine, white birch, hazy in the brightness of the afternoon sun.
After a bit, Havelstrasse resumes as a proper street and then dead-ends right at the point where Goethe-Strasse, the main drag of the post-reunification subdivision, becomes Friedrich-Engels-Strasse, the main drag of the pre-reunification old town. (Is this culturally complicated, or what?)
A country house in an architecturally similar spirit, nearby, has been turned into a research institute for the study of bees. The institute is associated with Humboldt U. in Berlin--which has an ag school, somewhat strangely for the university of an entirely urban city-state.
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| Länderinstitut für Bienenkunde. From Institut web page. |
On Wednesdays you can buy honey from the Institut bees, which forage in the heather in the heathland south of town. If it had been a Wednesday I would have bought some heather honey, but sadly, it was a Thursday.
And then we come to the S-Bahn station, where to get to the entrance you go past this giant bee sculpture:
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| Bienenstadt sculpture, Hohen Neuendorf. My photo, August 2016. |
Is this too strange? I think it's time to get back to the city.
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