A little geography

Rivers and canals and the city

Berlin is in a big shallow swampy valley running east-west between two plateaus. It has two principal rivers, the Spree and the Havel. The Spree comes up from the south, from the hills near the Czech border. It makes a sharp left at Berlin to run westward through the middle of the city, in a perpetual summer traffic-jam of excursion boats, and flows into the Havel on the western edge of town. The Spree is too big to spit across, but if you had a good throwing arm you could play catch across it through much of its length in the city.

The Spree in central Berlin. Bellevue  (presidential) Palace on the left.  Photo, M. Seadle

The Havel is a geographically somewhat ridiculous river that starts well north of Berlin, nearer the coast, and heads for the North Sea by running southward down the west side of Berlin. Just beyond the city it makes a U-turn and flows north again to flow into the North Sea via the Elbe river.

The Spree and the Havel are the only navigable rivers in Berlin—the other rivers, like the Panke and the Wühle and the Tegeler Fließ, are just brooks—and the Havel is not so much a river in this stretch as a long chain of lakes.

The Havel in northwestern Berlin (Tegeler See)

(Photo: Tilman Kluge, Wikimedia Commons)

The Havel spreads out into lakes on the west side of the city because the land is so flat. And because the land is so flat, the Spree wobbles and loops through the middle of the city, taking twice the mileage needed to get from point A to point B. So in the days when more cargo went by water, canals were cut across the city to shorten the route. One canal shortcuts a big loop of the Spree; one makes a straight shot from the midtown Spree to the Havel; one runs like a freeway loop around the south side of the city, and so on. The plateaus north and south of the city (the Barnim and Teltow plateaus respectively) are big glacial moraines pocked with sand dunes and bits of lake. The Tegeler Fließ (favorite walk, across the north edge of Berlin) was made by the melt-water coming down from the Barnim plateau at the end of the last ice age.

Tegeler Fließ, northern Berlin. My photo.

I love postglacial landscapes like the upper Midwest and northern Germany: moraines and eskers and dunes and kettle lakes. People don’t necessarily think of the Midwest or the North European plain as beautiful landscapes, but they are.

Once, years ago, Archangel (family nickname for my husband) and I were on the train from Brussels to Paris and fell into conversation with the high-school basketball coach of a town on the French-Belgian border. He was trying to practice his English, because he was often in the US (the native land of serious high-school basketball) for coaching clinics. We were trying to practice our French.  “I know the words in English,” he said, “but I have not the English grammatory.” Our French grammatory was not so hot either.

We asked him what place in the US he liked best, and he said Nebraska. Eastern Nebraska.

We asked why, and he said, “Because it is a beautiful landscape.” 

Insert American laughter here: who goes to eastern Nebraska to admire the landscape? … But yes; actually it is beautiful, the Midwest.  And so is the flat green water-landscape here.

**

As the pictures show, parts of Berlin are very rural-looking. You can get lost in the forest or meet a farmer cutting hay within the city limits. Archangel’s cousin Gisela was knocked off her bicycle by a wild boar within the city limits. (The wild boar didn’t have hostile intent, it was just in a hurry.) Portions of the city are densely populated, but something like a third of it is green space, and much of the green space is state-owned and cannot (we all hope) easily be turned over to development.

The green space has a kind of constitutional existence. Berlin as a political unit in its present form—a conglomerate of multiple independent cities and towns—grew out of an arrangement called the Dauerwaldvertrag (the permanent forest contract) by which the assorted cities and towns went together to purchase large quantities of forest-land around and between themselves and pledge never to develop it.

The forest contract dates from around the beginning of the twentieth century. Berlin, in roughly its present form, was put together in 1920 from eight separate cities, 59 smaller towns, and 27 manors. The map of greater Berlin used to look like a map of pre-unification Italy or an American metropolitan area: lots of competing little gerrymandered principalities. But now it is one relatively rational political unit.

The old cities and towns were consolidated into twenty (now twelve) districts or Bezirke, each with its own mayor and council and intense neighborhood character. If you live in Charlottenburg, going to live in Hellersdorf would be approximately like going to live on the moon, and if you live in Reinickendorf you may be alarmed at the thought of setting foot in Kreuzberg (and vice versa).

The map below, from Wiki Commons, shows the districts. (We live in Mitte, near one of the loops of the Spree.)

 http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berliner_Bezirke

What this blog is about

Water is what you see when you fly into Berlin: slow disorderly rivers and die-straight canals and splodges of lake everywhere. Mostly water in the woods, reflecting the trees.

Trees reflected in the Spree, Berlin (Photo, M. Seadle, 2013)

The Berlin waterside is undramatic, and the countryside where the rivers come from is not spectacular. Berlin itself is not old and mellow-beautiful. A lot of it is scruffy and gray and looks like Chicago with less sunshine.

      Along the Spree 
Photo-composite, M. Seadle, 2013

But how human and walkable the city is, from top to bottom and end to end. Every summer in the last several years I have come here and celebrated by walking the Tegeler Fließ, the little river that marks the city limit in the northwest. I start at the end of the U-Bahn line, following the water through woods with cuckoos in them, past little lakes and village churches, across meadows and rye fields. There are wild strawberries in the woods.

 Tegeler Fließ (My photo)

In the winter I have walked the canals, picking my way through the slush-soaked fireworks-litter at New Year’s, watching the coal barges from Poland unload at the power plants, watching old women tie birdseed packets to the waterside bushes.

This has all been piecemeal and incomplete, and now that I am in Berlin for a longer time my project is to walk all the waterways systematically, one by one, end to end.

**

This is also the occasion for some observations about Germany and the US, particularly urban and academic life.

Berlin is an extraordinarily livable city, and—particularly for someone who has been within range of that remarkable urban disaster, Detroit—it is natural to ask why urban life works as well as it does here.

The German universities are in an interesting transition, trying to become more internationally competitive, which means becoming more like the best US universities but on a different economic model. How do you create first-class universities without charging any significant tuition, in a country that has no culture of alumni donation, where the state spends less than the developed-world average on education?  The answer may be that you don’t, but it remains to be seen.

For friends who need some geographic orientation (aaaugh, what are all these strange place-names?), see the post, “A little geography.”  University matters appear under the label, "Academic Questions."