Grunewald lakes 1

Glacial Channel to the Greenwood

Late February. The winter rain patters on the windows all night, sometimes soft, sometimes hard; and the wind kicks and moans against the building. The winter is getting old, and you can feel the natural world -- the whole out-there, the whole not-us --stirring in its sleep. It isn't nice outdoors. 

It's not that portions of your anatomy would freeze off quickly if exposed; the temperature hovers around freezing. But the wet and the wind--the rawness of the air, the occasional furious ice-pellet assaults--are not inviting. 

Still. The winter aconite is in buttery bloom in Tiergarten; the witch-hazel and the snowdrops are in bloom. The daffodils are up, cautiously. The light's been turned up to normal levels in the sky, but the days are mostly clouded and weepy.

So we aren't going on any big woodland ventures just now, but we are going out along the water again. The idea is to work along a couple of tunnel valleys in western Berlin--mostly in the city, in reach of cafes if warm-up stops are needed. 

Tunnel valleys are glacial-landscape features, long narrow valleys scooped out by meltwater under the ice at the edge of the continental ice sheets. They're often full of water--the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, for example, are tunnel valleys. Here in western Berlin there are a couple of long shallow scoops of lake and fen--the Grunewaldseenketten, the Big Greenwood Lake Chain and the Little Greenwood Lake Chain and a very little side-tributary--that run roughly southwest-northeast on the city side of the Havel. 

So: Suppose you started at the Brandenburg Gate and took the big street that runs west from there, through Tiergarten, through the Charlottenburg Gate (with Friedrich I and Sophie Charlotte watching the traffic in baroque splendor under their anti-pigeon netting), then on west to the highway and Ringbahn that demarcate Inner from Outer Berlin. (East of the Brandenburger Tor the street is Unter den Linden; but then once you get through the gate you get thrown into the violently political street-naming of more modern times. In Tiergarten the street is called the Street of the 17th of June, for the East German workers' uprising in 1953. (I can remember banners on the Charlottenburg Gate advertising an outdoor Christmas concert, saying: It's Christmas on the 17th of June!) Further west it becomes Bismarckstrasse and then Kaiserdamm and then Heerstrasse (army street), commemorating the aggressive new German empire of the late nineteenth century as a joint work of Bismarck and the army. The street-name flavor is a little rancid here; but I think if you get far enough out, into Brandenburg, the street abandons political statement again and becomes the Hamburger Chaussee.)

If you looked left just before you got to the Ringbahn (and if you were high enough up), you would see the Lietzensee, the northeast-most component of the lake chain. Further north, the tunnel valley fades out in soggy spots toward the Spree, which is maybe a mile and a half away.

Lietzensee (north half), from Funkturm. Photo, ©  A. Savin, Wiki Commons.

Charlottenburg--before Sophie Charlotte planted herself here and before Friedrich renamed the place for her--was called Lietzow; and oh, it's been here, as a settlement, a long long time. There were people living here in the Stone Age, there was a substantial settlement in the Bronze Age--a bit north of the lake, I think, closer to the Spree. 

As someone who grew up in a trash-it-and-move-on culture, I'm bemused by these places where the generations have piled on top of each other for millennia, doing on-site fix-ups of whatever the previous generations trashed. Religious wars and real-estate developers and the like come roaring through like rivers in spate, and then the city patches itself up and limps along down the same old streets. 

**

The "Lietz-" root in names like Lietzow and Lietzensee comes from a Slavic word meaning marsh or puddle. (So typical of Berlin-area place names, which are likely to be traceable to words meaning mud, swamp, drizzle, and other dank February phenomena.) The lake is a little below street level here, not much. We're at the north end of the valley, where it's shallow.  

North end of Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

Actually, although there have been people out here near the Lietzensee for a long time, there haven't been many people until comparatively recently. In the 1820s a General von Witzleben, the Prussian Minister of War, acquired land here and tidied it up, turning this west side of the lake from swampy forest into park.  --Ah, these are funny people, these military families in eastern Germany. This particular General von Witzleben was the son and brother of Prussian generals, the father and father-in-law of Prussian generals, and also a violinist of considerable distinction. Rossini, who had no great need to flatter Prussian generals, told him it was a shame he was a soldier, he could have done something serious as a musician.

Music is a bigger part of life here than in many places, I think. (Do any distinguished-violinist generals come to mind from early nineteenth-century US history? Nah.) When German political candidates are interviewed during a big election campaign, and the interviewers have got past the policy questions about how to deal with shaky banks or Vladimir Putin or imperfectly integrated immigrants (or, for that matter, imperfectly integrated locals)--when the interviewers turn to questions that are supposed to tell us what the candidate is like as a person, they ask things like, "Mozart or Wagner?" (We may amuse ourselves--or perhaps not--by imagining the likely responses of US presidential candidates to this question.)

Because music, here, is thought to be an important way of knowing, musicians get more opportunities to raise their voices in public matters. Kurt Masur is said to have been influential in keeping the downfall of the East German regime peaceful in 1989, for example. And you're a bit more likely here than elsewhere to hear a professional musician holding forth about current issues on the talk shows along with the journalists and politicians. (My favorite talk-show example was a discussion of bankruptcy law several years ago, where the musician of choice was a guy who did quasi-US-style country music. --You know, debt themes: they repossessed my pickup, they repossessed my dog, etc.)

It's also noticeable how much more intensely people listen at classical concerts here than in much of the US. When the music is going on at the Philharmonie, people do not cough or read their programs (Do you even need a program? Surely you know the music!) or shift in their seats. They listen, with an intensity that communicates itself like a smell, like fear, like silent laughter. You can feel people following the development of the themes in a string quartet; you can feel, like silent warmth or chill in the air, the general approval or disapproval of the way the performers are treating particular passages. 

A German friend says, of this quasi-religious communal intensity, "Oh, that's just the Philharmonie. That's the old West Berlin Bürgertum, the old traditions. Some of those people still have their Hausmusik." Home concerts, the family string quartet. "But it's dying out."  

Not dead yet, however. I was at the Philharmonie on a weekend afternoon several years ago, for a kind of open house at which multiple chamber ensembles, mostly ad hoc, mostly members of the Berlin Philharmonic, were playing. You could wander around between the ensembles, and the wandering was sometimes a bit chaotic. The woman sitting ahead of me to listen to the Philharmonic's string trio was fed up with the event. I heard her say to the friend next to her, "I wouldn't have come if I had known it was going to be this way. We could have done as well as this making music ourselves at home."  Well, perhaps. 

She was--oh, of a certain type, fifty-five-ish, with expensively tended hair and good pearls and well-polished disapproval skills. One imagined a family villa out in Grunewald or Dahlem--in the Nobelviertel, the noble quarters, as one says here. I wouldn't have wanted her to turn her critical scrutiny on me. (It would make me think about how long it's been since I got a haircut. Lack of self-discipline! Pull yourself together! the villa owner would say. But getting haircuts is so boring, I would whine. It seems like such a waste of time! No, no, says the villa owner. Ordnung muss sein. Pull yourself together!)

We aren't quite out to the Nobelviertel yet, though we will be when we get farther along the valley. We're still in Charlottenburg, which is not nobel, but is in its best parts quite vornehm--like these apartments at the south end of Lietzensee, by Dernburgplatz with its pollarded plane trees and its long cascade leading down through a garden to the water.

Dernburgplatz. February 2016, my photo.

Ah, this is very handsome stuff, I like this. Vornehm is "noble" or "courtly" in the dictionary, but at least in real-estate-speak it's a little step down from nobel. It's different from "luxurious," too: it's cultured high-bourgeois. (A Luxuswohnung could possibly be crass; a vornehme Wohnung had better not be.)  

When General von Witzleben cleared the forest and swamp out here on the west edge of Charlottenburg in the 1820s, he built a big house on the western shore of the Lietzensee. Probably quite nobel; but (unlike some more recent property owners in the area) he seems to have been a good sport about giving the public access to the park, including the little swimming beach he put in along the water. He wanted to put an artificial island in the lake, too: the water wasn't deep, just a couple of meters, so it shouldn't have been hard to build up from the lake-bed to the water's surface. But it wouldn't build up: the material sank into the bottomless mud of this glacial marshland, almost without trace. 

So, no island; and presently no general--he died youngish, mid-50s, after a long illness--and no house; the family sold it as soon as he was dead, and at some point it vanishes from the historical scene. Not much of anyone else built out here along the lake until around around 1900, and meanwhile--for a while--the public got some enjoyment out of the park and the beach.

It didn't last, though. (We do get in so much trouble when we start messing with the water.) By the end of the nineteenth century the lake had almost completely silted up, and what good is a swimming-beach when the water is only halfway up to your knees?  Maybe the island-material was partly at fault? Or the runoff of soil from the slowly encroaching city, or the reeds, which had almost entirely taken over the lake by the end of the century?

By then Berlin was booming, and the better addresses had been drifting west for a good while, out along Kurfürstendamm and Kantstrasse (which in those days dead-ended somewhat short of the lake). So it was worth someone's while to clean up the area and start building something vornehm for the new industrialists and upper civil servants and the like who made up the westward drift. 

The land around Lietzensee was acquired by a real estate developer named Werner Eichmann, head of an outfit called the Witzleben Land Co. (Nothing to do with the general, I think, but--such a respectable name! Very vornehm!) The official who approved Eichmann's development plans (in those days, the Polizeipräsident) cut the plans back to leave a big chunk of public park on the west side. (Sound man: this is kind of thing that gave the Prussian civil service a good reputation.)

Eichmann did pretty well with the development, even on the reduced scale forced by the city authorities. He built himself a house here on the east side of the lake. (Too bad about the weather in this photo; the house doesn't really look so Draculoid when the sun is shining.) 

Haus See-Eck on Lietzensee, February 2016. My photo.

The idea was that Eichmann and his family would live on the best floor and sell off or rent the other floors to other wealthy folks, thus financing Eichmann's retirement. But a single floor in this place is really big, and (how very Berlin!) Eichmann overestimated the demand for very expensive housing and had trouble moving the properties. (If you look at real-estate websites now, you see more million-dollar apartments under construction here than the city is likely to absorb with any speed. The folks in our not-at-all-vornehm neighborhood have been pointing and snickering at a local example that advertises Luxus! on the fences around the construction site and is said to be poorly designed. But who knows? Maybe they will find buyers.) Eichmann had to cut up the other floors of his place into smaller apartments. His great-great-grandson runs a handsome-looking little private hotel on the floor that the developer kept for his family ...

Eichmann's company had the lake dredged, to make it a proper lake again and enhance the property values. And we do get in such trouble when we start messing with the water. All these lakes in the northern part of the Grunewald chain have had water quality problems. They're smallish, shallow lakes and  often don't have clear flow-throughs. They fill with rainwater and with seepage from the surrounding land, and some of the water seeps out again vaguely; but a lot of it just sits there heading for eutrophication--the problem of excess algae and plants in the water, sucking up all the oxygen as they decay, killing whatever fish are left in the shallows. 

The water-quality problems aren't helped by runoff from the city, which brings additional undesirable substances into the water. (In the US we tend to think of the runoff problem as being mainly lawn fertilizer and weedkiller, but Berlin is not lawn country. I remember seeing a sign somewhere along the water hereabouts (Germans love technical information, the city is slathered with technical information) saying that the worst sources of runoff pollution were (1) automobile tire residue from the streets (apparently as your tires wear down they leave nasty stuff behind) and (2) dog droppings.) 

So although the dredging turned Lietzensee back from a reed-marsh to a lake, it wasn't such an attractive lake when the dead fish started to smell. Hence it was the site of an early--possibly the world's first--project to reverse eutrophication. The lake's been better since then, but it's an ongoing challenge keeping the water sweet. There is extensive technical information about the history and current prospects of the lake-oxygenation projects, on information boards at the south end of the lake; but it wasn't a great day for standing around reading extensive technical information outdoors, so I don't know much about the latest patch-up. 

I really must come back here with Archangel some day in good weather. The Germans have such sound ideas about using the waterside as a place for drinks and pieces of cake. At the north end of the lake, the old boathouse has been turned into a cafe/ beer garden with a terrace that stretches out into the water. On the east side of the lake the Hotel Seehof (the building with the flag on top, and with Eichmann's home just to the left of it) has a big cafe terrace a story or two above the lake. 

Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

The highrise over on the right is a place where we thought a little about buying when we were apartment-hunting ten years ago, but it seemed kind of far from center city. (The real estate ads' emphasis on the nearness of nature was off-putting to Archangel, who likes to keep his feet firmly on the concrete.) 

Well, some summer day we will come out here and have a drink on the water and imagine what it would have been like if we had moved to Lietzensee.

**

The lake is long enough that it was awkward to get around, so when Eichmann's Witzleben Land Company started developing out here, just after 1900, they extended Kantstrasse on a causeway that effectively divided the lake in two. 

The footpath goes under the causeway to the south half of the lake, but I go back up to street-level to see what's up there.  This is good, this is mildly entertaining. The locals are much given to painting kitschy pictures on the boxes that contain electrical-transmission machinery at intervals around the city. (Much more fun than leaving them blank.) Here, where the box somewhat interferes with the view down to the lake, it's painted to look like a stone arch with a view through it.

On Herbartstrasse. February 2016, my photo.

On the other side of the box, the lake side, there pretends to be a view up to the street. 

On Herbartstrasse. February 2016, my photo.

(The electrical box in front of our building isn't painted, but there is good reason for that. There's a rosebush twice my height that grows around it, like the thorns around Sleeping Beauty's castle. The lower part is pruned away to let the electricians get at the equipment, but (a) at least in June the rosebush would dominate any kitschy painting--it's an astonishing mass of pink--and (b) it looks as if it would commit some serious assault and battery--slashed face and hands --on any human getting close enough to paint.) 

The lake and the park go on nicely here, on the south side of the bridge. But (sigh) it's so relentlessly wintry still. There are spots here and there in the city--the tangle of bushes that face south to the sun along the S-Bahn viaduct, for example--where little tiny green leaves are starting to show ....  But nothing here.  Just the bare, bare plane trees marching along with their moss-streaks and their age-lumps.

Plane trees in park on Lietzensee.  February 2016, my photo.

There is something interesting across the water, something that looks very klinkerexpressionistisch  (isn't that a good word?) ... 

Lietzensee, Kuno-Fischer-Strasse 8.  February 2016, my photo.

Klinker (clinker auf Englisch) are those dark, almost purplish bricks fired at a very high temperature so that they're almost glazed: popular material for expressionist architects in the early decades of the twentieth century, especially up towards the North Sea: Hamburg and Hannover and Bremen have some great clinker buildings. There are a couple of fine clinker churches in the neighborhood here also, which we will probably run into if we muddle around in the area long enough.

But what is this place? Doesn't look like anyone's villa on the water. It turns out to be one of those solid office buildings through which all sorts of small pacifying social processes have run. 

It was built at the end of the 1920s as an administration building for the Knappschaft-Berufsgenossenschaft, that is, the miners' accident insurance fund. (Different worlds: universal accident insurance for workers was introduced in Germany in 1884; in the US it started early in the 20th century in some states but didn't cover the whole country until 1949.)

By the early 1950s the miners' insurance fund had moved on, probably out to the west German mainland. The house became a kind of emergency shelter for the stream of refugees flowing in from (not-yet-walled-up) East Germany. Then later the place was used by a variety of government agencies, including the Berlin police. So the building has its role: Here we house the offices for coping with all the little bad stuff that happens in society.

Then along come the 1990s, and a burst of dizzy optimism that empties the building. The optimism throws much too much commercial (and residential) real estate on the market--and in these heady days, who wants to think about the
 persistence of little bad stuff? The end of history and all that. So the building stands vacant for some years. Somebody cleaned it up about 2000, and now it's supposed to be a home for media firms--filmmakers and such. There may not be quite enough of these to fill the place, and the German Cancer Society also occupies part of the house. (The little bad stuff is sort of back.)

Then here we are at the south end of the lake. Up the steps to the white pergola that overlooks the lake, up the steps by the Great Cascade--the long stone-step waterfall that was built to boost the Vornehmheit of the place early in the last century, and is now part of some water-recirculation plan to freshen up the lake. It's farther up to the Charlottenburg street level at this end of the lake than at the other. (The tunnel valley's getting deeper here.)

Dernburgplatz, at this end of the lake, is really quite grand (see photo near beginning of this entry), though the view back from the Platz to the lake is more utilitarian than vornehm: the big visual marker is the doggy-doo bag dispenser provided by Berlin Streets and San. 

Dernburgplatz looking toward Lietzensee. February 2016, my photo.

But of course it is vornehm to clean up after your dog. (Pull yourself together!)

**

We're pretty near the Stadtbahn here, the east-west line of the S-Bahn, which will take me straight home. I sort of know my way around here, it isn't so far from where my father-in-law was born, and where Archangel and I used to stay when we were touristing here years ago. Here we go: Suarezstrasse, then Rönnestrasse right by the tracks  ... ah, they're sad, some of these Charlottenburg streets. 

These big solid bürgerlich apartment houses were meant to have--did have--decoration. Garlands arcing across the balcony fronts, perhaps held up by fat putti; perhaps a satyr-head leering over door, perhaps a noble god- or goddess-head in the top gable. All this sort of thing was ill-seen after the war, during one of these periodic purify-society-by-killing-the-old-architecture campaigns that infect societies. This kind of ornament was seen as characteristic of a 
hierarchical, authoritarian society, a posing, dishonest society--the ornament is fake, after all, it's usually just plaster (Stuck) trying to look like stone. So there was an official program of de-plastering (Entstuckung) in Berlin, which paid landlords a bit of money to knock the decorations off their houses. And thus some of what looks as though it might be stark ornament-free postwar building is really Kaiserzeit architecture that's been morally cleansed of its gods and garlands. 

Along Rönnestrasse, Charlottenburg.  February 2016, my photo.

Ah well. Too bad, perhaps. Our own place is strictly Bauhaus and I like it, but I'm not convinced that Stuck ever made anyone a fascist. Still--the city is what it is, patched and limping as always--and who knows what Rönnestrasse will look like in a hundred years' time? 

**

Information about Werner Eichmann's Haus See-Eck is from:  http://willkommen-in-berlin.com/geschichte/

Information about the house on Kuno-Fischer-Strasse is from https://inzuam.wordpress.com/2015/11/30/vergangen-aber-unvergessen-notaufnahmelager-kuno-fischer-strasse/

Havel 9

Winter and Potsdamnation

January. Bitter cold, murk, snow. (That is, bitter cold as defined by Germans, which means, "Hardly anyone eats outdoors now." This isn't serious, this isn't Minnesota.) Cold, dark, cold, ice, dark, wind, etc. The waters in Tiergarten look like slabs of marble, white and hard, and skins of ice move out into the water from the banks of the Spree.  Maybe there will be work for the city icebreakers this year, unlike last. 

But the days get lighter: by late January, if the sun is out, it shows its face over the housetops, instead of looking like a lost soccer ball lying on the ground at the south end of the street.

Our street.  Photo, M. Seadle, January 2016.

And before the river freezes solid, there is a big thaw in the night--when I open the windows one morning the snow is gone and the air smells of rain and wet earth and green leaves. Ivy, mahonia, rhododendrons, nests of mistletoe in the trees, all stay green through the winter. The hellebores--Lenten roses--are blooming in Tiergarten, bowed down under the rain.

Winter here is not like winter in the US Midwest, where the first real snow of the year is exciting, and the deep snows in the deep winter are exciting, and there are blue-dazzle days in January when you need to take your sunglasses if you're going out walking in such woods as you can find. The snow here is modest and unexciting and it doesn't last; and bright light is the least of anyone's problems for months on end. 

The winter isn't exciting here, it's a drift into dim nothingness. People resent and resist, in late November and December, saying No, no, I don't want this to happen, let this not happen, as if we could keep the sun levered up a little higher in the sky, just by digging our heels in. Of course in the US there are people who don't like winter, but I don't remember the kind of quasi-desperation that is in the air here as Nature hits the dimmer switch, and the light fades, the city goes gray, and we are all driven indoors. 

**

The last time I was out on the Havel, in Potsdam, was just that late-November kind of day when you think, No, no, I don't want this. Dim light, intermittent icy drizzle. Sure, let's go for a long walk.

Something monstrous is going up by the S-Bahn station in Potsdam (which is itself generally considered a blot on the landscape). Actually the new thing is not yet going up so much as going down, making a big muddy hole in the ground surrounded by cranes and fences and billboards. 

But we can walk away from this, toward the Long Bridge that leads into central Potsdam. There's a quiet stretch of river here, dreamy (cold, wet) with the end of autumn.  

Havel near Long Bridge, Potsdam.  My photo, November 2015.

The Long Bridge is long because the river splits here to go around Friendship Island, and the bridge must go over both channels and the fifteen-acre sliver of island as well. Basic principle of water-city exploration, never miss an island if you can get to it--and here are stairs in mid-bridge going down to the island, so let's see what is down here. ... Ah, garden; and very nice garden indeed. 

Part of the landscaping goes back to the 1930s, but of course the years following were no better for gardens than for any other form of life. (What becomes of the tulip beds when you blow up the Long Bridge in the face of advancing Russians? Probably nothing good.) The garden was patched up in East German days and stuffed with egregiously healthy socialist sculpture, which is still there:

Harmonie, by Dieter Rohde (1965). My photo, November 2015.

Landscape-gardening apprentices are at work here, among the fallen leaves, in the dark day, in the knife-edge wind. They clean out the beds and haul away the dead summer in wheelbarrows. 

Ah, but wait, here's a last outburst, before the snows come.

Chrysanthemum bed, Freundschaftsinsel. My photo, November 2015.

I've been walking up the New Channel (Neue Fahrt) side of the island, so at the downstream point of the island, where the river splits into the New Channel and the Old Channel, I have a choice. Should I stick to the water's edge, along the Old Channel (Alte Fahrt) shore, or head back down the middle of the island, checking out the garden design in more detail?  Well, somehow the Old Fahrt sounds like the suitable thing for me.

It's even more autumn-dreamy here than on the other side.

Alte Fahrt from Freundschaftsinsel. My photo, November 2015. 

Partway down the Alte Fahrt side, there's a little bridge over to center city, over to the Old Market and the Nikolaikirche and so forth, which perhaps I should have taken. But I didn't. Another day, another day.

Alte Fahrt and Nikolaikirche. My photo, November 2015.

I can't resist looking around a little more to see what's in the middle of the island. Here are long pools with stepping stones across them, past spaces where fountains play in the summer.

On Freundschaftsinsel.  My photo, November 2015.

Here's an herb garden, shriveled down on itself in the late autumn. A little chill drizzle whips through the air, and a stainless-steel fish sculpture creaks like a wind-vane overhead.

Flying Fish, by Gabriele Rosskamp und Serge Petit (2001). My photo, November 2015.

The flying fish sculpture has a partner, a flying bird--which looks more like a scorched and falling bird.

Flying Bird, by Gabriele Rosskamp und Serge Petit. My photo, November 2015.

It was, perhaps, easier to put the gardens back together again than to put the city back together again after the war. In Potsdam they say that there were three waves of destruction of the city: First there was World War II, with the British Air Force taking a rather Taliban-like approach to the unrighteous local architecture: this was not a big military target, this was a cultural target, the point was to wipe out the architecture.

Potsdam Nikolaikirche, 1947.  Photo, Bundesarchiv. Wiki commons.

Already in 1914, George Bernard Shaw had inveighed against Potsdam as emblematic of everything militaristic and illiberal; he saw World War I as a justified endeavor to put an end to the Potsdamnation (his word) of Europe. Allegedly he said, "There are some cities that deserve to be obliterated, and Potsdam is one of them." (At least the Germans believe he said this (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13489426.html), although the statement is not so easy to trace in GBS's collected works.) In any case, Bomber Command acted on the idea in '45. 

The second wave of destruction of the city was the Communist tear-down of much of what was left after the war, and the cramming of stark concrete boxes into the city. Drive a stake through the heart of the old architecture and put something heavy on top so that it can't rise again! (We see more of this as we get farther into town.)

Finally there was the capitalist land-grab after reunification, with further destruction of historical substance. Not in the name of principle this time, however, just in the name of a quick Deutschmark (or euro, depending on the date).  

The latest phase (here as elsewhere in Germany, including the old West) has been rebuilding historic buildings, or replica-building if nothing of the original is left. It is possible to have mixed feelings about this. (Is this restoration or destruction, or can we even tell the difference?)  

One of the most unnerving examples of replica-building I have come across is in Braunschweig (old West), where the Schloss in center city was considerably damaged by the war. The Braunschweig city council decided in 1959 to tear down what was left rather than restore it. The city council leaders thought: look, the Schloss was built as a demonstration of absolutist princely power in the seventeenth century, and then it was used by the SS during the war--put a stake through its heart!

A substantial portion of the local population wanted to have the building restored, pretty much as it had been, so there were a lot of protests--and the protesters were not necessarily fans of absolutism or the SS. The Schloss was just a big (and fairly handsome) piece of what the city looked like, and people wanted to keep it. 

Ah, but then, times change. In the mid-2000's, when a property development company offered to rebuild the Schloss in Braunschweig as a shopping mall with a big parking ramp, the city took them up on it; and there were protests again. Is this too Disneyland, is it kitschy to fill a place like this with shoe stores and fast food joints? 

Who knows--but here it is, and we have all seen much worse-looking parking ramps.

Schloss, Braunschweig. Photo, Heinz Kudalla, Wiki Commons.

When Archangel and I were tramping around Braunschweig a few summers ago, the Schloss seemed like good object in the cityscape.  But admittedly the close-up experience of the mall-parking-ramp aspect of it was a little creepy. (Princely absolutism was a little creepy too--but more than fast-food joints are, or less? Is this even an askable question?)

A long time ago, when I lived in Munich--which had rebuilt some medieval bits in center city--an American visitor said to me: Funny that they would just want to put up a copy of the old stuff, when they had the chance to build something new.  D'you know why they did that?  

Yes, well, sort of.

If you lost a big part of your face in a terrible accident and had to have a new one built up with plastic surgery, how different would you want to look? Sure, maybe trim the nose or build out the receding chin a bit, but--would you want to look like a completely different person? The cityscape is our collective face, we don't normally want it wiped out and replaced with something altogether different. 

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A lot of private money has gone into these palace reconstructions. You may have contributed indirectly to the Potsdam Stadschloss yourself, without knowing it. If the organization you work for uses SAP to integrate and manage its information (and if it's a biggish organization, it's more likely to use SAP than any other comparable piece of software), then your organization has put money into the pocket of Hasso Plattner, one of the founders of SAP. About twenty million euros came out of Hasso Plattner's pocket to insure that the historical facade of the Stadtschloss in Potsdam was properly replicated, whatever might be behind it. (Here it's the Brandenburg state legislature, rather than a shopping mall.) 

Plattner wasn't the only major contributor. A big German television personality (talk show host and such) gave money for the rebuilding of the Schloss's Fortunaportal, originally built for the grand entry of Friedrich I after he had crowned himself king in 1701. That's the goddess of fortune in gold on the top, reminding everyone that careers like king and television personality are vulnerable to chance.

Fortunaportal, Potsdam city palace.  Photo by Prussianblues, Wiki Commons.

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After you cross the Long Bridge, the roadway becomes Breite Strasse, and the new Stadtschloss stands up handsomely and almost unphotographably on the right. (You can't step back from it without ending up a long way away, tangled in the trolley lines or lost in the middle of another construction site or obstructed by the truly vile hotel across the way.)

Stadtschloss (Brandenburger Landtag) from Lange Brücke.
Photo,  Adrian Fiedler, Wiki Commons.

Down the street a little farther is a quasi-separate part of the palace complex (also rebuilt), the Marstall (stables).

How can you not love this north-German baroque--these long low grand facades, the sober classicizing, the color? 

Marstall, now Film Museum, Potsdam.  Photo by Klabauter2, Wiki Commons.

The Marstall has had a diversity of lives. The original building here was put up for the Great Elector (1685) as an Orangerie (greenhouse, winter-garden) for the palace. Friedrich Wilhelm I, practical and military-minded as always, turned the Orangerie into a stable, as an accompaniment to turning part of the palace gardens into a military exercise ground. (We don't need exotic fruits and flowers, we need well-trained cavalry!) Friedrich II, aware of the need for both cavalry and gorgeousness, had the stables made bigger and grander (1746), and it is his version of the Marstall that has been rebuilt (and turned into a film museum).

Friedrich II's trouble then--after the Stadschloss had been modernized and dignified, and Sanssouci built as a summer retreat--was that the route from one fine palace to the other was so clearly not fine. It's like seeing how shabby your carpet is after you've bought new furniture. Friedrich, who was not one to leave problems unsolved, had another of his architects, Georg Christian Unger, build a grand  facade to cover and join some of the unimpressive houses along the way.

Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Breite Strasse.  Photo, Arild Vagen, Wiki Commons.This photo makes t

I think this photo makes the place look more overbearing than it is in real life (or at least than it seems to me). Let's get a more amiable close-up look.

Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

How Frederician, how classical, how stolen from northern Italy (by way of the seventeenth-century plans for Whitehall Palace, which Friedrich told Unger to use). How impractical, originally: the vertical structure of the facade didn't match the vertical structure of the houses behind it, originally, so the house windows didn't necessarily look out through the facade windows. 

The unimpressable locals called these Frederician facades (this is not the only one in Potsdam) Vorhemdchen--false shirt fronts, dickeys.

The semi-nude figures disporting themselves with music and drink on the balustrades look as though they are pretending to be in sunny Italy but are not convincing either themselves or the onlookers, in this freezing winter-edge. Potsdam is not exactly the capital of la dolce vita. (It's starting to rain again.)

Top of Hiller-Brandtsche Häuser, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

This building was empty for a good while post-reunification. The city owned it but didn't have the money for sorely needed fix-ups. Then an investor bought it and, like many post-reunification investors, didn't seem to get anywhere very fast with the project. A permit request was eventually put in to turn the building into a hostel, but then the request was withdrawn; and after a long public silence about the building, it emerged as a set of luxury apartments.

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And speaking of Italy, as we go down Breite Strasse we suddenly find ourselves in the Veneto. Isn't this some Palladian villa plucked up by a winter storm and stuck down in front of a big muddy hole in the ground?

Langer Stall facade.  November 2015, my photo.

Yep, this is another of Friedrich II's false shirt fronts--designed, like the one on the other side of Breite Strasse, by Georg Christian Unger. This shirt front not only has nothing in front of it (it stands a long way back from the street); it also no longer has anything behind it. It used to conceal the Langer Stall--the long barn, which was a sort of big shed to be used for military exercises indoors when it wasn't exercise-weather outdoors. The hole in the ground in front turns out to be a much longer-stalled rebuilding project than the big brick facade across the street. 

The Garnisonkirche (garrison church), built in the 1730s, used to stand here. Its tower was the tallest thing in the Potsdam skyline: Fontane, who didn't like the building much, said that the tower was like a giraffe's neck stuck on the body of some much smaller animal. 

Garnisonkirche and Breite Brücke, Photo by Max Bauer, 
sometime pre-1945. Bundesarchiv, Wiki Commons.

The tower of the garrison church dominated the city not only visually but also in sound: it had a big carillon that marked the time in prewar Potsdam life. On the hour it played Lobet den Herren, one of those mighty seventeenth-century chorales that make their way into the Bach cantatas. On the half-hour it played a tune which had righteous and patriotic words put to it in the nineteenth century (Don't deviate a finger's-breadth from God's ways) but was actually the tune from Papageno's lust-struck aria in The Magic Flute. (If a girl would kiss me, I would feel really good!) (And one may ask, which words went through the head of a musically literate soldier when the bells rang in Potsdam?)

The church survived the big bomb night in 1945; it wasn't hit at all. But the Langer Stall nearby--the building itself, not the Palladian shirt-front--had a lot of wood in it and burned like a torch through the end of the night. The windows of the church had been broken out by the concussion of the bombs, and finally in the morning sparks from the Langer Stall blew in and caught the wooden galleries in the church; sparks caught the wooden louvers of the bell chamber. The interior blew up in flames, and the carillon bells plunged to their deaths. 

So the roof and the interior furnishings were gone, but the walls stood, and the tower stood. The roof over the nave was gone, but services could be held in the base of the tower, after a bit of cleanup.

Garnisonkirche remains, 1966.  Photo, Wiki Commons. 

Ah, but it was a wicked wicked building, and the East German government wanted it to be obliterated. The Garnisonkirche had been a sort of high holy place of the old Prussian military. Moreover--and for this reason--it had been the stage-setting for the handshake between Hindenburg and Hitler in the spring of 1933 that signaled the backing of traditional conservatives for Hitler and thus the turning over of Germany to the Nazis.  

So the Potsdam city council voted in 1968 to blow the place up--a split vote, which was unusual in the coerced unanimity of the time. The building took a lot of killing: the charges that were supposed to have taken the whole tower down only took half, and another set of demolition charges had to be scheduled.

And so, decades later, some people in Potsdam wanted to rebuild the Garnisonkirche (and gave money for it) because it was part of the face of the city. Some people in various parts of Germany wanted to rebuild it (and gave money for it) because it was a monument of Prussian culture. (Hear GBS spinning in his grave.) Some people in the Brandenburg Protestant church wanted to rebuild it (and gave money for it) because they wanted to use it as a sort of international peace and reconciliation center, to cancel out its old and objectionable cultural connotations. Their efforts in this direction outed some of the Prussian-culture donors as apparent right-wing baddies, who objected to this approach. (They argued that a memorial service at the church site for victims of the Nazis was "too one-sided.")

So some of the Potsdam residents and the church authorities stepped back, thinking: we don't want a common project with these people! In 2014 a local citizen initiative started up, calling itself "For a Potsdam without the garrison church," and the militantly anti-militarist wing of the church started an initiative called "Christians don't need a garrison church."  A proposal not to rebuild the church passed in a local referendum; and while these referenda are not binding in Germany, politicians ignore them at their peril. The city council voted (split vote, numerous abstentions) that the Oberbürgermeister should use all legal means to dissolve the foundation that had gathered a lot of the money and provided much of the leadership for the rebuilding project.

And so here we are in 2016, and the foundation for financing the rebuilding of the church still exists. Its spokesman has recently told the Brandenburg General News that it hopes construction will be underway in 2017. Who knows. 

Meanwhile there is a big hole in the ground, which will collect the rain and snow and empty pizza boxes for some seasons yet.

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After the East German authorities blew up the remains of the Garnisonkirche they built a data center for the regional government more or less on the site. I think the very East-German-era building next to the big hole in the ground was part of this, but hereabouts it's harder to find information on post-1945 buildings than on ones from the eighteenth century. At any rate, the place is adorned by a terrifically Cold-War-era mosaic called Man and Science. Not a great piece of art, but how it does brings the era back .... (The mosaics were put up in 1971; the comparable flavor in US vintage would probably be about 1961.) Here's the lab:

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

Here's what we can do with lab science, build big rockets:

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

And here are the (wonderfully museum-ready) computers that we use to steer the rockets.  

Man and Science, Dortusstrasse, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

A subsequent panel shows something that I took to be a combine harvesting grain and Archangel believed was a space-alien gunship. It was hard to tell from the picture.

Here we are clearly in second-half-of-the twentieth-century Potsdam, with its massive weight of highrises jammed into the landscape.

Along Breite Strasse. November 2015, my photo.

The views from these places, up toward Sanssouci and out along the Havel, must be fabulous.  The buildings sort somewhat oddly with the pre-war cityscape--for example, as they surround the apparent mosque below, which is actually the fanciful nineteenth-century coverup for the pumps that work the Sanssouci fountains. (Friedrich II had abundant fountains in the gardens at Sanssouci, but the hydraulics never worked very well in his time, one is told. The waterworks had troubles until they got a Borsig steam engine (that triumph of German applied science; see Havel 3 post for a bit on the Borsig works). The minaret is covering up the smokestack for the steam engine.)

Pump-works for Sanssouci.  November 2015, my photo.

Lots of people take offense at all the Soviet-era concrete in Potsdam--the way it comes smashing into the gracious courtly ensemble that accreted on the sand dunes out here between the two Thirty Years' Wars (one in the seventeenth century, one in the twentieth). But you can't avoid thinking, out here: doesn't the Soviet-era stuff follow, somehow? Pursue some of the logic of Friedrich's (courtly) Enlightenment, and you end up smashing the courts--having a revolution in the name of reason and of the people. And then more revolutions.

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Well, there's far too much to think about out here; I want to go home and read. On the way back to the station I cut through a bit of the old center city, which is flourishing and lively. Here is a bit of the eighteenth-century court city, interleaved with asphalt and autos:

Potsdam Altstadt. November 2015, my photo.

Here is a square that used to be a garden designed by Lenné, and then became a parking lot, and now is sort of usable public space again. At present it is occupied by a protest against factory farming. (The text on the pig says, Try vegan ... For the sake of animals, the environment, and your health!)

In Luisenplatz, Potsdam. November 2015, my photo.

And what is this Italianate object up ahead, a loggia with military-looking sculptures on top?  Mars presides over one portal, Bellona over another: there are piles of arms heaped as trophies in between. This is the Alte Wache (old guardhouse), built in the eighteenth century, damaged on various occasions, patched up minimally and not so well in the 70s and 80s, more thoroughly rehabbed in a long-term job that finished a couple of years ago.  

Alte Wache (Commerzbank), Potsdam.  November 2015, my photo.

I read in the city's press release about this rehab job (https://www.potsdam.de/content/136-sanierung-von-denkmalgeschuetzten-gebaeuden-der-innenstadt-abgeschlossen) that the facade was so damaged by air pollution that it had to be calmed down (beruhigt). Sure, air pollution gives me stress too, I think, but how does a building get nervous and how do you calm it down? 

Ah, a German-vocabulary failure on my part: beruhigen does usually mean calm down, but it also means de-oxidize. Always good to learn something new.

The occupant and source of financing for this building (bless their capitalist hearts, they did a nice job here) is the bank where Archangel and I have our accounts. Should I stop and pick up some cash? Is Mars or Bellona the right figure to preside over the entrance to the ATM lobby?  Who knows.