Spring sidetrack: Britz

Take care, little flowers!

Summer already. The spring seems to vanish before I have even caught up with my e-mail. Before I know it, the palm-tree-delivery truck is in the street behind us, winching a couple of big palm trees out to stand on the terrace at the Irish pub. (Dublin suburban gardens are full of palm trees, so an Irish pub has to have palm trees, almost as much it has to have Guinness and fish-and-chips.) The palm-tree-delivery truck means it is almost summer--and then it is summer, and we are tumbling toward the solstice, and the tremendous light pours into streets and rooms, filling them like water. 

But--now hear this--I am recording a major achievement from the spring. When I was walking the Teltowkanal in February this year and passed along the edge of Bruno Taut's wonderful Hufeisensiedlung (Teltowkanal 7 post), I said that I wanted to come back in the spring to get a better look at it; and I also wanted to go back to the Britzer Garten, which is not so far away. I had very happy memories of sitting in a small library-cum-cafe there, reading math, on a beautiful summer day several years ago. I had always meant to go back and do more of the same, but never managed to do it.

But once in a while we manage to do the things we mean to do. Here is the edge of the Hufeisensiedllung on a fine spring day.

Cherries on Onkel-Bräsig-Straße, April 2015. My photo.

And here am I, wandering around the streets gawping:  Look at the cherry-blossom against the sky! Look at the tulips by people's doors! Look at the wisteria coming into flower against the red walls of the row houses!

Wisteria on Hüsung, April 2015. My photo.

How wonderful all this is: the big old cherry trees in bloom against Taut's bright, solid, well-designed houses. Indigo-blue houses like the almost-last color at the edge of the rainbow. Red houses, yellow houses. 

Cherry blossom, Hufeisensiedlung, April 2015. My photo.

Ah, but I can't wander around in circles here all day with my mouth hanging open like a moron, I do want to get over to the gardens.  So off I go, south and west through the neighborhood. 

It's a perfect day, cool enough for walking, warm enough to toast in the sun and read in a sheltered place. What I have with me today is not math, but it's at least a mathematician's book: Descartes' Discours de la Méthode.

It's nicely apropos, too: the Britzer Garten has a tulip festival under way, and Descartes published the Discours in the Netherlands in 1637, in the same year that Dutch tulip mania--the first recorded asset-market bubble, I believe--peaked and crashed. (In the previous year, tulip bulbs had been the fourth-highest-valued export of the country, following gin, herring, and cheese. Is there any country nowadays whose biggest-money export is booze? I think not. World trade isn't what it used to be.)

Lucky Descartes. He had sold his inheritance (French real estate) and invested the money in bonds that would give him an adequate income and let him devote himself to mathematics and philosophy. If the tulip mania had been a modern bubble, large parts of the economy would have been swept up in it, and Descartes' bond investments might have been in trouble. But it was a pre-modern bubble, which didn't make big waves in the economy at large. No mass unemployment when the tulip-futures market collapsed. (We don't get the modern kind of asset-market crisis that sucks down a lot of relatively innocent bystanders, until ... when? Later nineteenth century, I think.)

René Descartes, Portrait by Frans Hals. Photo, Wiki Commons.

Descartes is one of those people you encounter in little canned summaries, but probably don't actually read, in introductory courses in college.  --Though I remember being at some event at the U of Chicago decades ago (a lecture by some political bigwig of the time, I think) when a cluster of undergrads, loud and unsettled as a flock of starlings, came to roost next to me, arguing about Descartes. A tall dark young woman was holding some point against the united opposition of the rest, all of them convulsed with laughter. As this was the U of C, probably some of them had actually read the books they were talking about. The tall woman flung herself down near me, insisting to the rest of them with that luminous undergrad kind of intensity, "But I take Descartes seriously." And they swirled around her like starlings mobbing a bigger bird, screeching, "You can't take Descartes seriously!" 

It's hard, actually. In canned-summary form, he seems unconvincing. In the summaries he says: I think, therefore I am ... and therefore [with just a couple of explanatory steps in between] a benevolent deity exists. And he says: I know that ideas are true when they are clear and distinct.  Surely this does not make sense?

But then, Descartes is not an idiot. Being a brilliant mathematician doesn't guarantee that you're a brilliant anything else, but still--analytic geometry is an amazing invention, and I am curious to see what he really has to say about other matters.

So, off we go to the gardens, to sit in the sun and read.  Past the Britz village church, one of those little medieval fieldstone churches that are dotted around the outer parts of Berlin. (The tower's much newer--you can tell, in part, because the stones in the tower have been cut so squarely and uniformly. In the main body of the church the stones just are what they are: big or small, square or round or blobby, more or less as they came out of the fields.)

Britzer Dorfkirche, April 2015. My photo.

The church stands on a small height above the old village pond, and on the far side of the pond some spectacular mass of shrubbery is in bloom. (Good heavens, look at this, a whoosh of blossom coming up from the water like the flare of a welding torch. I come from a land of meager springs, I am amazed.) 

Britzer Dorfteich, April 2015. My photo.

On we go, looking for a bakery with sandwiches for lunch and not having much luck. Now that we're away from the Hufeisensiedlung and out near the ragged edges of the city, things are bleak and over-automobiled. 

Ah, here's a bakery (not so appealing, but we'll take what we can get); and then here's the turn to the garden entrance. What is this going to be like, I wonder? My memory of the actual design, from the last time I was here, is fuzzy. There are so many ways of making parks and gardens.

A big German park or garden is often meant to be like a forest (here's the park we live next to in Berlin):

Großer Tiergarten, Berlin.  Photo by Manfred Brückels, Wiki Commons.

A French park or garden is often meant exactly not to be like a forest, not to look like nature in the raw: it is something more civilized and geometric.

Gardens of the Chateau de Vendeuvre. Photo, Wiki Commons. 

I don't know quite what this means for the Britzer Garten, which is not supposed to be just forest: there is said to be a very fine spring-bulb display here, and a big dahlia show in the summer, and so on. So is there going to be something like the geometric but riotous flowerbeds that I saw in London earlier in the spring? (These pictures are both from Whitehall Gardens.)

As it turns out, there are some formal beds like these (mostly not as lush) at Britz.  But it's not what the German flower-planter does best, at least not here. Here they just strew the landscape with flowers in a fine open-handed sort of way:

Grape hyacinth and cherry blossom, Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

Ah, this is fine, this is great stuff. Let us perch on a bit of wall and eat our sandwich and make the acquaintance of René Descartes.

I hadn't realized how autobiographical the Discours is. I love autobiography (not the celebrity kind, but people actually trying to make some sense of their lives). To be sure, D.'s story of his life is programmatic, it's tendentious--he's trying to use it to explain and promote a set of works to which the Discours is the prologue. But still, it feels real.

At the risk of anachronism, I want to say: don't you just know people with the same take on the world as the young Descartes? He's dying to get out of school; it seems useless to him. Academics disagree with each other, so they're probably all wrong, he says, and anyway, what's the point? They're just sitting in their offices, without anything real at stake in their disputes, so there's nothing to stop them from spouting nonsense. Let me get out in the world, he thinks, where people are doing something that matters. Politics, trade, war. Let me get involved with people who are doing something real: they'll understand the world better than academics do, because they have to. They have to think clearly because the consequences of their decisions are so important and come home to them with such force.

So he leaves school and travels and meets real people and is a gentleman-volunteer with the Dutch army. Then he is in the Bavarian army, backing the Empire at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War. (A mathematically trained officer is useful for designing fortifications and calculating artillery ranges and so on. One of D's important later mathematical discoveries is based on his observations of the behavior of artillery shells as they head toward the people they are about to kill.) 

White narcissi and grape hyacinths, Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

Descartes is part of the Catholic Imperial army that wipes out the Czech Protestant forces early in the Thirty Years War. (A sizable Muslim contingent has been sent from Turkey to support Protestantism, but it gets entangled with the Poles and is no help.)  

After the Czech army is wiped out, Ferdinand, the reactionary Catholic who has recently been elected Emperor, becomes the new King of Bohemia. The Protestant ex-king and queen and their children flee to the Netherlands, in the chaos almost forgetting to pack an infant son, who is tossed into a carriage by a member of the court at the last minute. (In later years, Descartes will be a friend of one of the other children; no hard feelings about who was on which side in Prague in 1620.)

After the defeat of the Czechs, Ferdinand goes in for forced reconversions to Catholicism, seizure of Protestant property, and increases in absolute imperial power. How else can there be order? he thinks. And order there must be. But unsurprisingly, there is a bad reaction to this. The war spreads, the imperial finances deteriorate, unpaid mercenary forces ravage the countryside, and order in Central Europe--everything in Central Europe--goes to hell in the proverbial hand-basket. 

Descartes concludes, with regret, that real people spout nonsense also. High stakes don't guarantee good understanding. So what to do now? Or more precisely, what to think, how to be sure that what you believe is true? Descartes doesn't care so much what he does: his rule is to do what the people around him do. But he does care very much what he believes.  

I am done with my sandwich and the wall is not a place to sit on for a long time. Let's wander on and look for somewhere more comfortable to continue. 

The late narcissi are out in abundance here, more than I had expected: 

Narcissi, Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

Of course I have no clue where I am, or how the portion of garden I am wandering through now relates to the portion of garden that I was in the last time I was here. I can't find the cafe with the little library in it; perhaps it's gone, or perhaps I'm in the wrong part of this rather large (200-acre-plus) establishment. I probably came in from the other side before.

I think I remember the small hill I have just come to, which I climbed the last time time I was here, because how can you see a hill without wanting to climb it? It was rather sweaty and boring on a hot summer day, but it's wonderful now, covered thick with daffodils from top to bottom. Not suitable for photography, however: the wind is blowing so hard, the flowers are just a blur. 

Here's a lower, more sheltered spot where the breeze is not so wild.

Daffodils, Britzer Garten. April 2015. My photo.

And of course there are tulips, scattered through the grass as if we were on a hillside in Anatolia.

Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

I don't see any of the streaky-stripey kind of tulips that were so prized in the seventeenth century. In early 1637, when the Discours was in press, one of these might cost as much as a rich man's house in Amsterdam. (Eighty cents a pop at Walmart for the modern version.) 

Scholars still disagree--typical! the young Descartes would have said--about whether the peak tulip prices were really irrational or instead were somehow efficient and tied to fundamental values, at least insofar as this was possible under the circumstances. (It's complicated: part of the 1636-37 problem was that the people who ran the tulip markets changed all the futures contracts to options contracts temporarily, which was bound to muddle up the pricing. And maybe it mattered that short-selling in tulip futures had been made illegal.) 

In any case, the market peaked and crashed, and development of new tulip varieties slowed way down. I think this early-double or peony type of tulip is a Victorian creation. (And don't the flowers just look like it? A little loud, a little overconfident and Albert-Memorial.)

Double tulips, Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

**
At the moment I have a very clear and distinct idea that it's time for the first Eiscaffee of the season. This is cold strong coffee over vanilla ice cream with whipped cream on top. I don't indulge in too many of these in the course of the summer (really not), but now might be the time. A sunny park-bench among the flowers, a little strong coffee, and we will get through the rest of the Discours.

Actually, with the benefit of coffee and cream, I think I understand how it could be that, as Descartes says, clearness and distinctness are criteria for the truth of ideas. (How satisfactory it is to one's sense of order to get this straight. It's as good as cleaning out the broom closet.) The criteria do not make sense if the ideas we are talking about are what would now be called ontologically objective propositions--that is, if they are about external, material, measurable things. The proposition, "I am ten feet tall" might be very clear and distinct to me if I am a loony, but that doesn't make it true: the criteria don't apply to statements like this.

The criteria do make sense, however, if the ideas we are talking about are ontologically subjective propositions--propositions like "I am in pain," which are essentially about subjective states. When it is very clear and distinct to me that I am in pain, then it is certainly true that I am. If it's not so clear to me that I am in pain, then maybe it's not so true that I am. (When people have pains in phantom limbs, the subjective pain is real, even though the material, objectively measurable limb isn't.)

The kind of propositions Descartes is interested in are about cognition more than about feeling, but clarity is not irrelevant here either. If it's quite clear and distinct to you that you believe such-and-such, then it's quite true that you believe it (even if such-and-such in itself is not true). If it's not clear in your own mind what you believe, then perhaps it's not true that you believe anything. (And could a mathematical proposition that was not clear be satisfactorily provable and therefore established as true? Not.) 

Descartes takes subjective states seriously as a separate reality: mind is one thing, measurable material is quite another, and each of these is as real and important as the other. He's probably more interested in mind--that's where the math is, after all. We don't prove the Pythagorean theorem by objectively measuring a lot of triangles. But Descartes does admire empiricists: the part of the Discours that I am reading now goes rocketing off-topic into extravagant praise of William Harvey, who discovered how the blood circulates through the body.

In fact, D says he is going to devote the rest of his life to what we would now call biomedical research. This, he says, is the activity that would benefit the human race the most--because the mind is, although separate and different, so intimately dependent on the condition of the body that our best hope of making people wiser is to improve their health. 

So often we don't do what we mean to do, however. Descartes does not in fact devote the rest of his life to biomedical research. It's not so surprising that he doesn't, perhaps: he is a spectacularly good mathematician, but I think he is not by nature an empirical, data-drudge type like William Harvey. It's hard to imagine him spending a lifetime dissecting corpses and experimenting with fish hearts (over and over and over) as Harvey did.  

Part of the attraction of medical research may have been the hope that it would explain mind-body, subjective-objective connections, which D. knew were were a weak point in his theories. If mind, as he believed, is absolutely not material--if subjective reality is not part of the measurable material world--how could it be so intimately involved with the body? 

One of D's scientific correspondents, Elizabeth of Bohemia, pushes him hard on this point. (The daughter of the Protestant ex-King thrown out of Prague by Descartes' comrades-in-arms in 1620, she is now grown up and a competent mathematician and philosopher and behind-the-scenes mover in practical affairs.) Think of this and that sort of behavior, she says, giving examples. Wouldn't it be easier to account for these things by allowing the mind to be material? Why don't we go for the more economical explanation? 

Descartes, in response, bobs and weaves and evades. She pushes, again: Think about the passions, she says (the emotions, we would say now, not meaning quite the same thing). If we really understood what they are and what role they play in our lives, maybe some of these problems about human nature could be better addressed. He responds by writing a new book on this subject, but it is his last. (It doesn't look that interesting in the canned summaries, but who knows?) The next year he will be dead. 

This is just after the Thirty Years' War ends, at last. Elizabeth is busy with correspondence nudging her connections this way and that in the negotiations for the peace treaty. She is always in correspondence: advising the University of Leiden about hiring a mathematics professor, nudging the negotiators after the English Civil War and Commonwealth, when the Stuart monarchy is restored. (She and her siblings are the closest relatives the new English king has, after his regrettable brother.) Eventually she becomes Abbess of a Protestant convent in northern Germany, runs the surrounding territory, nurses it back to modest prosperity after the ravages of the war, and shelters a variety of radical religious refugees (heretic Calvinists who don't believe in private property, Quakers who don't believe in violence). 

What a general disaster Descartes' lifetime is. Climate change, famine, plague, civil and foreign war. The world loses something like 25% of its population. (I am speechless with amazement when I look at official estimates of twenty-first century climate-change costs that include only things like storm damage, reductions in agricultural output, and increased energy costs. They don't include the costs of people's increased desire to kill each other and smash institutions when they are under economic stress. Surely these costs are quite high?)

Descartes' disastrous lifetime is also a time of astonishing creativity in math and science--and in part, people are working so hard at these things because they are working on the basis of ill-founded hopes. They think that if we knew how to reason properly (math) and knew our facts (how do hearts work?), then things like the Thirty Years' War and the English Civil War wouldn't happen again. 

Thomas Hobbes, whom one does not usually think of as naive, believed that if we just pulled up our socks and tried, we could develop propositions about the optimal organization of society that would be as clearly true as theorems in geometry. So then, Hobbes thought, given this extension of geometry to politics, everyone would agree on political matters instead of trying to cut each other's throats because they disagreed. (But no, poor Hobbes. Better geometry has only given us more accurate artillery ranges.)

Elizabeth's brother Rupert--the one who was almost left behind as an infant in the flight from Prague--grows up to be a noted military commander, occasional African explorer and developer of the slave trade, English government official, inventor, scientist, and sometime artist (printmaker). (He was also said to be the fourth best tennis player in England. Where do people find the time for all this?) The subject of his best-known print is taken from a painting (probably) by the Spanish artist Ribera, supposed to represent the execution of John the Baptist. The John-the-Baptist iconography in the picture is about nil, however; at least in Rupert's version, the subject looks more like the sadness of generalized official killing. 

Prince Rupert of the Rhine, mezzotint (after Ribera): 
The Great Executioner.  Photo, Wiki Commons.

Rupert had considerably broader experience of cutting off heads than the Spanish painter did. The executioners in Ribera's paintings tend to be warty and grotesque; this one is a serious man, a realist. A soldier in hard times, perhaps. 

Rupert signs his own name on the length of the executioner's sword blade. If he can identify with anyone in the picture, it is not necessarily the saint. Though it is also noticeable that the saint's and the executioner's faces do not look as different here as they often do in the iconography. Rupert, who has been there, knows that the two are sometimes harder to tell apart--and maybe less different at bottom--than we sometimes imagine.

** 

Time to wrap it up and go home. One more stroll through the flower-fields. ..
This is Narcissus poeticus, I believe: the pheasant's-eye or poet's narcissus. 

Narcissi, Britzer Garten, April 2015. My photo.

The really nasty parts of the seventeenth century produce a lot of poetry addressed to flowers. In civil-war England it's delicate formal verse, in elevated language: Fair daffodils, we weep to see you haste away so soon. In Germany, which is worse devastated, the poetry is rougher stuff. 

There's a seventeenth century verse, apparently written in 1637 (the year of the tulip crash and the Discours) that describes the grim reaper Death with a sort of ferocious humor: He's whetting his knife today! It already cuts better!  (Heut wetzt er das Messer, Es schneidt schon viel besser.) One by one it lists the flowers that will fall: The noble narcissus, the jewel of the meadows; the lovely hyacinth, the Turkish lily, ... the sky-colored speedwell, the yellow and white tulips. 

The refrain is: Take care, little flower!

**

A relatively recent contribution to the debate about whether the tulip market was efficient is Earl Thompson (2007), "The tulipmania: Fact or artifact?" Public Choice 130 (1-2): 99-114. 

Some information on the history of tulip varieties: http://www.hortmag.com/plants/collectors-choice/tulips

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a useful entry on Elizabeth of Bohemia:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/elisabeth-bohemia/

The poem that begins Fair daffodils ...  is by Richard Lovelace.  The first version of the German verse, Es ist ein Schnitter, heisst der Tod, appeared in an anonymous broadsheet printed in 1638. (There are numerous versions.)

Dahme 3

In the Asphalt City and Along the Lake

Here it is the end of May (eek, no, it's June, and I still haven't posted this!), and the days are immense and bright. The birds are making a racket outside the windows at three-something in the morning, and when I came home from a concert the other night at a quarter to ten, you could still have read a book in the open street by natural light. At least if the print was big enough. 

In the winter I can see about to the end of the block. But now, from the study window, I can tell the evergreens from the broadleaf trees in Rehberge Park, four kilometers away; and beyond that I can see the blue-green folds of the plateau north of the city, maybe twenty kilometers out. The forest-leaves are thick and dark by now, the summer-shadow is under the trees. 

Already early in May, when I finished up the Berlin stretch of the Dahme, the leaves were getting thick down here, screening the water in the not-so-many places where you could get close to it.

Along the Dahme, Schmöckwitz, May 2015. My photo.

A little orientation is in order, perhaps. Here we are southeast of Berlin, looking north-west into the city. The water that goes wobbling off to the upper left in the photo below is the Long Lake, the Langer See, the stretch of the River Dahme that I have been walking along.  Off to the right, in the middle distance of the picture, goes the Seddinsee, a lake that is not part of the Dahme. The course of the river goes through the Zeuthener See, which is down in the lower left of the picture. The inhabited blob of land between the lakes, almost but not quite an island, is Schmöckwitz, an old fishing village which is now the last neighborhood in Berlin before we hit the Brandenburg border. (And that left-to-right strip of water that you can just see, high up on the right of the picture, is the Müggelsee; see Spree 10 post, last July.)

Schmöckwitz and surrounding lakes. Photo, Matthias Renner, Wiki Commons.

Well, the lakes have all been there for a long time, but the inhabitants of the shoreline come and go. Back in the early 1950s, the red-roofed establishment in the woods on the right of the Zeuthener See was  the "Ferienheim [vacation home] Bertolt Brecht" for forestry workers. The East Germans were keen on these sort of hostel-like holiday camps named after Communist culture heroes, where people could have vacations in supervised groups, doing organized outdoor activities. 

it's hard to imagine Brecht himself enjoying this sort of healthy outdoor groupism, however: 

     In der Asphaltstadt bin ich daheim. Von allem Anfang
     Versehen mit jedem Sterbsakrament:
     Mit Zeitungen. Und Tabak. Und Branntwein.
     Misstrauisch und faul und zufrieden am End. ['Vom armen B.B.']

     I'm at home in the asphalt city. From the start
     Furnished with every last rite:
     With newspapers. And tobacco. And brandy.
     Mistrustful and lazy and content at the end.

Can anyone see B.B. out there joining the morning calisthenics? Nah.

Still, the lakeside establishment was a nice enough place, and maybe it was a sign of hardening of the arteries in the East German system that by the end of the 1960s it wasn't available to ordinary workers any more. (Or did it became clear that forestry workers didn't especially want vacations in the forest?) The place was turned over to the leaders of the umbrella organization for East German unions, who used it as a conference center. 

Then a Japanese private university bought it in the early 90s, at a time when the Japanese were still buying lots of things. Ex-communist vacation spots in eastern Europe, floundering small colleges in the US.  Loretto Heights, the Catholic women's college in Denver that planted its red-sandstone Romanesque up on the highest point in the city, was bought out by the same Japanese university a little earlier, the year the Berlin Wall fell. 

What shall we make of this, that these iron hierarchical organizations, the Church and the Party, have faded away from the lakeshore and the heights--and been replaced by establishments like the one in Denver that offers TOEFL prep courses and unaccredited business degrees to almost anyone who can write a check? People's ideas of what it takes to make your way in a difficult world have changed. 

**
There's a lot of private property and fencing down here on this stretch of the Dahme; we're almost out of the city, and public life is fading out.  But every now and then you can get back to the water: here's a bit of open beach along the river.

Along the Dahme, Schmöckwitz, May 2015. My photo.

It's getting to be sailing weather and there are a lot of boats out of winter storage, at their moorings, ready to go:

Along the Zeuthener See, May 2015. My photo.

Now and then there's even one out on the water, though not many on this chilly weekday.

On the Zeuthener See, May 2015. My photo.

There's a public footpath along the water for a little way, which dead-ends at this lovely creampuff of a neo-rococo villa, built around 1910 by the owner of what was then the biggest department store in Berlin, as a gift for his fiancee.

Hertzog Villa, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

The lakes have been here for a long time and the inhabitants of the shoreline have come and gone. For a while in Cold War days the villa was the residence of the Soviet ambassador. Later the Stasi (E. German secret police) used it as a guesthouse. After reunification the villa was picked up by the Dussmann Group, which put a lot of money into renovations (the Stasi not being known for its historically-sensitive aesthetics). 

Dussmann is a funny outfit: one of these German-based, internationally active, highly competent family firms with fingers in diverse pies. They own the big serious book and music store in Berlin (go-to place for classical music scores, for example: you can try out the scores on the piano in the store before buying), but they're mostly a service-contracting firm. If your company--in Germany or eastern Europe or China or Vietnam or the Persian Gulf--needs catering or cleaning or security or plumbing/ heating /electricity technical services, or in-house child care, Dussmann supplies it. They also run a lot of assisted living/ nursing home establishments in Germany. They use the villa on the Zeuthener See for meetings and events and some corporate training. 

They seem to be doing quite well financially, though I'm not sure that your typical intro business course would say that child care, security services, plumbing, and classical music scores were a strategically well-integrated portfolio. 

I walk on south, down along the Zeuthener See more or less, but it's hard to stay by the water. Eventually I give up and cut across through a patch of woods, the Zeuthener Heath. If I can't see the water, at least I'll see something of Zeuthen, a little Brandenburg town that is not, so far as I know, distinguished for much besides having an S-Bahn station.  

Zeuthener Heide, May 2015. My photo.

The woods are full of springtime light. Let's see, we come out of the trees by the discount grocery, and then we should turn south .... Agh, the street I have got myself on is going altogether the wrong way, I missed a turn somewhere. This happens to me so often, and on perfectly straightforward routes like this one. But if I go back to the intersection with the big spring-bulb bed, then I should be able to get myself back on track:

Intersection of Schillerstrasse and Schulstrasse, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Ah, this is not bad at all. Here are chestnuts coming into bloom along Schulstrasse (School Street), clusters of white candles high in the air, lighting up the street.  Here are thick stretches of forget-me-nots in bloom around my ankles.

Forget-me-nots, Schulstrasse, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Then this big block of a building coming up must be the school that School Street is named for. It will be interesting to see whom the school itself is named for, out in this piece of the old-East quasi-countryside. Schools here are mostly named for culture-heroes--scientists and artists and the like--unlike the US, where public schools, at least when I was a child, tended to be named for geographic locations (Central, West), or local politicians whom no one could remember, or a few uncontested national heroes like Lincoln and Washington and Franklin. In our neighborhood in Berlin, the grade school across the river is named for Miriam Makeba, the South African singer. The neighborhood high school is named for Adolf Menzel, the painter of Prussian historical scenes and life in mid-nineteenth-century Berlin (construction, railroads, beer gardens):

Adolf Menzel, In the Beer Garden. Photo, Wiki Commons. 

So who is the culture hero down in these parts? The older part of the building looks late-20s-early-30s: dark brick with geometric texturing and figures of healthy youth in short pants, looking like types who would have enjoyed group activities at the Ferienheim Bertolt Brecht down the river. (Ah, it's not fair to snipe at such things; just because I don't like healthy group activities--"organized whee," in Robertson Davies' immortal phrase--that doesn't mean they're all bad ...)

Paul-Dessau-Gesamtschule, Zeuthen. May, 2015, my photo.

So--slow down, peer, cross street--who is this school named for?  Good Lord, it's Archangel's cousin Paul Dessau. Distant cousin, from the Communist branch of the family. The man who wrote somewhat forgettable music for Brecht's plays in the 1940s and 50s, after Brecht and Weill had split up. 

They had all fled to America in the Nazi-time, Brecht and Weill and Dessau--and then the question comes, what do you do afterward, when it's possible to go home, and when home is a bombed-out mess with an uncertain future? Weill stayed in the US and wrote songs for Broadway musicals and died at fifty. Brecht and Dessau went back to East Berlin with the intention of helping to build a democratic socialist society, and lived long enough to see some dubious results. And all this probably has nothing whatever to do with the quality of the music. How Weill's music lights up the words of the songs and makes them fly-- and Dessau's doesn't, alas. (One of the Brecht-Weill songs was on the Doors' first album in the 1960s, along with "Light My Fire," and with all due respect I find it hard to imagine a Paul Dessau song having such an after-life.)   

I remember the first time I saw the Threepenny Opera, in a high-school production in rural Germany to which the Goethe-Institut hauled us off one night when I was there to learn German in the 1970s. Mack the Knife was played by a visiting non-German teacher with a bad accent, and the props tended to fall over. But oh, the songs flew, and people sang bits of them in the Goethe-Institut hallways afterward (und ein Schiff mit acht Segeln, und mit fünfzig Kanonen ...), and the live-wire types in the class took names from the play. Our Mack the Knife was a Turkish dentist named Attila. 

I had actually heard the Brecht-Dessau songs earlier, but they didn't make any impression. In my last year in college in Denver, the university theater department put on a production of A Man's a Man, with the music by Dessau. Jim, who lived downstairs from my roommate and me, had a part in the play and was bellowing the songs on the stairways and in the kitchen under ours for months. But I don't really remember the songs, just the bellowing. He was a vigorous solid young man, Jim was, and he did thunder on the flimsy floors and stairways of the building. (Ach, how terribly they build in the US, especially in the West, all plywood held together with little staples. A strong young man running down the stairs and bellowing A man's a man will shake the building.)

Farther down the street, I pass the Zeuthen fire department, which has treated their building to a mural:

Feuerwehr, Zeuthen, May 2015. My photo.

Handsomely done, fire department.

It isn't far now to the S-Bahn station, which is a fairly handsome place also. A row of alternating pink- and white-flowering trees marches pleasantly beside the tracks. But this is all too far out in the country for me--this is Brandenburg, it's time to get back to the Asphaltstadt--though surely Berlin is the greenest Asphaltstadt in the world?.

London Interlude

London River

I'm behindhand with posts. Three international trips in six weeks, lots to do, not always friendly circumstances. (Six inches of snow in Denver in mid-May, flooding that closed the highway I needed to use, etc. etc.--no walking by the water here, the river wanted to eat you alive.) But I am finally back in Berlin and should have a couple of quiet months here now.

**

I had one short job to do in London in mid-April and another at the end of the month. So, over the Channel we go, in mid-month, and I seem to have fallen asleep somewhere over the Continent--but then I look down and we're headed straight up the Thames Estuary.

This is Heathrow, of course we're in a holding pattern, says the Lufthansa pilot, in a tone of resigned disapproval (the same tone in which the Lufthansa pilot says, This is Shanghai, of course we won't have an on-time departure). So we tilt and circle, and once or twice I can see a densely-bridged stretch of the river that must be in central London, though we're still fairly high up and the details are hazy.

Thames, Tower Bridge, London. Photo, Daniel J. Maxwell, Wiki Commons.

The underground train from the airport into central London is packed; I am squashed in beside a heavily perfumed pair of Royal Jordanian crew members. How beautiful they are, a man and a woman with faces like Achaemenid Persian sculptures in dark gold; they are reading the Daily Mirror in a desultory way, passing the paper back and forth. Aaagh, the British tabloid press. The headline on the page that laps over toward me is, "Perv Videos, Sex with Dog." (There'll always be an England, but is this a good thing?)

It's more than forty years now since the first time I was in London. Hitchhiked in from the West Country with a friend, then. Somewhere after the fruit-juice delivery man in Somerset, somewhere after the wait in a damp wind near Stonehenge, we picked up a long ride with a race-car driver. So we got across the south of England fast and bagged the last beds at the Bloomsbury YWCA, which no longer exists. And good riddance, in a sense: mein Gott, how that place smelled, you had to hold your breath in some parts of the building so as not to be overcome with nausea. I don't know where the smell came from; it wasn't the cooking, which took a strong stomach but had a different smell. Baked beans and chopped-up spaghetti for breakfast, horrible stuff. 

This was also the London where you could get wonderful theater seats for half a pound. I saw (twice) a young Ian McKellen as Hamlet (and how old McKellen is now, playing Gandalf in all those hobbit movies, how can so much time have passed?). The Hamlet was an almost uncut production that meant a mad run afterward to the Y, to make it in before the iron-hard curfew. I learned how to push in crowds, for the first time in my life (no real experience with such things in Colorado). This was probably as good for me as seeing a classy production of Hamlet.

The friend had to go back to the US before I did, and I stayed in the Y for another week (gasp, retch). I shared the room with Yorkshire shopgirls who might have been speaking Uzbek, for all I could understand of their talk. I sat in Russell Square on gray days, reading Henry James and eating ripe blackberries by the boxful, sharing space with the mad old women who fed the birds. 

I took the boats up and down the river. Down, somewhere east of Tower Bridge; up, all the way to Hampton Court and back on a perfect September day, through the boaty suburbs where people were getting home from work on a Friday evening and getting out on the river. Lawns that ran down to the water, with cream teas on the lawns. Little sailboats with red sails on the river. Messing about in boats. It seemed incredibly wonderful.

The Thames at Richmond, 1895. Wiki Commons.

Archangel and I were away from London for a long time after the 1970s. We finally came back in the early 90s and stayed with a friend in Richmond. The friend, who used to work on things like famine relief in Cambodia, was working for a big software firm by then. Everything had changed, the city had washed its face and had big money, and there were homeless young people sleeping on the sidewalks everywhere. 

**

How deep the London underground is, how complicated the passages from platform to platform, down little winding corridors lined with what looks like cracked bathroom tile. (How unlike Berlin--our neighborhood underground line is really only just underground: if you're at the station entrance and hear the train coming into the station, you can take a flying leap down the stairs and catch it--at least, you can do this if you're still young enough to take flying leaps, which I am not.) Here in London, the escalators go on forever--oh, I know it's not as deep as the metro in Moscow or St. Petersburg, but I still feel a bit like a Jules Verne character in Journey to the Center of the Earth, as I head for the surface again. 

Up up up we go on the escalators into central London, past endless theater posters. (Germany does not have this brilliant proliferation of private-sector theater.)  Out of the underground, into the maze of little medieval streets. Gate Street, Remnant Street. Two derelicts are arguing drunkenly at the turn of Gate Street.  I'm jollier than you are. You are not. I'm jollier. No I am ... See, I made you laugh! I'm jollier than you are!

Noise, crowds, auto exhaust. The streets going down toward LSE, where I have a long day of meetings tomorrow, are being torn to pieces; the sidewalks are ripped up, the facades are covered with scaffolding. (Part of this, I discover later, is work following an underground electrical fire early in April that was fed by a gas leak and burned under the street for two days, sending flames shooting up from the manholes.)

It's a lovely piece of the city all the same, there are always sweet, still places. This is the north side of Lincoln's Inn Fields; I am being put up by my excellent hosts on the west side, somewhere among the deconstruction.

Lincoln's Inn Fields. My photo, April 2015.

There's nothing on my schedule this evening, and the spring evenings are long. Time to walk by the water. 

It isn't far to the river: I bumble through LSE, through the tiny lanes and steps, to the Strand. The street layout here comes from a world not only long before cars but even before horse-carriages, a world with no need for space in which to move large wheeled objects rapidly. The Strand is a fairly big street, but two of the great baroque churches that dot this part of the city, the so-called island churches of St.-Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, sit slap in the middle of the street, with the traffic dividing around them as best it can. 

The late afternoon has turned dark, with cloud off the sea. The street is shadowed and seems full of sound instead of light; they're change-ringing at St. Clement's, with a tremendous peal that multiplies itself in the tight-packed city, echoing from stone to stone.

     Oranges and lemons, 
     Say the bells of St. Clement's.

     You owe me five farthings,
     Say the bells of St. Martin's.

How wonderful they are, the Wren churches. I love the names: St. Mary-le-Bow, St. Lawrence Jewry, St. Peter Upon Cornhill, St. Martin Within Ludgate. I love the Portland stone: that white-gray limestone from which big things in London are built: the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the Bank of England, the National Gallery, and this string of pale, chaste, Anglican-Baroque churches in the City and Westminster.  Wren built more than fifty churches here, in the desolation after the Great Fire. The exteriors must all have been black as sin in the days of coal fires, but they've been cleaned up since--and what a wonderful color the Portland stone is, what shall we call this color? Subtly different from my other favorite limestone city, Chicago, built of Blue Bedford stone from the Indiana quarries. This is cream-tea color, perhaps.

Looking down Fleet Street toward St. Clement Danes. Photo, Victor Grigas, Wiki Commons.

The dragon on the column in the picture above is one of about a dozen that guard the entrances to the City. The dragons aren't old, they're modern fantasy layered into the old city. The dragon in Fleet Street, in the picture above, is a late-Victorian creation (1880), and most of the boundary dragons date from the 1960s. The pair on Victoria Embankment, which I pass on my way downriver, are the oldest, from the mid-nineteenth century; they used to be decorations on the Coal Exchange building, over toward the Tower, where the massive coal shipments that kept the city heated and powered and lethally filthy were bought and sold and taxed. (The dragons were saved and moved over to the Embankment in the 1960s, when the Coal Exchange was torn down to widen the street. The London coal business was perhaps by then not what it used to be, after a murderous smog in the early fifties killed over four thousand people in a few days, and coal fires were subsequently restricted.) 

Boundary dragon, Victoria Embankment. My photo, April 2015.

The city tax on coal funded the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire in 1666, including the building of St. Paul's and the other Wren churches. The coal tax also funded the building of the Thames Embankment in the nineteenth century, which replaced marshy ground with the stone-foundation bank that I am strolling along at the moment.

Actually I am on the Thames Path, which opened in 1996: 184 miles of footpath from the river's source in the Cotswolds down to Greenwich. (Thank you, National Trails.) It's nice to see pedestrianism coming back; I don't know why our parents' generation was so fixated on cars, so determined to regard landscapes as drive-through experiences. 

The generation before them still walked. Often (and especially when I am back in England) I think of two old men I met at the beginning of the 1970s. One was a historian who had been a Rhodes scholar in the mid-1920s, a rural Kansas boy doing a year or two at Oxford that opened up the world for him. In the summer he and a couple of friends took a boat across the Channel and walked from the Low Countries to Italy. Along the roads that hardly had cars on them yet; just horses and wagons, summer dust, winding ways through the fields and towns. Roads still lined with trees to give shade to the travelers on foot or on horseback. 

Lost worlds. The trees are gone along the highways, cut down to widen the roads and reduce the number of objects against which out-of-control cars can crash. (There are still roads like this here and there, though, espeically in central Europe: if you're walking across the country, through the woods and fields in Brandenburg, or Meck-Pomm or any number of places, you can tell when you're coming to a road, because you can see a double line of trees on some relatively high stretch of ground, where the road would not be too muddy.) 

Sycamore allee near Kröpelin (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). Photo by C. Pagenkopf, Wiki Commons.

The other old man I think of was someone I met in Scotland, when he was having a look over the territory where he used to go walking on holidays. One more look, he said, before he went into hospital for a risky operation. 

He was full of memories, of course--and what were the memories that stuck with people like this, the things they would want to tell to a young person, chance-met or slight acquaintance?

It was all about World War I. They had lived through World War II as well, but it mattered less, it left less trace. You get in a rush later, your life leaves less impression on you. I remember the historian, who was still a boy during the first war, talking about seeing military parades in his little town in Kansas (parades that said, look what we're sending to Europe!). One parade included a primitive tank that got stuck in the pertinacious Kansas mud and had to be pulled out by horses. 

The great memory for the hiker in Scotland was of being a very junior British diplomat at the Versailles peace conference. Eager, frustrated, lost, exhilarated---what is so enthralling as to have a hand in making bad history? 

What would we talk about in twenty years, if some passing young person was inclined to listen? I have no idea. I met an old Frenchwoman on a long flight in the 70s, who told me about walking with her mother in the streets of a Paris suburb during the First World War, hearing the guns when the Germans were close. Her mother had a long lilac-colored dress that brushed the gravel path; brush, brush went the dress on the gravel in the September afternoon, and crump went the artillery. Perhaps the Germans would be in the city soom, perhaps everything would change; perhaps not. Brush brush. Crump. 

**

Well, things do change. The wars are past, for the time being. There's been a lot of building in London since the 70s, or even the 90s, and not everyone likes it. There was considerable opposition to the glassy tower here (by Renzo Piano), which was finished in 2012 and is popularly known as "the Shard." It's the tallest building in Europe, and it was being plunked down in what had stayed a pretty low-rise city for a long time. So I understand the hesitations about it, but what a lovely thing it is. Look how it shines in the clouded sea-light, how it changes, moment to moment, as the day dwindles into a gray April twilight.

Blackfriars Bridge and the Shard. My photo, April 2015.

I'm not sure it has turned out to be a very successful investment project; the office floors were slow to find occupants. But then, the state of Qatar owns a majority share of the building (it houses al-Jazeera's biggest operation outside Qatar), and presumably the state is in the investment for the long term.

**

The path is on the other side of the river from the Shard, in the financial district proper. I have not seen so many men in dark suits and ties--or such overwhelmingly male gatherings--since I do not know when. It's about half past five, and the young bankers and lawyers are having their afternoon pints, oblivious to the beginnings of a fine rain. A few of them are startlingly, incapably drunk; most not. 

Pub along the Thames. My photo, April 2015.

Relative to Berlin, that swampy tabletop, London is a hilly place: you go up from the river, up little steep streets or stairs. I can see Tower Bridge up ahead, which was about as far as I meant to go, and this rather secretive-looking set of steps going off to the left is tempting as a turnaround place. Where will this go? To one of the sweet places in the city.

The street sign says I am going up St. Dunstan's Hill, presumably there is a St. Dunstan's church somewhere up here--and so there is.  

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

What a great builder Christopher Wren was. This tower and needle-spire are his, added to the medieval church when it was patched up in the 1690s, after the Great Fire. The tower and spire still stood when all the rest of the church had to be taken down and rebuilt from the ground up in the eighteen-teens, because the roof was too heavy for the supporting walls. The walls had stood for a long time, but the roof had pushed them so far out of true that it was only a matter of time until they collapsed. 

The tower and spire still stood when most of the church was destroyed by a bomb hit in the 1940s. The interior, open to the sky, has been turned into a garden: there is a flowering cherry, a few palm trees, a green lawn, a lot of quiet in the April twilight.

St. Dunstan-in-the-East. My photo, April 2015.

But it's time to go back to drunken-banker-world and grab an early supper, and get back to the hotel to check through the presentation for tomorrow morning. So, let's take a more inland route, along Eastcheap, and see what the City looks like these days.

Lots of newer buildings, I haven't been here for an age. The building popularly called the Gherkin (by Norman Foster) is a bit intrusive but lively. --A certain penny finally drops as I catch glimpses of this building down various streets. "Gherkin" (British for pickling cucumber) always seemed an odd word to me--somehow it doesn't look English. It finally dawns: the German word for cucumbers is Gurken. The word comes from German through Dutch to English. Duh.

The Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) and St Andrew Undershaft Church.
Photo, Carlos Delgado, Wiki commons.

The church in front of the Gherkin has stood here looking like this, against various backgrounds, since the sixteenth century; it's one of the very few to have survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz. 

Other things have not survived. The reason that a new building like the Gherkin could be put here is that the building previously on the site, the Baltic Exchange, was badly damaged in a terrorist attack (Provisional IRA) in 1992, and after some consideration was deemed beyond rescue and torn down.

The Baltic Exchange as an institution (not building) still exists: it's an association of some six hundred companies that control a good deal of the shipping in the world. The job of the association itself is to provide freight market prices and shipping-cost indices that are used to set rates and settle freight derivative contracts around the world. All this information used to be exchanged on a trading floor, but these days it's on a screen on your desk, if you're in that business, so the Exchange doesn't need the building. 

London always had big business with the Baltic. In medieval and Renaissance London there was a substantial settlement of Hansa merchants--that is, merchants from the semi-independent cities along the North Sea and Baltic coasts and the rivers that emptied into those seas; merchants who handled the trade in grain and furs and timber and amber, all the stuff that came and went in North-world, so different from the Mediterranean trade in oil and wine and spices.  

The Baltic Exchange was founded in the mid-eighteenth century--but not, as it happens, by people from North-world.  By Greeks, rather--later added to by members of the so-called Chian diaspora, people who fled from the island of Chios after the 1822 massacre by the Turks. (Population of Chios before the event, 100,000-120,000; population after the event, maybe 20,000. Some were killed, some sold into slavery, some fled, never to return.)

The Chians (partly Greek, partly Genoese) were merchants from way back, and at the beginning of the nineteenth century the successful merchant families had been making out like bandits, moving Ukrainian grain to Western Europe, and western manufactured goods back the other way. Those who weren't at home during the massacre, or managed to get away, moved out to cities where they had long had business: Odessa, Alexandria, Trieste, Marseilles, London. 

**

I wonder how often the big prestige projects, like the Gherkin and the Shard, actually make money--or rather, for whom they make money. Swiss Re used to own the Gherkin, and unloaded it early in 2007 for about twice what they paid for it. The buyers were a British investment firm and a German property company, IVG Immobilien. Eventually the new owners couldn't meet their mortgage payments, and the property went into receivership about a year ago. IVG is seeking compensation from some former managers who were responsible for the possibly excessive price of the deal; I don't know whether they've had any luck. [http://www.propertymall.com/property-news/article/34249-IVG-seeks-compensation-from-former-managers-over-Gherkin-deal] The building was sold about six months ago to the Safra Group. The Safras are billionaire Brazilian bankers with origins in Syria and Beirut; they got their start in banking under the Ottoman Empire, by financing trade between Aleppo, Alexandria, and Istanbul--picking up some of the business that used to belong the scattered Chians, perhaps? I don't know.) 

How many diasporas have scattered people into London over the years. The Chians in the early nineteenth century, Poles and Italians in political troubles in their home countries in the middle of the century, Central Europeans fleeing the Nazis in the 1930s and early 1940s, among many others. And what becomes of people, in these translations from one culture to another ...? What sort of Londoners do they all make?

On the way back to my hotel I pass another Wren church.

St. Bride's, 19th century engraving, Wiki Commons.

This is St. Bride's, the Fleet Street church, with many famous parishioners, ranging from John Milton to that offshoot of the Central European diaspora, Sir Clement Freud: British celebrity chef, member of Parliament, television personality, grandson of Sigmund Freud (who fled from Vienna to London in 1938).

**

Long work day the next day, and then just time for a shorter stroll upriver early the following morning, before I head back to Berlin. (It would have been a somewhat longer stroll if I had not been stopped along the Embankment by the police, who claimed to believe I was engaging in some kind of illicit currency transaction with the young Asian visitor whom in fact I was helping to get a picture of himself in front of the London Eye. I don't even know what kind of illicit currency transactions you can have in London--there isn't a black market in pounds, is there?)  It's a beautiful, beautiful April morning, the Portland stone is white in the spring sun, and the river is full of traffic.

On the Thames, looking toward Whitehall and Charing Cross station. My photo, April 2015.

I go as far as Lambeth Palace (the Archbp of Canterbury's London residence), and cut back through the Archbishop's Park (how well the English do gardens):

Archbishop's Park, Lambeth. My photo, April 2015.

Then back over Westminster Bridge, which is starting to fill up with tour groups. What did Wordsworth, that poet of lakes and mountains, think was the most beautiful view in the world?  The one from Westminster Bridge.

    Earth has not anything to show more fair:
    Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
    A sight so touching in its majesty:
    This City now doth, like a garment, wear

    The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
    Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
    Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
    All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

The bridge is packed with operators of shell games and their eager victims.

Then back to the hotel through Whitehall Gardens (ach, I do love English gardens, they're so lush with flowers):

Primroses in Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

Whitehall Gardens. My photo, April 2015.

I pick up my bag and take the underground back from Holborn to Heathrow. In the Holborn station there is a digital screen on the wall facing the platform, which shows a weather forecast sponsored by the Tate. In Berlin, which is literal-minded, the weather forecasts provided on public transit show a sunshine/cloud icon and a predicted temperature. Here the screen says something like, A warm golden glow: the forecast today resembles Dante Gabriel Rosetti's "Woman in Yellow." And the screen shows the Rosetti watercolor from the Tate, which is indeed like a glow of sunshine in the underground. When I am back a few weeks later, on a day with heavy rain forecast, it says, "Pull out your waterproof jacket, you're going to need it! This afternoon's forecast resembles The Deluge, by J.M.W. Turner." And there is a reproduction of the Turner painting on the screen.