Spree 9

Out to the Summer-Fresh

What a pleasant little walk this is, from Köpenick to Friedrichshagen along the river. We're transitioning out of turn-of-the-last-century industrial territory to turn-of-the-last-century resort territory ...  But aaaugh, I don't like the word "resort," it doesn't have the right feel. A resort sounds like one of those places that telephone you during dinner in the US and offer you an almost-free trip to Florida if you'll listen to their sales pitch for time-shares.

What the Germans called territory like this when it was developed, back in the latter part of the nineteenth century, was die Sommerfrische. The summer-fresh. (It's an old-fashioned word now; it faded out along with the custom of spending the summer in the countryside and the winter in the city.)

There's still a somewhat leisurely feel to the area. The riverside is full of gardens and boats (summer-fresh occupations). Tatters and shards of garden scatter out along the streetside and the waterside.

Bachelors' buttons along the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

There are immense numbers of boats tied up along the water. Rowboats pulled into little water-nooks in gardens.  Biggish yachts with proper moorings. (Big yachts, watch out for pirates on the Spree!)

Pirates on the Spree. June 2014. My photo.

And then we come to the forest. As always in Berlin, if we walk far enough we will come to the forest. When I stand at the window at home and look out, I can see the forest like a green wall out at the edge of sight, at the edge of the city. There is the Grunewald (the Greenwood) to the southwest (and the workmen who come to patch or deliver something in the apartment point and say, Hey, look, that's the Greenwood!). Turn half-north, and there are the Spandauer Forest and the Tegeler Forest out beyond the airport; and straight north, the high ground of the Barnim Plateau with its heaths and woods. We don't look southeast--but if we did, and could see far enough, we would see this:

Along the Spree between Köpenick and Friedrichshagen. June 2014. My photo.

Turning away from the path here, you look into an intensity of green. (The holy green, writes Hölderlin, walking by a different German river in the 1790s, the witness of the blessed deep life of the world ...) The forest smells wonderful: earth and water and leaves freshening in the sun. It was sharp-cold when I came out this morning, but it's starting to warm up. 

Woods along the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

It is so dark in some of the shady stretches, on this clear summer midday, that the automatic flash goes off on my camera. 

Willows sprawl out over the water.

Willow along the Spree, June 2014.  My photo.

It is rather solitary here at the moment. A little track veers down to the water and to what looks like a large doorbell at the water's edge. So what happens if you ring the bell, does the witch come out of the woods or does some water-monster come flopping out of the Spree to snap you up?

Nah. What looks like a terrace on the side of this floating house detaches itself, as a raft, and hums across the water to pick you up and take you to the Spree-Ark, the restaurant in the floating house.

Restaurant Spreearche, June 2014. My photo.

**

The river is starting to open out, the sun is bright ... ah, and the woods open out too. A clearing, a path--should we get sidetracked?

Perhaps not. Someone is sitting on the water stairs by the old Friedrichshagen brewery across the river, playing extraordinarily good jazz saxophone. Let us dawdle and listen.

Old brewery, Berliner Bürgerbräu, Friedrichshagen

This is about the last piece of major industry we will meet on the river, I think. Beer is another of those things that is heavy relative to value, like the sand and gravel and coal that we have seen moving along the Spree.  (In Colorado, where I grew up, the slow lane on the highway--especially in the mountains--was called the Coors lane because the Coors beer trucks plodded so, trying to get their heavy heavy loads uphill.) So there was much to be said for brewing right on the water and rolling the kegs straight down from the brewhouse to the barges.

There were commercial brewing operations here from the 1750s onward: first a family business (owners lived for a while in the White Villa next to the brewery, on the right of the picture above), then a cooperative of Berlin restaurants, then a corporation, and then of course a state-owned firm in East German days. Then a family firm again after privatization in the early 1990s--with that dash of the fantastical, the slightly untrue, that new/old East German businesses often seemed to have. 

Oh, it wasn't a fake or a disaster, it wasn't the Spreepark (see Spree 6 post). The new company made a go of it for twenty years, and we all drank Berlin Citizens Brew (Berliner Bürgerbräu), it was perfectly decent beer (and the price was always a cut below the other local beers in the grocery store). It was exported successfully to Russia and Japan. 

Citizens Brew was the last independent industrial brewery in Berlin--the only thing between the microbreweries with their couple of coppers and fermenters under an S-Bahn viaduct, on the one hand, and the giant Radeberger that owned all the other beer in Berlin, on the other hand. Poor Citizens' Brew: it wasn't a feasible size. The volume wouldn't pay for anything like Radeberger's advertising spend, they couldn't get the giant's kind of price-cut on raw materials--and yet they were industrial, they couldn't live on a little cult following like the microbrews under the S-Bahn.

They did have their local devotees. When the firm finally sold out to Radeberger in 2010, the public worry was, Oh no, what's going to happen to Robin Redbreast?? (This was one of the specialities of the Friedrichshagen brewery.) There was a quasi-audible rustle of sighs of relief around the city--or at least through the newspapers--when Radeberger promised to keep making Robin Redbreast (Rotkehlchen) at its big facility on the north side of town. 

I don't understand the popular Berlin taste in beer. Not that I'm much of a beer-drinker anyway, but if I drink it then I like it plain and pure, not full of the stuff that the city traditionally puts in. Consider the absolute Berlin classic, the Weißbier mit Schuß that used to be so ubiquitous on summer beer-garden tables (and is a little less prevalent now, I think, given the changing population). It's a low-alcohol wheat beer with a shot of woodruff syrup (if green) or raspberry syrup (if pink). (Aaagh, pink beer ...) The Rotkehlchen they used to make in Friedrichshagen has caramel in it, which gives it a sort of rusty-red color.

When did they make Rotkehlchen in Friedrichshagen, exactly? This is where the story gets a little fantastical and untrue. The local devotees of the drink were devoted partly because it was a local product. The brewery was a big local deal, it was a place where you could sit by the river playing your saxophone on a summer's day and feel good; you could have a candlelight dinner by the lake, at the White Villa next to the plant (or you could go dancing at the White Villa or get married there). Or you could take a tour of the plant, in which it might be evident that not much brewing was going on. And the guide would say, "Oh some days we just don't brew. Every small brewery has days like this." [Information here and in the following paragraph is from an article in Tagesspiegel, 15 Jan. 2010.] 

But actually, more and more of the Berlin Citizen Brew was not being brewed by Berlin citizens any more but was produced more or less secretly down in Chemnitz in Saxony, almost on the Czech border, and trucked up to the facility in Friedrichshagen for redelivery from there. (Exactly how much of this was going on, and how transparent it was, are topics of disagreement.) The Saxons are good technicians and could even chemically copy the Berlin water, with its flaky hardness.

But now Radeberger has taken over. It's a Frankfurt firm, part of a family conglomerate that made its first fortune by introducing baking powder to Germany in the nineteenth century and now has fingers in all sorts of (often but not always literal) pies, from frozen pizza to banking and shipping. I don't see Citizens Brew in our local grocery any more, although it certainly still exists. Maybe Radeberger raised the price, or maybe the local patriotism of our excellent (Turkish) grocer was disillusioned.

**
We have to be a little thoughtful about which side of the river we're on here, because there are no more bridges for a long long way. There is, however, a tunnel under the river that would take us into Friedrichshagen.   

Spreetunnel, June 2014.  My photo.

There's a long flight of stairs at each end, and it is fascinating to watch people getting their bicycles up and down these rather steep stairs. I see one young woman struggling to keep her bike from running away with her on the downward trip, but most people--including the seventy-plus crowd--just toss the bicycle over one shoulder or tuck it firmly under an arm and clatter up and down the stairs at speed, like mountain goats.

Friedrichshagen, on the other side, is a real summer-fresh. It's on the biggest lake in Berlin, and people have always come here to boat and swim and hike and have a little refreshment by the water. 

Berlin Citizens Brew, brewed according to the Purity Law of 1516.
Sign at Friedrichshagen restaurant, July 2014. My photo.

There was a writers' colony here in the 1890s (and later), and a party spot for the Party in Communist days; nowadays there is a scattering of art galleries, and studios that open to visitors in the summer, along with the beaches and boat rentals and beer gardens. The streets are pretty; Friedrichshagen was too far out to catch many bombs in WWII, and it's been cleaned and polished a good deal in recent years.

Street in Friedrichshagen, June 2014.  My photo.

Archangel and I come out here, but not typically in the summer-fresh. We have a fairly good record of being in Friedrichshagen always on the coldest day of the year, in fact, because we always come out to spend a day with his cousins here between Christmas and New Year. (And we usually miss the streetcar out to the cousins' house, and end up walking because it beats standing on the ice at the open corner where the transit modes meet. More on this later.)

**

I go back to the S-Bahn, which has a long steep sweep of stairway up to the tracks, not unlike the stairs in the tunnel under the Spree. The young man ahead of me pauses, balancing his belongings before tackling the stairs. Here he goes--bicycle under the right arm, large takeout pizza balanced on the left palm, and up he runs like a mountain goat. 

Spree 8

Cleaning up Berlin: Construction and Laundry

It's interesting to live in Berlin after living in Chicago for a long time. It can feel like getting out of Plato's cave and seeing the real things in the sunshine, after seeing the shadows of the images in the cave. Chicago grew up in the late nineteenth century when Berlin was the hot industrial city, the innovation capital of the world--and naturally there are likenesses and modelings.

The University of Chicago was founded as a knock-off of the University of Berlin. (The original core collection of the U of Chicago library was acquired by buying up, whole, the most suitable-looking bookstore in the neighborhood of the U of Berlin.) The Berlin Ringbahn, an elevated rail line that encircles central Berlin (for 37 km), is like a tremendous magnification of the Chicago Loop (about 3 km). And so on. 

Getting to this last stretch of the Spree means getting through the construction at Ostkreuz (East Cross), the eastern node of the Ringbahn. (The key intersections of the Ringbahn, where the north-south and east-west lines cross it, are named East Cross, West Cross, South Cross, and ... nonono, not North Cross. Gesundbrunnen, instead. Just to keep you alert.) 

Ostkreuz has needed work. Here's one of the east-west platforms in 2007. 

Platform, Ostkreuz, 2007.  Photo by Christian Liebscher, Wiki commons. 

They started tearing up the place in 2008, and are very slowly (I presume thoroughly) putting it back together again. The new east-west platforms will be here.  (The upper, finished part is the shed for the north-south tracks.)

Ostkreuz station, March 2014.  Photo by Ingolf, Wiki Commons.

For the time being, we clamber around a lot on temporary stairs and catwalks over the construction, trying to figure out where the trains are now. (Last week the S3 was here, but last week's "here" no longer exists ...)  I locate the S3, which I assume is bound for Köpenick, where there is a confluence of rivers. A scratchy announcement comes on:

     Worthy passengers, the incoming train shuttles only to Rummelsburg, where           you can change again for a train to Köpenick. 

The worthy passengers moan, quietly. (But someday the construction will be done.)

**

Köpenick is the next piece of Berlin east of Niederschöneweide (last post), and is of course different. The districts and sub-districts and neighborhoods here are so distinct, so identified and marked and named .... I'm still not altogether used to it.

Naming is a human practice that thins out as you go west into the American interior, where nature gets bigger than culture. Where I grew up in eastern Colorado, a lot of noticeable physical features like buttes and bodies of water lacked names (the US Geological Survey might have called them something, but no one I knew called them anything). The flowers by the roadside and in the pastures lacked names (undoubtedly botanists had labeled them, but no one I knew called them anything). In Denver, when I was in college, I lived in a number of different places and never heard that any of my surroundings were neighborhoods with particular names. Chicago is different: you couldn't ever not know what neighborhood you were in. But it's more intense here in Berlin.

And the naming is complicated. Köpenick is a district that includes Köpenick city and other places like Friedrichshagen and Müggelheim (no, this does not mean a home for Muggles). Köpenick city is then made up of distinct pieces like Köpenick Altstadt--the old city center--and the Salvador-Allende-Quarter, and the Wolf's Garden (Wolfsgarten), and the Finance Department Heath (Kämmereiheide) and so on, each of which is a different sort of place.

The first piece of Köpenick-city that we come into, on leaving Niederschöneweide, is Spindlersfeld. We're out in the deep east here: brown houses, old streetcars with high steps, streetcar stops thick with smokers and cigarette litter; potholes in mid-street so deep and lasting that the grass takes hold in them--though it does not get as tall as the grass along the street-sides and in the parks, where it is waist-high and run to seed. I pass one little patch that has been mowed and smells like new-cut hay in the June sun. 

There are old-east ruins.  This is the Spindler works, which gave the Spindlersfeld neighborhood its name. The windows are broken, the woods begin to close in from the sides, and some of the trees that have dug their roots into the rooftops are getting rather large.

Spindler works, Spindlersfeld, June 2014. My photo.

Spindler's company started out doing laundry (among other things), and laundry was big business in Köpenick in the nineteenth century. It's all about water, out here. 

The Berlin-area ground water that goes into the city water systems is chalky-hard. (The verb "de-scale" was never a big part of my vocabulary until I moved to Berlin, but here it is essential. As in, "The espresso machine doesn't work any more, maybe it should have been de-scaled more often.") But the river water is softer, and in Köpenick in the nineteenth century it was relatively clean, safely upriver from massive human insanitation and nascent industry. And there were waterside meadows for drying and bleaching the laundry in the sun. Perfect for laundry!

So ... here are two representative local heroes of the Köpenick laundries, whose memorials I have stumbled over, tacking back and forth near the river bank, trying to get up the Spree and around the occasionally intrusive private property. 

One of the local heroes is Henriette Lustig, the woman who is credited with getting the commercial laundry business started here in the 1830s. Different world then: Berlin was still very French (became less so, proportionally, when the heavy industrialization later in the century pulled in lots of German workers), and she was christened Marie Frederique Adelaide. The family called her by the name of her older sister Henriette, who had died. (Because it was convenient to keep calling the youngest child Henriette? Because it made it seem as if the first Henriette was still alive? How would you feel, being called by a dead sibling's name rather than your own?)

In earlier days, your servants did your laundry, in your own household--or you did it yourself if you were sufficiently downscale, but you had to be a long way downscale not to have someone to do heavy household work like laundry. (The wonderful opening passage of Penelope Fitzgerald's novel, The Blue Flower, describes a young man arriving at a friend's house around 1800, and feeling awkward because, of all days in the year, he has arrived on washday. His own household (servants, under his mother's supervision) does the washing three times a year, "therefore the household had linen and white underwear for four months only. He himself possessed eighty-nine shirts, no more. But here ... he could tell from the great dingy snowfall of sheets, pillow-cases, bolster-cases, vests, bodices, drawers, from the upper windows into the courtyard ... that they washed only once a year. This might not mean wealth ..., but it was certainly an indication of long standing.")

After the eighty-nine-shirt era, there was a longish interval--starting in Henriette Lustig's time and continuing up to the widespread diffusion of washing machines--in which it was normal to give your laundry to a commercial service that picked up and delivered to your door with considerable frequency. So here is Henriette Lustig starting out with a basket; and then with a cart pulled by a dog to carry the customers' linens; and then with a big wagon and a horse. Or even two horses. She had employees, and then more employees. Boom times!  By 1900 there were four thousand laundry workers in Köpenick and  eighty-nine firms; but she was the first. (The source for all this is a website called FemBio.)

Memorial plaque for Henriette Lustig, Altmarkt, Köpenick.  Photo by Clemensfranz, Wiki Commons.

What a life. She ran the business, met the payroll, had seventeen children, and couldn't sign her own name. Nor, according to one of her daughters, could she count past ten. The business never made real money, but it survived, side by side with the entirely different world of Wilhelm Spindler. 

Back when Henriette was still doing laundry in other people's houses, before she started her own business, Wilhelm, who was almost the same age, was doing his Wanderschaft. (The traditional practice for skilled trades then was apprenticeship, then Wanderschaft or Wanderjahre--going from city to city, ideally in more than one country, working in different establishments to expand your knowledge and polish your skills--then, if all went well, you could set up on your own, back home.) In Wilhelm's case the trade was silk-dying, and after a couple of years on the road he set up a silk-dying business in Berlin, which also offered to wash fine shawls. (If we put the color in, we can clean your shawl without taking the color out, presumably.)

He was interested in technical developments, in chemistry. In his wander-years, in Paris, he had learned about dry-cleaning with chemicals like benzine. He introduced dry-cleaning to Germany--big breakthrough! Beginnings of one of those solid late-nineteenth-century German family fortunes that end you up with a neighborhood and bridge named after you and a plaque like this:

Wilhelm Spindler, memorial on Spindler-Bridge over the Spree.
Photo by Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons.

Wilhelm corresponded with people all over Europe, learning about the latest in dye chemistry. (How could you dye silk an even, perfect, lasting black?? Vital business question, in the days when the black dress was the standard garb of women past a certain age.) Working on dyes was hot stuff in chemistry in those days, a lively interface between science and industry. Adolf Brüning, who got his Ph.D. at Heidelberg under the immortal Robert Bunsen (namesake of the Bunsen burner!), came to work at Wilhelm Spindler's dyeworks in Berlin. And married Wilhelm's oldest daughter, and founded a firm in western Germany that eventually became the chemical giant Hoechst.  

Brüning's great discovery was a green dye that would still look green under gaslight. The French empress had red hair, she wanted to wear green under the gaslight ... and another fortune was made when she became Brüning's customer. (The empress set the fashion, and Brüning got enormous contracts to supply the silk works in Lyons.)

They were conscientious employers, Spindler and Brüning. Health insurance for the workers, sports facilities, paid vacations, in the days when such things were rare.

**

In the 1920s, the Spindler firm was bought by Schering (which now belongs to Bayer). Henriette Lustig's daughter continued to run a small laundry in Köpenick. 

After World War II, the Spindler works became part of a state holding company under varying names, including The People's Own Firm, United Laundries of Berlin. Henriette Lustig's granddaughter continued to run a small laundry in Köpenick .... 

It's all over now; the granddaughter's little laundry gone in 1965, the remains of the Spindler business gone in the 1990s. Real estate developers own the remains of the Spindler works now and are building housing here. Some of the housing is new, occupying formerly vacant ground, some is supposed to be rehabbed space in the old works--not so evident, but perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place.

There is supposed to be a promenade along the Spree through all this new development (also not so evident, but perhaps I wasn't looking in the right place). Lots of private property here, lots of fences with beware-of-dog signs. 

Or sometimes, for a change:

Warning! Combat Cat!  Spindlersfeld.  June 2014.  My photo.

Chicago-Berlin again. The notion (often honored in the breach, but still present) that the public should have a right to walk by the water, under the trees, is core Berlin--it's an important piece of what brought greater Berlin together (see "A little geography" post in February). Daniel Burnham, in the Chicago Plan, said: “The lakefront by right belongs to the people. Not a foot of its shores should be appropriated to the exclusion of the people.” (You go, Daniel Burnham!)

**

At Köpenick a fat river called the Dahme joins the Spree:

Dahme River at Köpenick, June 2014. My photo. 

Or is this really  the Spree joining the Spree? The Dahme used to be called the Wendische Spree and the Spree proper was called the Müggelspree (as it sometimes still is). In 1938 the name Wendische Spree was officially rejected in favor of Dahme--I think as part of a general campaign against admitting how Slavic this part of the world is. (The Wends are Slavs--it's sort of an umbrella term for western Slavs, also a more special term for one of the branches of the Sorbish-speakers down in Lausitz, south of Berlin.) 

(The river was not the only victim of renaming. Little Sorbish towns in the country south of Berlin were also given more German-sounding names in 1938. For example, Trebatzch (eek, Wendish!) was renamed Leichhardt (ah, German!). The name effectively changed back in 1947: one dark night the locals uprooted the 1938 city-limit signs that said Leichhardt and planted new ones that said Trebatzch.)

So it's good that things have names (unlike in rural Colorado), but it gets complicated. 

**

Out of Spindlersfeld into central Köpenick, and we're in a different world, primped and painted with all the amenities of a prosperous part of Berlin. Yellow houses, green houses, pink houses. Intact streets, mown grass, Vietnamese florists, Turkish produce shops, and so on. Köpenick no longer lives by taking in the city's washing, but it lives well. 

Köpenick, Gutenbergstrasse. June 2014. My photo.

I go over the  bridge on the Dahme and have a look at the Schloss on the island in the Dahme, a nice piece of north German baroque.

Schloss Köpenick. Photo by Andreas Steinhoff, Wiki Commons.

With a nice garden:

Schlossgarten Köpenick, June 2014. My photo.

There's more on-and-off the water for a bit .... Here, where I get back to the river after an "off" bit, someone has staked out a place.

Chair by the river, Köpenick, June 2014. My photo.

Then--I think we're in the Finance Department Heath now--the riverside is open territory at last, and the summer afternoon is perfect, and nothing could be better than to walk by the water.

Along the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

**

Eventually I hop the S-Bahn to go home via Ostkreuz. There is an announcement in the train:

    Very honored passengers, this train goes only to Rummelsburg, where
    you can change for a shuttle to Ostkreuz and change again there.

The very honored passengers moan. 

Spree 7

Through the Beautiful Meadows

There's a slow and messy stretch here in the Schöneweiden: the neighborhoods of Oberschöneweide (the upper beautiful meadow) on the north bank of the river and Niederschöneweide (the lower beautiful meadow) on the south bank. (There are no actual beautiful meadows in sight on either bank.) It's hard to stay by the water, as the riverbanks are often taken up with private property, heavy industry, the occasional ruin, and other quasi-disasters. 

The recommendation of the greenways map is: forget about it, don't even try. Take the F11 ferry (from the point where we left off last time) over to the north bank, get up into the nearest stretch of woods and don't come back until you're out of this whole area and practically in Köpenick. The recommendation is probably good--green and quiet and efficient--but I don't know this part of the city at all and am curious about it. I do want to take the ferry (a part of Berlin public transit that I do not normally use), but I won't go up into the woods; I'll see if I can stay somewhat close to the water, either on the north bank (upper meadow) or the south (lower meadow).

So I take the S-Bahn out to the end of the Plänterwald (see last post) and walk down to the river, where a big barge is asleep at the bank: the Concordia, out of Glücksburg on the Baltic. 

Barge parked along the Spree by the Plänterwald, June 2014. My photo.

Very still, not a soul in sight on the barge. (Are they all asleep? Off buying groceries?)  I have just missed the ferry, which is heading across the water to Oberschöneweide, so I peer at the barge for a bit (can't tell what it's carrying, it's all under wraps) and then sit on a bench under the trees thinking about Glücksburg. Archangel and I were up in that part of the world, on the Danish border, a few summers ago (meant to go bicycling but all the rental bicycles were too high for me: seats at a level half-way up my ribcage, suitable for six-foot Danes but not so good for creaky older persons who are five foot three). 

Glücksburg is the northeasternmost point of Germany, where the Flensburg fjord that divides Germany and Denmark turns a sharp corner on its way into Flensburg harbor. Waterworld, up here in northern Europe. River, lake, sea, fjord, swamp, deep-sheltered harbors.

We tend not to think of the Danes as imperialists, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Denmark (which then owned Flensburg and Glücksburg) had trading stations in West Africa and colonies in the Caribbean and India. Flensburg harbor was busy and rich, Flensburg--as part of the Caribbean connection--was the rum-distilling capital of Europe. In honor of which we sat drinking rum on a long summer evening, in one of the narrow courtyards that lead back far from the streets in Flensburg. Good shelters from the winds off the sea, that can be icy even in August. 

Inner courtyard, Flensburg. Photo by Soehnke Rahn, Wiki commons. 

Europe pulls this way and that between the two sea basins: the Mediterranean, with its ties to the ancient and Middle Eastern worlds (think of southern France in early-classical times, when its ties with Egypt or Phoenicia were probably closer than its ties to the Seine), and the Baltic-North Sea world that opens out into the north Atlantic (so that people were sailing from Denmark out to Iceland in the early middle ages, when sensible Mediterranean sailors would hardly go out into the Atlantic at all).

How different the two sea-basins look. Around the Mediterranean, deforested mountains rise from the water, and deserts and near-deserts stare at it. Here--well, not much rises up from the water, the water is more likely to rise up and drown the land. (Strengthen the dikes, build the sea-walls higher!) Marsh and forest are everywhere, the land drowns in green.  

Waterworld. The Wasserschloss, the water-castle here, was called Glücksburg from the sixteenth-century builder's motto: Gott gebe Glück mit Frieden, may God give joy with peace. 

How stark and bright and bare this is, compared to, say a chateau on the Loire or an Italian palazzo. (Scandinavian design!)

Glücksburg water-castle. Photo by OnkelHeini, Wiki Commons.

This was (sort of still is) the seat of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, one of those over-hyphenated little Germanic principalities that bred kings and queens for the rest of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, like a Kentucky stable breeding race-horses. 

If you look back to the world that was about to go up in flames a hundred years ago in August--a world where monarchs still mattered, constitutional though they were--how many of the European countries had monarchs who grew up here at Glücksburg or had parents or grandparents who did? England, Denmark, Norway, Russia, Greece ... Even the German imperial family was always being hauled off to Glücksburg for holidays, because the empress, Auguste Viktoria, not only came from the closely related family of  Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg (ach, these names!), but also had a sister who was married to the Duke at Glücksburg. The Empress stayed in the castle on visits; the Emperor, who seems not to have liked so much closeness with his in-laws, stayed in his yacht out on the water. (This is the Auguste Viktoria for whom the bell was named that appears in the Berlin-Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal I post in March.) 

A small world, that almost-but-not-quite comic-opera world of late nineteenth-century royalty.

This is King Giorgios I of Greece, who grew up in Glücksburg (as Prince Wilhelm of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg--but what could the Greeks make of a name like Wilhelm?). 

King George (Giorgios) I of Greece. Photo from Wiki Commons.

One of his sisters married the King of England, one married the Czar of Russia (after being rechristened Maria Feodorovna--what could the Russians make of a name like Dagmar?). He presided over the first modern Olympic games in Athens, annexed bits of territory from the tottering Turkish empire and failed to annex others, trying to come up with acceptable borders for the relatively new country. He was shot in the heart by an anarchist in 1913. Not quite comic-opera. 

Wilhelm/ Giorgios was thus off the stage before the First World War gave the last disintegrating push to the Turkish Empire and so let the demons loose in the Middle East. Greece had been the first piece of the old Turkish Empire to split off and become a national state, with a monarch provided (at least recommended and supported) by the western powers. Iraq and Syria and other Middle Eastern states were later created on more or less the same model, but with more sloppily, less plausibly constructed borders ... (Gott gebe Glück mit Frieden.)


**

The ferry stop has the usual array of public-transit notices: route, schedule, legal terms of transportation, plus a statement that scheduled ferry runs may be cancelled in times of storm, fog, or heavy ice. (The Berlin Water and Shipping Authority runs five or six icebreakers in winter--the city has icebreakers just as it has snowplows: tough blue boats with names like Seal and Sea Otter and Sea Lion--but in a bad winter the ice can get ahead of them just as the snow might get ahead of the snowplows.) Not a problem today, on this perfect rain-washed summer morning.

Presently the ferry comes hustling back. 

F1 ferry on the Spree, June 2014.  My photo.

I am on the south bank of the Spree; the stop on the north bank is somewhat downriver. The pilot uses just enough engine to get the ferry away from the pier; then he cuts the power, and the ferry drifts silently downriver, cross-river, on the current. The morning is wonderfully fresh on the water, in the silence. The ferry touches gently, exactly at the little pier on the other side, and the gangway clanks down in what looks like the middle of nowhere. 

Is there even a street here? Maybe, but no street sign. Well, let's do like people in the Brothers Grimm stories and "fare forth on good fortune," and see where it gets us. 

**

So .... over the river and through the woods? Not exactly; more like over the river and through the Kleingärten.

In Oberschöneweide, June 2014. My photo.

How can the summer be so far along? It seems only yesterday that the apple trees were in bloom, and now look: the apples are the size of small fists ...

Apple tree in Oberschöneweide, June 2014. My photo.

The Kleingarten stretch is just a little rim on a substantial industrial and residential neighborhood. I always lose my sense of direction in Kleingärten, and the stretch here is only just big enough for me to get farther north than I meant to. Maybe I should have stuck to that unlabeled little remnant of a one-lane street with the abandoned trolley tracks in it, running through the garden plots?  But I didn't.

The street names here, once I get out of the Kleingärten and back to proper streets, are inventor-scientist names from industrial-revolutionary times. I go down Watt, across Helmholtz, to Siemens and then to Edison. 

At the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century Oberschöneweide was one of the great industrial districts of Europe. Here was the new world of big-science-based industry which, a hundred years ago (as industrialized war) was about to roll over the old world of monarchs who grew up in water-castles. 

AEG (the Allgemeine Elektrizitätsgesellschaft, the General Electric Company), which took much of the lead in electrifying Germany, had big operations here in Oberschöneweide. They started by buying the German rights to Edison's light-bulb patents (hence Edisonstrasse, and the Edison school, which is the neighborhood grade school):

Edison Grundschule, Oberschöneweide, June 2014.  My photo.

And then AEG went on from there, on their own. Electric plants, electric motors, electric trains; the first tape recorders (1935); appliances, cars (non-electric). (Siemens built cars too, interestingly--not a project that ever interested firms like GE or RCA in America, so far as I know.) Other electricity-related firms settled nearby, as did metalwork and mechanical engineering firms. 

The building that appears below was the Frister light-fixture factory, the biggest in Europe by 1920. In East German days, the development lab for the country's radio and telecommunications business was here, along with facilities for design and production of lab instruments. The East German radio headquarters, where all the shows were produced, was nearby; broadcast equipment was produced a little way upriver, in Köpenick. A lively neighborhood here, in its way ...

Spreehöfe, former light-fixture factory, June 2014. My photo.

Now there are offices in the building (everything from software firms to welding firms), restaurants, a cinema, a bowling alley, a fitness club .... The place looks more hesitant, less established, than similarly repurposed industrial buildings in Charlottenburg (see Spree 3 post, May 2014). The place does not look fully rented. There are uneasinesses: the tenants include a club with suspected connections to the neonazi scene; the police have stopped a couple of concerts there, once threatening to cave in the door with a battering ram because the owners wouldn't open.

Across the river, in Niederschöneweide, things are not so rehabbed.

Empty factory near Treskowbrücke, June 2014. My photo.

Some of the residential neighborhood on the Niederschöneweide side is fine, but some of it is not:

Abandoned building, Niederschöneweide, June 2014. My photo.

There are undigested pasts here, traces of other forces that helped to put an end to the world of the monarchs. 

After I cross back to Niederschöneweide (on the recommendation of the greenways map) I try to avoid a through street called Schnellerstrasse on the south side of the river because I know it will be loud and exhaust-fumed. I vaguely supposed it was called Schnellerstrasse because it was schneller (faster) than the little side streets--but no, it is named for Ernst Schneller, who lived nearby.  

Schneller was a schoolteacher and then an officer in the First World War. After the war he went back to teaching, but he had also been politicized by the war and its aftermath and was active in the Social Democratic Party. He helped organize defenses against the attempted right-wing military coup in 1920 (the Kapp-Putsch), which briefly drove the elected government out of Berlin. Schneller was alarmed enough by the near-success of the coup to switch loyalties from the Social Democrats to the Communists, who he thought (not without reason) would take a harder line against the dictatorial right. (A young Adolf Hitler had flown from Munich to Berlin to support the attempted coup--a sign of worse to come.)

Schneller became a member of the state legislature of Saxony and campaigned for Communist programs of the time, like free school lunches, free textbooks, and health care for schoolchildren. He graduated to the national legislature, and had his ups and downs with the Party leadership; he was arrested by the Nazis in 1933 and was never out of prison after that. He was shot in 1944 for leading a resistance group in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.

He was a fairly popular hero in postwar East Germany: many schools were named after him, and a television movie was made about him. Most of the schools have been renamed, and the memorial in his old neighborhood does not seem to be exactly held in honor.  

Ernst Schneller memorial, Niederschöneweide. June 2014,. My photo.

The un-naming of things in the old East is creepy at times. It's certainly understandable that Stalinallee should no longer be Stalinallee (the East German government already did that un-naming, long ago). But it is maybe not required to un-name everything. It's as well that Schnellerstrasse is still Schnellerstrasse.

**

I'm trying to get back to the river.  I figure I'm not far when I'm at the intersection of Flood and Flow (Flut and Fließ) streets ....  And here we go around the last bit of dereliction-enclosing fence, and back to the water. Here is a civilized footbridge (blown up 1945, rebuilt 2007: these things take time!) over to the other Schöneweide. But I think I'll stick to this (lower-meadow) side, which has more visible green space.

Kaisersteg footbridge over the Spree.
 June 2014. My photo.

So at last I'm back by the river, and it looks very like the river--the way the river has looked almost from the mouth at the Havel.  There are nineteen-hundredish factories dreaming by the water...

Along the Spree, looking toward Oberschöneweide

... and there is green space, bursting with flowers ...

Roses along the Spree in Niederschöneweide, June 2014. My photo.

... and there are more factories. (Note the front of the coal barge in the picture below: it's a double, it goes on forever, beyond the scope of even the widest wide-angle setting on my camera.)

Coal barge on the Spree, June 2014. My photo.

The tower in the picture above is part of the building that once housed the NAG, the New (later National) Automobile Company--the one that the electrical-equipment company AEG owned for a while. NAG did well in the 1920s, when they designed some champion race cars that helped them to appeal to the luxury market.

Perhaps they were sort of cars that the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs would have motored around in, in their day. Lost worlds. The company went under in the 1930s, along with much else.

NAG 1908 model. Photo by Softeis, Wiki Commons.

Ah, but some people are resourceful and find their way. What has happened to the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, now that breeding monarchs is no longer much of a business?  

Prince Christoph (as I read in the Flensburg newspaper), has a degree in engineering and runs a corporation called Glücksburg Consulting.  It is headquartered in Hamburg now, with offices in a variety of other places, but it started in the water-castle at Glücksburg. (Like starting up a business in your suburban garage. Sort of.)