Spree 6

Dead Dinosaurs and Other Casualties 

Ah, this is a wonderful stretch, after all the struggles through the construction in the last miles. On this side of the river is Treptower Park (see last post--and it was so pleasant that I walked through it again), followed by the Plänterwald.  

Plänterwald, June 2014. My photo.

A Plänterwald is a forest that is managed by selection cutting: when you harvest the wood you take out individual trees of a variety of ages, in order to leave the forest diverse—you just don’t clear-cut or take all the mature trees or all the good trees.   

On the other side of the river are some fine pieces of old industry, often still in operation, updated or re-purposed.

Along the Spree in Treptow, June 2014. My photo.

Work is on the other side of the water, play is on this side--mostly solid old-fashioned kinds of play. As you go deeper into the East it often feels as though you're going back in time.

I pass a big beer garden. Some elderly bicyclists coming in the other direction stop here for morning coffee on the terrace under the trees--and aaaugh, they leave their bicycles on the path without locking them at all, not even with the feeble chain locks that are common in these parts; they just lean their bikes against the railing. We're definitely going back in time.

I pass various boat-rental establishments.

Along the Spree in Treptow, June 2014. My photo.

The original of the picture on the boat-rental shed is a little artificial island in the river, where there has been an Ausflugslokal, at least on and off, since the 1890s ....

Insel Berlin, June 2014.  My photo.

Do we have Ausflugslokale in the US? Presumably in some places, but not mostly where I have lived. These are establishments for eating and drinking outdoors under the trees (with some indoor space too, in case of rain) in some attractive spot. You gather family and/or friends and walk through the woods to the spot, or bicycle in a troop (children are expected to cycle from an early age: our neighbors' child got her first bicycle at the age of two). Along here, of course, you can come by boat. 

Or apparently--at this restaurant-on-a-boat, a little bit upriver--you can come by seaplane. 

Seaplane by restaurant on Spree, Treptow. June 2014. My photo.

Then you have coffee and cake, or pink Berlin beer, or sausage and potato salad ...  And you can sit and watch the river go by and contemplate what has become of the public's property since the end of the old East Germany.  

In the 1980s I used to think: the east European economic system is not functioning well, but how is it ever to be changed? If all the property held by the state were to go back into private hands, this might be a good thing--but into whose private hands? The heirs of the pre-Soviet owners? Hmm, but what if they're heirs of old Nazis who got the property by nefarious means? What about the heirs of the pre-Nazi owners (who, if they exist, are scattered over the world and unlikely to agree with each other about the necessary reinvestment in the property)?  Should you forget the old owners and sell to the highest bidders--or at least, sell to someone, in some sort of market-like proceedings?

Think about it. You're trying to sell a whole country off, in thousands of little packets. The country's been closed in on itself, information is not so good, many of the assets are run down and need urgent reinvestment. It is uncertain how quickly the country can recover from being a centrally controlled police state, so it's uncertain when, if ever, these assets will start generating serious income again. Under the circumstances, who knows what any of this stuff is worth? And there is so much of it ... and we can't take forever to do the transition.

So you know what happens. Some of the good stuff is sold at low prices to cronies who make a killing, and some of the bad stuff is sold at high prices to suckers, who lose their shirts. 

And, of course, once in a while the good stuff is sold cheap to suckers who make a killing, and the bad stuff is sold at high prices to cronies who lose their shirts, unless they manage to saddle the state with the debt fast enough ... because no one does know what this stuff is worth.  

To be sure, there were also honest and reasonable transactions, and many of the old businesses flourish. In twenty-five years, under largely favorable circumstances, some real progress has been made in rebuilding the old East. (Would-be nation-builders, consider the time-line here.)

For example this cement factory, initially built in the late 1940s on the initiative of the Soviet occupying forces, is doing well. (Isn't this a fine sculptural object by the water, against the clouds?) It is possible to ask, of course: Could you not do well here with a firm supplying building materials for the endless rebuilding of Berlin? The answer is probably, Oh yeah, you can always not do well. 

 Zementwerk Berlin, Rummelsburg. June 2014. My photo.

Consider the Spreepark. Before reunification it was a popular amusement park here at the end of the Plänterwald, with over a million visitors a year. There were seven bids for it when the country's assets were sold off in 1991, and the authorities--who clearly had no time to check credentials--awarded the park to Norbert Witte, a worthy member of a family of carneys and cons. (His grandfather Otto was a locally famous con man who claimed, apparently untruthfully, to have been King of Albania for a while before the First World War.) 

Norbert Witte had been responsible for a terrible carnival-ride accident in Hamburg in 1981 that killed seven people and maimed more. The carnival sites in Germany wouldn't give him permits any more after that, and he had betaken himself to Yugoslavia. 

Ah, but then capitalism came to East Berlin, and Norbert Witte bought the Spreepark. He became a big financial contributor to the Christian Democratic (center-right) party in Treptow-Köpenick. Spreepark employees were lent to the Christian Democrats as election workers, and Witte brought in a good list of new party members (many of whom later turned out to be Karteileichen--a wonderful German word that translates as "file-card corpses"--not really new members). 

Witte updated the Spreepark in ways that may not have appealed to the regular customers, and raised the entry prices. The park's finances grew shakier. The city guaranteed a loan to the Spreepark for much more than the place was worth and was left on the hook when the company declared insolvency in 2001. 

Witte cleared out to Peru. He packed up the six best rides under the noses of the authorities, claiming that the rides were being taken down for repair, and waltzed off to Lima with them to set up an amusement park there. 

It did not go terribly well. In fact it went belly-up like the Spreepark but much faster (has anyone noticed that this man is not a manager?). 

He tried his hand at drug-smuggling: no great talent for this either. He was caught trying to get 167 kilos of cocaine out of the country in the mast of a ship called the Flying Carpet. 

While Witte was in Peru, there were attempts to sell the remains of the amusement park. First a French company was interested in it, but the deal ran aground on the buyers' insistence on eliminating the public walkway along the river. The district dug in its heels and refused (you go, Treptow-Köpenick!), and the French backed out. They may well have had other reasons and used the public-walkway issue as a pretext. Or they may have believed that the project had a significantly better chance of success if they alienated the local public by closing off this extremely popular walkway and charging visitors a high price for some sort of private access to the river in a spot that would still be surrounded by very pleasant public access on both sides. 

Hmm, maybe it was best that these business geniuses did not have a shot at running the park ...?

Along the water near Spreepark, June 2014. My photo.

Then the Danish group that runs Tivoli considered buying it, but backed out on the grounds that the German economy was too slow at the time. Also, if I read the accounts correctly, there were still 23 people living in some kind of Wild West village on the grounds, who might be difficult to move ... (What was all this about? I have no clue.)

In 2010, the irrepressible Norbert Witte reappeared, out of Peruvian jail and back in Berlin, offering to run the place again. 

He meddled around in the park for a little while, but it was too run down now for him to make even the appearance of a going concern out of it. (For some truly wonderful photos of the present state of the park--the fallen dinosaurs, the grounded swanboats, the ferris-wheel cars dragging almost in the water--see this blog: Otts World.)

Witte's now-ex-wife, in whose name the rights to the park were held, generated a little money by offering tours of the ruins. (Look what a spectacular mess we have made!) 

This is a long-standing Berlin tradition, by the way. When one of the bastions of the Spandau Citadel was blown up by French artillery in the Napoleonic wars, the army charged admission for tours of the damage in order to raise money for repair. The new Berlin airport (incomplete, formerly supposed to open in 2011, no opening date now given), which is arguably the worst construction project in the contemporary world, offers tours of the disaster. The tours do attract the curious and raise a little money ....

To everyone's surprise, the city bought back the Spreepark a few months ago. The plan is to clean it up and run it as an amusement park again.  But we will see ...

There is an old Ausflugslokal at the edge of the Spreepark, the Eierhäuschen, which has been here since the early nineteenth century and figures in one of the classic nineteenth-century German novels (Fontane's Der Stechlin).  The postcard below is from 1906.

From Wiki Commons.

The Eierhäuschen is technically outside the Spreepark but was drawn into its disasters and has long been vacant and ruinous. The trees close in on it.

Eierhäuschen, June 2014. My photo.

And meanwhile the river does its work.  A tugboat rushes upriver to a job.

Tug on the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

The wake sloshes in a pleasant talky way against the riverbank. A big barge, the North Wind out of Petershagen, comes shouldering downriver, headed west in the darkening afternoon.

Nordwind on the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

I'm at the end of the Plänterwald, and it's time to head home. Let's see, where might the nearest transit stop be? I'm probably not so very close to the S-Bahn here, so maybe a bus or--since we're deep in the tram-filled East--a streetcar.

Ah, no, here it is. It's a ferry. 

Spree 5

Like the tracks of birds in the sky

Suppose you're on the U-Bahn about to cross the Oberbaum bridge--

U-Bahn crossing the Oberbaumbrücke. Photo, Quentin Scouflaire, Wiki Commons.

or on the S-Bahn about to cross the (much more utilitarian) Elsen bridge upriver. If you're watching your fellow passengers, you might note a drift of attention, and perhaps people, to one side of the car. The goal is to get a good look at Molecule Man, which stands in the river between the bridges. (The people who know it's coming drift first, because they want to look at it again--it's a very look-at-again piece of public art--and then others follow.)

Molecule Man, by Jonathan Barofsky. May 2014, my photo.

Allianz Insurance--bless their actuarial little hearts--funded Molecule Man. They also occupy the undistinguished but very large building that dominates this section of the Spree-shore. (It's the easternmost object in the Mediaspree project on this side of the river; see previous post.) There are lots of want-to-look-again buildings in Berlin. Augenweide, one says in German, eye-pastures, pastures where the eye can graze long and happily-- but the Allianz building is not one of them. It's just big.

**
We need to back up and begin at the beginning of this stretch of the river. Out of the S-Bahn at Ostbahnhof, a little downriver from the Oberbaumbrücke. Head for the water, thread through the tourists at the East Side Gallery. 

Here, on the remains of the Berlin Wall, the names of the paintings are: 

          Paradise out of darkness

          The spirit is like the tracks of birds in the sky

          Weary death

          Say what wonderful dreams hold my mind surrounded

          Thank you, Andrei Sakharov

And so on. In 1990, the year after the Wall came down, 118 artists from 21 countries painted a long section of the wall-remains here in Friedrichshain.

Gabriel Heimler, Mauerspringer [Wall jumper].
East Side Gallery, May 2014.  My photo.

The East Side Gallery has struggled more than a little with destructive graffitists and real estate developers. There was a cleanup and repaint job in 2009, which saved some deteriorating paintings, but it has been hard to save the gallery--and this, the largest continuous remaining stretch of the Wall--from the developers. Some sections have been destroyed to make a clear path from the river to a bloated arena named for a cell-phone company. Some sections have been destroyed because the developers want to plant their new high-rise just exactly SO and not otherwise. 

Karsten Wenzel, Die Beständigkeit der Ignoranz. [The persistence of ignorance.]
East Side Gallery, May 2014.  My photo.

**

Past the East Side Gallery, over the bridge from Friedrichshain into Kreuzberg. We cut through a little bit of east Kreuzberg: imaginatively painted houses, strings of little cheap eating places with battered picnic benches set out along the sidewalk, occupied by the international young (the would-be rock stars and software moguls and world-savers, the travelers and squatters) in furious conversation, over bowls of chili or hummus plates that cost a couple of euros. One cubbyhole restaurant that has put out actual, if somewhat derelict, chairs, with backs, instead of the backless benches native to the street, looks uncomfortably pretentious. 

In Kreuzberg, near Schlesisches Tor, May 2014. My photo.

Then we can get back to the water, perhaps, down this side street diminishing to a sort of path through aggressively private property?  Ah, yes. We just have to get past the bear, which is one of the less benevolent-looking of the many Berlin bears.

Bear near Twin Towers, May 2014. My photo.

Walking this whole Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg stretch of the river is a battle to get to the water (unlike the long placid stretches of public greenway before and after). Past the bear, we come to one of the mingy ten-meter public strips that are supposed to exist along the river here and sometimes actually do but sometimes do not. 

How shabby this little strip by the Twin Towers is.  I, who am no anarchist, find that my mind is occupied with wondering: what is the original French for these two statements?

    Property is theft. (Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? 1840)

   The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to    say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the      true founder of civil society. How many crimes, how many wars, how many      murders, how many misfortunes and horrors, would that man have saved the    human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have    cried to his fellows: Be sure not to listen to this impostor; you are lost, if you    forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all, and the earth itself to nobody! (J.-J. Rousseau, On the Origin of Inequality, Second Part, 1755.)   

The last sentence used to be written on the 57th Street underpass, under the   Illinois Central Tracks, in Chicago.

The view from the ten-meter strip is good, however.

Molecule Man, May 2014. My photo.

But of course the strip goes a little way and then is blocked by a fence, the purpose of which is not obvious. Sheer pedestrian discouragement, perhaps.

Back inland, round a few corners, under the S-Bahn ....  Ah, a different world entirely! Suddenly! 

Here is Treptower Park, where the wonderful plane-tree avenue of Puschkinallee seems to shine with its own light, even on this dark day.

Puschkinallee, Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

Russian tourists are eating Italian ices in front of the Russian war memorial on the plane-tree avenue. The flowerbeds are gracious and old-fashioned, in a respectable old-East kind of way.  

Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

There is all the room in the world to walk, there are places to sit down by the water and to eat and drink; there is a long string of steamer piers and a small cluster of houseboats (one very handsome, painted a sort of denim blue and topped with red geraniums and solar arrays). Between the steamers a cormorant is thrashing around in the water trying to swallow a fish that looks almost as large as it is.

Spree at Treptower Park, May 2014. My photo.

We have left behind the edgy urbanism of Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg--the clubs, the squats, the startups, the immigrants, a certain kind of battle over real estate development. (There's a different kind out here; more on that next time.)

Treptow-Köpenick is the biggest and most thinly populated of the Berlin districts.  Before the district consolidations in 2001, before Treptow was put together with Köpenick, the Treptow district coat-of-arms gave a basic idea of the character of the district. (Or part of the character, at least.) Woods and water, water and woods. There is even a little set of ... well, people do call them mountains here. "The Berlin Alps," says Cousin Gisela (who lives out here) with a mildly satirical look. 

Old Treptow district coat of arms. Wiki commons.

Oh, the heart-burnings in these district consolidations, back at the beginning of the new millennium! Which of the two old district names is to come first in the new, combined district name? (Shall we call it Treptow-Köpenick or Köpenick-Treptow?) Which Rathaus will be the Rathaus for the new district, and what shall we do with the other one? How are the coats-of-arms to be combined? 

The Treptow-Köpenick arms have kept the castle wall with the small bear in the middle for the top, and have replaced the woods and big bear down below with two large fish. 

Treptow-Köpenick coat of arms. Wiki commons.

Köpenick is full of big lakes and thus presumably fish. (Which may provide a challenge in another 15 k or so, but we'll see.)

**

Which brings us back, in thought, to the Oberbaum bridge, where the rivalries of another combined district (Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg) play out every summer in the Battle of Vegetables. 

Crowds on the Friedrichshain end of the bridge try to push into Kreuzberg and are shoved back by the crowds on the Kreuzberg end trying to push into Friedrichshain. Weapons allowed in the hand-to-hand fighting are soft and messy things: water, bags of flour, vegetables and fruits ripe enough to be very soft and thus no danger if they whack somebody on the head. Friedrichshain wins, most years. It does leave a mess, of course. In 2012 an anarchist party challenged the organizers to pay for the cleanup, rather than leave it to the city, and the organizers (the Pirate Party members of the Berlin City Council) raised the money to do so. 

Anarchists are not always so bad.  (La propriété, c'est le vol, said Proudhon.)

Spree 4

Klingons on the Spree

The city vanishes, over and over, and is replaced by some crass simulacrum that horrifies the old inhabitants. This stretch of the Spree that runs through center city has been in a turmoil of rebuilding for a long time.

Some of the people who lived in West Berlin in the 1970s and 80s hated what the city became in the 90s. (Not everybody who lived in East Berlin was crazy about it either.) People who were euphoric about the place in the 90s got disillusioned in the 2000s. Those who came with enthusiasm in, say, 2003 are becoming unhappy now, as rents rise and tourists choke center city, and construction fences and building cranes (the Berlin state bird) still shoulder into the neighborhoods over and over--irrepressible, inconvenient, changing the familiar cityscape that had grown around us like a second skin. (But we've been rebuilding at a scorching pace for twenty-five years! Aren't we there yet?) 

One night earlier in the spring--when there were still real nights, and the daylight quit before we did--I looked out the east window and saw something strange in the night sky. I called Archangel, who peered at it carefully through the top of his glasses. There's a Klingon warbird hovering over the Hauptbahnhof, he said.

And it looked like it, too, but of course it was the lights on a new set of cranes. 

Spree, bridges, cranes near Hauptbahnhof, May 2014. My photo.

Vanishing Berlin has a long history. Of course postwar Berlin--ruinous, divided, somber--was very unlike Weimar Berlin. Which was not much like fat, ornate pre-World-War-I Berlin, which was not much like the Athens-on-the-Spree of the early nineteenth century, which was not much like Frederick the Great's Berlin, and so on and so on. There were sad campers at every change—and they weren’t even wrong to be sad.

         Man is in love and loves what vanishes,

         What more is there to say?

As Yeats wrote, and then proceeded to say much more.

**

There is much that’s unbeautiful and inhumane along this stretch of the Spree, in Mitte and Friedrichshain; but there are also good things. I'm a sucker for the new (2006) train station.

Spree, main railroad station and Moltkebrücke, May 2014. My photo.

How unrecognizable this is, compared to a dozen years ago. I can remember how scrawny and defeated the old train-shed looked then, and how savage the waste ground around it was. 

I have mixed feelings, though, about the park on the Moabiter Werder, the green space west of the station. It's wonderful to have park space along the water, of course, better than waste ground or private usurpations. But aaugh, this stretch of concrete and grass with "elliptical topic areas" planted in it (as a semi-official description says) .... The topic areas are supposed to provide visual references to biological diversity, to fairy tales, to the history of the area as a hunting-ground, and so on.

Wait, wait--as garden design, isn't this too mental? It’s full of concepts and references, and damned if you can find a place to sit in the shade on a hot day. Call me old-fashioned, but I'm not sure I want my neighborhood planted with topic areas. 

And yet, and yet ... it grows, and it grows on me, as I walk up and down. I see people being happy here. In a few more years I will probably like it. (What suckers we are for the world.)

**

This stretch of the river runs through the Regierungsviertel, the government quarter. The Chancellor's office is here, and the office buildings for the legislature, and so on. Slabby big raw buildings with blank space between them, not much foot traffic, not much humanity.

It may get better. There are new footpaths through grassy spaces; there are little trees that will be bigger after we are all dead. (Which is a time-scale that matters, here.)

The last time that I was strolling around here with Archangel, about a month ago, we met a crow bouncing up and down beside the walk, cawing and flapping, trying to intimidate a red fox on the waste ground nearby. The fox sat with its tail curled around its feet, head down a little, like someone being shouted at by a person who shouts a lot. When we moved closer the fox trotted off, and the crow flew away in the other direction, still shouting.

**

There's something fantastical about the Regierungsviertel. Today let us walk through the clouds from office to office ...

Footbridge over Spree, May 2014. My photo.

from the Paul-Löbe-Haus (main legislative office building) to the Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus (legislative library, archives, hearing rooms, etc., looking half like a ship about to launch across the water):

Marie-Elisabeth-Lüders-Haus, May 2014. My photo.

**
Then, after these fantastic strolls in the sky, here is an outburst of reality--a stretch of Plattenbau, the notorious East German prefab-concrete building mode, which is to architecture as gruel is to food. 

Along the Spree near Friedrichstrasse, May 2014.  My photo. 

(And oh, that color, that dim brown that used to be so common, regardless of whether you were in old east or old west, regardless of whether you were looking at Communist-era Plattenbau or Imperial-era stucco-work ....  This is what I remember of Berlin in the 1970s, for which I am not especially nostalgic.)

**

And after the outburst of reality, an outburst of fantasy. Sous le pavé, la plage, as they said in Paris in 1968. Under the pavement is the beach--though here the beach has flung itself out beside the pavement. 

Beach along the Spree, across from Museum Island, May 2014.  My photo.

Especially along this middle stretch of the Spree, the city and various private parties bring in sand and palm trees and deck chairs in the summertime, and there are beach bars that will sell you complicated drinks with little paper hats on them. 

Then there is more fantasy, of a not entirely benign kind. The cathedral (built around the turn of the last century, finished 1905) is a piece of imperial bloat; it was designed to be overbearing and it is. 

Berlin Cathedral, May 2014. My photo.

And yet, and yet ...  I remember, in a local television documentary, an interview with an older woman who had moved into an apartment nearby several years ago. She said that, as a convinced atheist, she had really disliked living so close to the cathedral at first. She had kept the curtains closed on the window that looked out onto it. (The building is so aggressive!) But without becoming any less of an atheist she had come to be fond of the cathedral. It's a neighbor, it's a friend, the bells speak and sing, it catches the clouds and the sun. (What suckers we are ...)

**

A little farther upriver is the absurdist Nikolaiviertel, a thirteenth-century neighborhood that was knocked to pieces in World War II and nearly drowned when the East German leadership planned to widen the Spree and make a harbor here (never happened, like lots of city plans). Finally the quarter was rebuilt as a tourist trap in the last couple of years of the Communist regime. There are some good pieces of restoration work here, but also a lot of quasi-medievalized Plattenbau in a truly startling color, a sort of pus-like yellow-green. 

And here, at the end of the quarter, is one last piece of fantasy: a fine nineteenth-century dragon getting the worst of it from St. George in a sunny space by the river.

Detail of St. George and the Dragon, sculpture by August Kiß, Nikolaiviertel, May 2014. My photo.

**

Out of the Nikolaiviertel, eastwards ... I stop to watch the boats going through the Mühlendamm lock, and half-notice a large plastic bottle floating in the river near the lock. (Must people throw their trash in the water?)

Then what is this little flatboat, spinning around in midstream? Here it comes toward the bank ...  One of the occupants leans out the back of the boat with a net on a long pole, dips the empty bottle neatly out of the water, and tosses it into the plastic-recycling bin on the boat. It's the river-sweepers at work. Thank you, Berlin sanitation department.

River-sweepers on the Spree, May 2014. My photo.

It's busy along here. Excursion steamers, river-sweepers, a big tanker, a private cabin cruiser; debris barges like big water-going dumpsters, shoved along by tugs, hauling away the wreckage from the endless construction (deconstructon).

**

The south bank of the river here is Kreuzberg (old West) and the north bank is Friedrichshain (old East), which are now joined into a single district that is the exemplification of Berlin cool. This is the hardcore-club district, the innovative-startup district, the anarchists' district, which is struggling with some not-very-welcome gentrification. 

How quickly the cityscape vanishes, scenes flying away like leaves flying off a calendar in an old movie to show that time has passed. Calendar leaf 2007: I used to come to Friedrichshain every week to do yoga with a couple of electro-funk musicians who made their living partly from gigs in eastern Europe. (Solid fan base in Serbia and the Czech Republic.)

Could have done yoga closer to home, of course, but I happened to have met these people, and it was interesting to go across the city. (Reading Nietzsche on the slow streetcar, so that the texts of Zur Genealogie der Moral and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft have the litany of the Friedrichshain stops woven inextricably into them in memory. Thus far, what gives color to existence has no history, says Nietzsche. Otto-Braun-Strasse! says the PA system. Or could we have a history of love, of greed, of envy, of conscience, of piety, of cruelty? says Nietzsche.  Petersburgerstrasse! says the PA.)

The musicians lived next to a vast construction site where slaughterhouses and stockyards had been, and new housing was being put up. The pile-driving was not an ideal background for meditation. 

It will be different now ... The last time Archangel and I were in Friedrichshain, (calendar leaf 2013), it was for a gallery opening where an acquaintance was selling pictures to raise money for Syrian refugees. Champagne and late-middle-aged small talk; late dinner afterward at a good restaurant in Karl-Marx-Allee.

**

But it still looks fairly like Friedrichshain along here.

In Friedrichshain, May 2014. My phot

And here: the big street running toward Alexanderplatz, wide enough for a tank parade, too wide to offer shelter from the winds of darker seasons. A street like The Hobbit's definition of discomfort: Nothing to to sit down on or to eat.

On Holzmarktstrasse, May 2014. My photo.

**

Older examples of this half-orc approach to urban design go back to the Stalinist period in the East, but new examples stare you in the face and keep you off the river here. The 1990s transformed both sides of the Spree here from dumping grounds to prime real estate ...  and prime real estate is not always a good thing for your neighborhood to be, if you want to live in it.

Politically troubled waters here--literally: here are residents in boats, demonstrating against real-estate investors in a bigger boat (out of the picture). The investors are trying to inspect their property, the Mediaspree project, which has included major rebuilding on both sides of the river for miles, and has much more building planned. A police boat is monitoring the situation.

Demonstration against Mediaspree, July 2008.
Photo, Ulrich Hofman and Andreas Lang, Wiki Commons.

In a referendum in the district in 2008, 87% of the votes came in against specified elements of the remaining Mediaspree project. Although referenda like this are not legally binding, they have considerable force, and the district authorities started to back off on portions of the project. (Let's cancel this highrise and this auto bridge, let's expand the public space along the water.) In any case, 2008 and the years immediately after were not a time when the investors were in a rush to move forward. 

But eventually they may want to move forward, and meanwhile the city has threatened to take planning authority away from the district, on the grounds that it is not providing sufficient planning security to investors. The investors can claim considerable damages for the changes of plan that the district wanted after 2008, and the city naturally would prefer not to pay. (Question: Who approved this project in the first place, when parts of it looked like urban design by Godzilla? Who thought that there wouldn't be a stink about the way the waterside was treated?)

All this is controversial, of course. The new housing and offices were for industries the city wanted: communications and music, fashion and software and renewable energy consulting. They were supposed to attract the creative classes, to be good for the city. One way of telling the story--with which it is even possible to have some sympathy--is to contrast the investors as responsible creators of jobs and housing with the anarchists who want unrealistic amounts of park space and low-cost rent for their favorite clubs, and expect other people to pay. 

But presumably one could create jobs without building like orcs or klingons? 

Without building these objects that look as if they could, at quite moderate expense, be re-purposed as prisons? 

Just kidding, sort of. Some of the buildings aren't bad, but some of them are, and mein Gott im Himmel, where is ordinary life in the vicinity of these places? Where do you buy bread, or flowers for Aunt Gertrude when you go to have coffee with her? Where do you lock your bicycle? Where are the döner stands and the fresh-produce stands and park benches? Where do you see your neighbors face to face? Somewhere, in the neighborhood ... but not too near these hulking projects.

Mediaspree: Twin Towers and Treptowers. Photo by Dalbera, Wiki commons.
(Note, I have slightly cropped the photo.)

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One of the post-2008 agreements was not to replace the old bridge here, which was blown in the attempt to stop the Russians in May of 1945 and has never been rebuilt.

Brommybrücke remains, May 2014. My photo.

There were plans to do a full rebuild of the bridge in the 1990s (like drowning the Nikolaiviertel, it didn't happen), and in 2001 (didn't happen) and 2007 (didn't happen; financial shortfalls every time, saving Berlin from its too-easy grandiosity). The post-referendum deal is that the rebuilding should be restricted to a pedestrian and bicyclist crossing ... but who knows what will happen in the longer term.

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Here behind the new Energieforum, it is finally possible to reach a portion of the pathetic ten-meter strip that was allowed to the public in the Mediaspree plan. 

In Friedrichshain, behind Energieforum, May 2014. My photo.

Nearby, a few members of the creative class, hunched in intense discussion over some papers, are sitting in the only place it is possible to sit here--on the concrete-covered ground. 

Nothing to sit down on or to eat. 


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Notes:

Quotes are from:
 W. B. Yeats, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen

 F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, I, 7.
J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, p. 1.