Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 2

The Land of Moab

Along the Schiffahrtskanal, January 2014. My photo.

The days are very small in winter here, narrow gray-white slots in the hours around noon, between dark and dark. And then, as January passes into February and March, the light comes back in tremendous leaps and bounds, rushing toward spring.

The days are big and bright now. There are green leaves in the hedges, and blooming crocuses on the sunny slopes under the trees, along the water. Before the spring came, I was mostly sticking to the southeast end of the canal, which is more urban (less mud and ice and dead back gardens) than the northwest end.  So … past the Invalidenfriedhof (see last post), to Nordhafen (North Harbor, but not a harbor any more, port facilities taken out in the 1950s and 60s and replaced by park); and from Nordhafen the canal turns west and runs through an area heavy with industry and institutions.

We come to Westhafen, a busy poky little port where Henry Ford assembled Model T's in a warehouse back in the 1920s. One of my favorite power plants is here, the Moabiter Kraftwerk. (Don’t you love power-plant architecture?)

Kraftwerk Berlin-Moabit, January 2014. My photo.

The power plants here are usually on the water, where the fuel can be brought in by barge. (In the winter I saw a barge with a sign on the side saying, “This ship carries as much as 33 trucks”--the cabin in back was as big as a house, and the captain (pilot?) had his car parked on the house roof.) The fuel (coal and biomass) is unloaded by a somewhat Rube-Goldberg-looking device, which you see part of here. It’s one of those things that’s impossible not to stop and watch when it’s in operation. It’s like watching the boats locking through level changes on the canals, people must stop along the path and gawp …

Unloader, Moabiter Kraftwerk. January 2014, Photo M. Seadle.

The neighborhood on the north side of the canal is Wedding, which is a historically tough district: it was a main supplier of Communist street fighters in the interwar years when the Communists and Nazis were shooting it out in the streets. Now, much of it is a poor immigrant neighborhood where there are troubles with the schools. 

Along Nordufer in Wedding, Berlin, January 2014. My photo.

Berlin is an immigrant city, it has a long history of insufficient native population and plenty of room for new people to come in. Dutch settlers were brought in to help drain the swampy ground in early days, French Protestants came in the late seventeenth century, on the run from rising religious intolerance. Other religious refugees came, in quantity, then and in the eighteenth century. (Frederick the Great said, famously: If Moslems want to come to Berlin, I will build them mosques.)  Some of the French Protestants settled in the neighborhood that is now on the south bank of the canal and named it Moabit, after the Land of Moab in the Old Testament. Semi-alien territory, a sort of refuge, near but not in the promised land.

Archangel and I have been up on this stretch of the canal fairly often. The immigration authorities are up here in Moabit (just across from the apartments in the picture above), in a bleak sort of barrack next to a plastics factory, and we used to have to come up and renew our residence permits every year. Lucky us, we didn’t have huge problems, though we were spoken to sternly every now and then. Usually for doing something which the last official we talked to said we must do, but which struck the current official as highly improper. 

Coping with immigration authorities anywhere is tricky, and angst hangs in the corridors of the immigration office like fog. If you’re a refugee you have to report over and over, multiple times a year, and every time, there’s a possibility that you might be booted out, sent back to a home that the German authorities have decided is safe and perhaps your ex-neighbors tell you is not. Or you’ve been here so long, the children hardly speak anything but German, and what is there to go back to? (I think of a young Bosnian friend, telling about these semiannual immigration-office appointments, when she was a refugee in Germany with her family: And oh, none of us could sleep the night before we had to go, and our stomachs hurt … Every time might be the time they lost what was now their home; and eventually, one time, it was.)

The U-Bahn stop for the immigration office is at Westhafen, where the tiles on the wall in the platform area look like word-search puzzles but are actually passages from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights with the words run into each other, so that it takes some thought to decipher them.

 

ALLHUMANBEINGSAREBORNFREE

ANDEQUALINDIGNITYANDRIGHTS

THEYAREENDOWEDWITHREASON

ANDCONSCIENCEANDSHOULDACT

TOWARDSONEANOTHERINASPIRIT

OFBROTHERHOOD.

If you pay attention to the letters on the stairway walls on your way out, you read the poet Heinrich Heine’s account of how the French mangled his name when he settled in Paris in 1831 (escaping Prussian censorship, and full of enthusiasm for the French revolution of 1830). “Heinrich Heine” was unpronounceable to his Paris neighbors: they called him “Monsieur Henri Hein,” which, as pronounced by the French, sounded a lot like “Monsieur un rien.”  Monsieur a nothing. 

In the immigration office the waiting rooms have black circles on the wall behind the last row of seats, where the anxious—the Kurds, the Bosnians, the Ukrainians, the Congolese—have rested their heads year after year, waiting, being Monsieur a nothing in a foreign country, endowed with reason and conscience…. And hoping that the locals are so endowed also.

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But now, along the canal, it is spring. The weather forecast on the video screen in the U-Bahn, coming down from Westhafen, says, "Increasing risk of sunburn."

Crocus near Plötzensee, March 2014

Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal 1

Graveyard shift

Late winter morning. Out of the central railroad station, with its twelve hundred trains a day, through a chaos of taxis and bicycles and lost tourists and traffic entangled in new construction sites; past outdoor fast-food places getting no business on a windy winter day. Over the Sandkrug Bridge with its roaring traffic, and then here we are, here is the greenway sign, blessed release from the traffic, onto footpaths and bicycle paths that will meet the streets only a handful of times again in the next several miles.

Schifffahrtskanal, Nordhafen.  My photo, January 2014

The Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal makes a near-straight shot from the Spree in center city to the Havel in the west (12 kilometers in comparison to the Spree’s wobbling 18 km to make the same journey). The canal skirts a string of cemeteries in this first stretch, dropping down from the Sandkrug Bridge into the Invalidenfriedhof, the military cemetery that was laid out behind a home for disabled veterans (the Invaliden) in the eighteenth century. A little further out are cemeteries belonging to the center-city churches which, as the city grew, could not keep burying their parishioners in the center-city churchyards.

Invalidenfriedhof.  My photo, February 2014

I've spent much more time in graveyards in Germany than in the US. In general the living spend much more time in graveyards, and the dead spend much less time there, in Germany than in the US. 

In the US, the living don’t spend much time in cemeteries because cemeteries can be dangerous places: you can get mugged bringing flowers, as in the Detroit cemetery where some members of Archangel’s family are buried. Or cemeteries can be derelict places: perhaps the management took the maintenance-trust money and ran, as in the Colorado cemetery where my father is buried. 

Here, the cemeteries are more peaceable and orderly. In December and January the graves are thickly heaped with fresh evergreen branches and dotted with pots of blooming heather or hellebore, and the tombstones are polished. (You can get tombstone cleaner from the store here, it's on the shelf next to the tub-and-tile and ceramic-cooktop cleaners.)  

But once you’re underground in the US, you’re likely to stay there quite a while; you own the plot, after all. Here, people don’t buy plots, they buy usage rights for a standard period. In Berlin it’s twenty years. (In Vienna—always more class conscious!—it’s ten years for standard graves and twenty for premium.) One day recently I was cutting through the St.-Johannis cemetery, further up the canal, and saw parking tickets on a number of the tombstones: red stickers saying, “The use rights on this grave have run out. Relatives should check with the administration.” Renewals are possible, but if no one tends to the renewal after the twenty years, then it’s time to clear the space for others. 

Graves of notable people and military graves are under a different set of rules; they aren’t cleared out under normal circumstances. And so there is a long-breathed, time-stopped feeling about the back reaches of the military cemetery along the canal, where the generals’ tombs sleep in the winter light. Here are Frederick the Great’s generals from eighteenth-century wars, generals from the War of Liberation against Napoleon, generals from the nineteenth-century wars of unification. The taste in monuments belongs to a lost world. Weeping angels, piles of antique swords and shields carved in stone. The occasional lion.

Invalidenfriedhof, Scharnhorst tomb.  My photo, February 2014

The front reaches of the Invalidenfriedhof, directly along the canal, were cleared out when the Berlin Wall was built, because the canal itself was the border between East and West Berlin. Manfred von Richthofen’s grave was here; when the Wall went up, the family was invited to take the Red Baron’s bones elsewhere. (Note for Colorado friends: did you know that the Red Baron's uncle Walter was a Denver real estate developer in the nineteenth century? He built East Colfax as an upscale residential district. Lined the street with big trees like a good German; the trees were ripped out later to make room for more traffic. Possibly a bad idea.)

Where the bicycle path runs now in the Invalidenfriedhof was the death strip, the no-man's-land, between the main wall and the lower "back wall" that was intended to discourage people from getting close to the main wall. People were killed here: mostly would-be escapees; once, an East Berlin border guard in a nighttime firefight between East and West Berlin forces, sparked by the attempt of a fourteen-year-old to get out of East Berlin by swimming the canal. (The fourteen-year-old  made it.)

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In the mid-nineteenth century the landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné planned agreeable tree-lined walks on both sides of this canal, as he did for the Landwehrkanal (see Landwehrkanal posts, February). But the work on the Schiffahrtskanal got started later, and before the landscape gardening could be done, there were wars and budget troubles and land-grabs for industrial purposes, and then worse budget troubles and worse wars. But late does not mean never, and about a hundred and fifty years after Lenné planned for “great-crowned trees” to stand along the water, the trees were finally planted—summer-lindens, the classic urban-boulevard and village-square tree in Germany.

How small they look, still, after twenty years. Lindens don't grow fast.

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There was a big church nearby, before the Second World War, where the funerals were held for people who ended up in this graveyard. 

Church near Invalidenfriedhof, 1901 postcard

The church had a famous ring of steel bells, with a “sensationally” pure tone, according to the accounts of the time. One of the bells, named Auguste Viktoria, traveled to Chicago in 1893 to be admired at the World's Fair. 

The church took a direct bomb hit in World War II, and the remains were slowly looted away in the years that followed. The lead from the leaded glass windows went, the copper from the remains of the roof went. Finally in 1967, presumably as part of the work to clear out more space behind the Wall, the East Berlin authorities blew up the ruins and carted them away to a scrapyard.

The ruins included Auguste Viktoria, which had survived the bombs and the looting and the demolition more or less intact, but was now in danger of being melted down or broken up. A neighborhood pastor bought the bell from the scrapyard before the worst happened, and it lived silently in his backyard for years, like a large hibernating tortoise. First in Berlin and then in a small town in Thüringen when he changed congregations.

Finally in the first winter after the Wall came down, people from the city in the Rhineland where the bell had been cast came looking for Auguste Viktoria. They bought the bell, restored it, and put it back to work in a parish church for a couple of decades. In 2011 they gave it to Berlin. And here it hangs by the water, in a peculiar little structure that looks like the illegitimate offspring of a sharpshooter stand and a lifeguard tower.

Bell Tower, Invalidenfriedhof. My photo, February 2014

The bell isn't rung any more, which is a waste. A good city is full of bells (and Berlin is): change-ringers practicing their mathematical combinations, carillons beating out popular tunes, church bells tumbling through the sky for feast-days and weddings.

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There are other strange relics along this stretch of the canal as well. The construction cranes have been busy here, on the cleared ground freed up by the fall of the Wall. There is a string of new apartment houses near the path. In the backyard of one of them, squatting glumly between the bicycle stand and the recycling pickup, is one of the old watchtowers of the Berlin Wall, left as a reminder.

Along the Schiffahrtskanal, north of the Invalidenfriedhof. My photo, February 2014.

Scraggly stretches of the back wall still stand in the military cemetery, and also in other cemeteries that were disturbed by the building of the Wall.  If you walk away from the canal a bit, where the Wall turned away, you land in St. Hedwig’s cemetery, which still has fragments of the back wall in it, grass-grown and graffiti-covered.  How small and cardboardy it looks …

Remains of back wall, St. Hedwig's cemetery, Liesenstrasse.  Wiki commons photo.

Academic questions 3: Fundraising costs

German universities look with envy at the rivers of alumni donations that flow into their US counterparts and do not flow with the same abundance here. (German corporate donors will pony up for specific projects that are useful to them, but that's another matter.)

Alumni groups of a sort--the "Friends and Supporters of University X"--have existed at many of the universities here for some time, but they are not big operations. Consider LMU in Munich, which has as good a claim as any institution to be the best university in Germany. It now has over 50,000 students and is a very internationally aware, go-ahead kind of place. it has an alumni organization that was founded more than ninety years ago and has all of 2,400 members. The alumni do come to networking events, I think, but they keep their hands firmly in their pockets. Professional development personnel are few and frustrated.

It’s not that people don’t give, here. Contrary to what you might suppose from reading some of the US press, Germans don’t expect the state to do everything. They donate, they volunteer, they found nonprofit organizations in droves. If you have to be picked up by an ambulance in the US, it probably belongs to either the fire department or a for-profit company. Here, if it doesn’t belong to the fire department it belongs to a charity supported by private donations. Donations and volunteer labor get the homeless into shelter on cold winter nights, stock and staff food pantries, maintain footpaths in the countryside and classes in Turkish classical music and I could not begin to tell you what else.

So it’s not that people don’t give; they just don’t give much to universities. The universities do not occupy the same cultural slot in Germany as in the UK and US. They don’t have the same emotional, imaginative resonance; and emotional resonance has something to do with where the money goes.

When Gerard Manley Hopkins was writing about Oxford,

            Towery city, and branchy between towers,

            Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark-charmèd, rook-racked, 
                 river-rounded …

who was writing great lyrical poetry about the University of Berlin?  You have to be kidding. 

On a less exalted note, universities do not have songs here. American university songs—alma maters, fight songs—seem as peculiar here as Japanese company songs do in the US. (One night when we had a young Berlin friend over for dinner, Archangel and I started in on “Far above Cayuga’s waters” by way of explaining the term “alma mater.” The young friend looked at us if we were absolutely barzoomy. Why?? she said.)

Similarly, I don’t think there is a German equivalent to the Oxford scenes in Brideshead Revisited, or C.P. Snow’s novels about university politics at Cambridge, or popular murder-at-Oxford books. The university in Germany is more like an ordinary workplace. Anglo-Americans don’t emote about the dreaming towers of the business district, and Germans don’t do it about the universities. Which tend not to have dreaming towers in any case, but miscellaneous rooms scattered inconspicuously around the middle of town. The only German university towers that come to mind are the one that was recently demolished in Frankfurt (big event, it had to be blown up), and the ugly tooth-like high-rise of the U of Leipzig, which the locals satirically call the “wisdom tooth.”

There is less emotional attachment to universities here because the university you went to is not particularly part of your identity here. It’s not evident to me that Göttingen people are different from Tübingen people in the way that Harvard people are different from Chicago people. In the US, the university is often a transforming experience: it’s an important contributor to making you who you are. Going to college means leaving home, socially or geographically or both, and learning to be a somewhat different person in a different world. It’s like the initiation rites in hunter-gatherer societies, in which adolescents are sent out into the bush or jungle to lose their childhood, learn the adult lore of the tribe, undergo possibly dangerous challenges, and come back as different, grown-up people. 
 
German universities do not have so much of this ritual resonance. In the US, if you go off to an elite university your high school friends may be a thousand miles away. It can't happen here, you can't be a thousand miles from home and still be in Germany. In the US, even if you go to State U an hour from home, it may be your first experience being this close to white people, or to black people, or your first experience in a town this big, or this small. The same is not likely to happen here: there's much more social continuity between Gymnasium (college-prep high school) and university. 

There's also more intellectual continuity here. It's possible in the US to get into a decent university even if you went to a high school that bans books or at least discourages reading, that believes the goal of education is docility and correct answers to multiple choice tests. And then the university is fabulously liberating. So you're grateful to it and later you give it money. The Gymnasia are not so likely to be intellectually dead, and so the universities get less love for being intellectually alive.
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So you can look at the cost of fundraising in the US as being the cost of operating the development office, which is relatively easy to estimate and to use in local decisions (for example, do we need another staffer to focus on bequests?). Or you can look at the cost of fundraising as including some of the costs of a culture in which fundraising will be highly successful--and then the costs are not easy to estimate and are largely out of the reach of local decisions.