Havel 11

It's high summer, and the city is shrouded and lost in unkempt green. Until I moved here and saw the contrast I never realized how repressed Midwestern greenery is. Most of the flora in a respectable Midwestern neighborhood is trimmed and mowed and edged within an inch of its life. But the principle behind a lot of Berlin landscaping is to let nature take its course and to go in with a chainsaw once a year so that you can still find your front door. (Actually, there's enough concrete to provide free passage between the messes of green; but still, when I walk down our street, I think: isn't someone going to clean up these big hedges, strangled with vines and stuck full of volunteer maple trees? Not in my lifetime, probably.)

There are, of course, some tidier places in the urban jungle as well. Formal beds in the neighborhood park:

In Tiergarten. July 2016, my photo.

Roses everywhere at this time of year ...  This is one by the Kladow (southwest Berlin) ferry pier (see last post), which I went back to because I didn't get nearly as far as I intended here last time. 

Rose by Kladow ferry pier. July 2016, my photo. 

There's a path I mean to take from Kladow today, southwest approximately along the water, along the Havel, out of Berlin into Brandenburg. It turns out to be more suburby than I had expected; there's been a lot of new building out here in recent years. (A lot of repression of the greenery, too, where the new building is extensive.)

Ah, I'm out of sympathy with places like this. A limitation on my part, surely; I don't suppose that we're morally superior in slobby, ratty center city. But there's something off-putting about all the righteous not-in-my-backyard signs, all the panic about possible disturbances to the terrarium in which people have enclosed themselves here.  The current fuss is about noise from the new airport--which, if it ever gets finished, will have a flight path going over Kladow. 

But people, you're thirty kilometers out from the airport here, how low are these planes going to be?  In Chicago we used to live right under the flight path to O'Hare, about twenty kilometers out, and I don't think we even heard the planes. (Though we could see them, a string of lights across the evening sky, sailing past the dining-room window at three-minute intervals.)

A big banner hung on someone's fence here says: "Get rid of the flight routes! A region defends itself! Your family-friendly community, Kladow."  Ah yes, and to whose families are we being friendly here? Not the ones who will get the noise--if any--under an alternative flight path.  ("Me first and to hell with everybody else" is a natural human attitude, but naked displays of it are unseemly, surely?) 

Somewhere along here, in a stretch of new houses, a well-dressed older woman's large dog has a go at taking a piece out of my leg. He is unsuccessful; she is unapologetic. (A neighborhood defends itself!) They aren't so used to strange pedestrians here, perhaps. 

The path wanders along, past the built-up areas, by the water, through the trees; past a farm-ish house or two.

Along the Havel, Kladow.  July 2016, my photo.

I know there's a newly restored country-house garden from the 1920s out here, probably worth a sidetrack ....  Yes, here's the garden wall, with a couple of porthole-like windows tempting you inside. 

Window into Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fränkel.  My photo, July 2016.

Ah, this is nice, this is delightful (restoration supported by the personal funds, organizational skills, and sometimes sweaty labor of the same people who put silly signs on their fences and let their dogs go after strangers. Credit where credit is due). 

Max Fränkel, who built a house out here in the 1920s, was a Berlin banker; he hired the designer of many pleasant Berlin parks and squares, Erwin Barth, to make a garden for him running down to the water. 

(Here, a good deal of honor is given to major landscape architects: if you're an educated person you know who was responsible for your big neighborhood park. If you're in the US, are you likely to know who designed your big neighborhood park, unless it's Frederick Law Olmsted? (Or is the park such that you would be especially inclined to honor the designer?) I was asking myself this, and thought I would try to find out who designed Washington Park and Cheesman Park in Denver, where I spent many pleasant summer days a long time ago....  Aaagh, I should have guessed: both parks were designed by a German trained here at the  complex of palace gardens along the Havel. (It figures.) A man named Reinhard Schuetze, who emigrated to the US late in the nineteenth century and became Denver's first official landscape architect. Maybe half a generation older than Erwin Barth, who did the garden out here.) 

What will we find if we go into Max Fränkel's garden? Roses, at this time of year: roses and roses.

Fränkel and Barth started on the garden in 1927, but it wasn't finished until 1933.

Landhausgarten Dr. Max Fränkel.  July 2016, my photo

Ah, such bad luck, such a bad time to live: the dragon of history sweeps its tail across the landscape and destroys it. Fränkel emigrated (no more place for Jewish bankers in Berlin after '33); Barth, who was profoundly discouraged by the rise of the Nazis and his own failing eyesight, killed himself. The war didn't do much for the roses, one presumes.

Over the decades, after World War II, the place decayed. Fränkel's house was torn down in the 1960s. In Cold War days, this side of the river was East Berlin; the other side was West Berlin. Therefore, presumably, there was barbed wire and such in the places where the roses used to be. In the 90s, when people started digging out the garden, it was meters deep in mess, and the rehab project has been slow.

The elderly bicyclists whose path I keep crossing today haul their bicycles up to the top of the pine-crowned hill in the garden to have lunch with a view; I settle down close to the water for mine. 

It's a pleasant garden; there's a lot to be said for Barth's work. It's not magic, it's not heart-stopping, like Lenné's at its best, but it's fine. I'm fond of the squares and little parks in Charlottenburg that Barth designed, on the edges of which Archangel and I have sat at cafe tables for years now. I'm fond of Barth's Volkspark Rehberge, the big sand-dune park that I see from my study window, five or six kilometers away, with its near-black line of evergreens on the top of the long dune.  I like to trudge around Rehberge in the early spring, when the broadleaf woods on the dune-sides are open to the light and there are snowdrops and aconite and little fluttery seas of blue-stars (squills) bursting out among last year's fallen leaves. (But how mournful it is in the winter, that long line of dark trees like a graveyard avenue, leading to the memorial at the top of the dune for Walter Rathenau, whose murder in the 20s probably unsettled people like Fränkel and Barth (see Grunewald Lakes 2 post, March 2016).) 

Well, let's go on, along the water for a bit, along the lovely summertime Havel.

By the River Havel.  July 2016, my photo.

It gets less built-up here, after the garden: trees and reedbeds instead of houses--or, to be precise, only occasionally a house, looking countrified and lost among the riverside reeds.

Along the Havel. July 2016, my photo.

And then, after a bit, we are at Schloss Sacrow, a down-at-heel country house in an overgrown park. 

The day is gray and damp. Paint is peeling from the exterior of the Schloss, which has run into some difficulties with its restoration plans and has a semi- abandoned look about it.

Schloss Sacrow.  July 2016,  my photo.

How thickly scattered the country is with medieval churches whose walls sag out of true, and baroque palaces whose roofs let in the rain. There doesn't begin to be enough money to fix up and maintain all of these (and should it be done, anyway?). Here at Sacrow, in the 90s, they got as far as fixing the roof and installing central heating, with a view to using the place as a museum, but it hasn't really worked out. The house is closed much of the time; the paint flakes off morosely around the door, and if you step back a little further than this picture, the grass grows thigh-high, tangled with weeds.

The place was livelier once. Young Felix Mendelssohn did some composing here, as the Magnuses, the Berlin banking family who owned the house in the early nineteenth century (and intermarried with the Fränkels upriver) were family friends of the Mendelssohns--yet another solid Berlin banking family--and invited them out for long visits.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV bought the house from the Magnuses in 1840 and expanded it a bit. He had Lenné work on the Schlosspark, and he designed a fantasy-church for the edge of the park, not very near to where anyone lived. He meant to incorporate it into his Prussian Arcadia, the fantasy-palace-and-garden complex along the river where our Denver landscape architect learned his trade. 

A poisoned stretch of Arcadia, this turned out to be. One of the reasons that restoration has been slow here is that the house and much of the grounds turned out to be thick with lead dust. Back in the days when the Mendelssohns visited, the Magnuses ran a production facility for white lead and lead acetate more or less in the backyard, and the toxics built up.

The place was successfully decontaminated a couple of years ago, however. It was a big job, digging out all the earth a couple of meters deep and carrying it away. The original earth was sent to a sort of earth laundry [a Bodenwaschanlage--I didn't know there were such things] to clean out the lead. The decontaminated earth was then used for an "unobjectionable purpose" elsewhere, and the Schlosspark got fresh earth from some uncontaminated source. (Doesn't this sound solemn and thorough and German? Well done, all.) (http://www.info-potsdam.de/beginn-der-dekontaminierungsarbeiten-im-schlosspark-sacrow-9910n.html) 

Parts of the garden had to be torn up and replanted, of course, but the basic design wasn't much changed. Here are the long straight lines of sight that characterize the older garden design in these parts: broad paths cut through the trees and the hip-high summer grass, from the house to the river, from the house to Friedrich Wilhelm's fantasy church, from the house toward a view of Peacock Island [Havel 6 post, November 2015], and toward views of other, grander palaces.

In some places the grass and reeds are so high that you can hardly see the river, close though it is. Sails move past through the green tangle as if the boats were on wheels in the overgrown lawns.

Let us go down one of these mown paths toward the church. It's a Romanesque-Italian thing plunked down in cold damp Brandenburg, without a human habitation in sight. The river laps against it. (In the photo it looks as though there's a bit of lawn and shrubbery in front of the colonnade, but there isn't; the east end of the church shoves into the water like the front of a boat, and the greenery is growing in the river.)

Heilandskirche, Sacrow.  July 2016, my photo.

In Cold War days the East Germans put sharpshooters in the church tower to pick off possible border-crossers.

**

How dark the day is getting.  There's no one here except me and the pair of elderly bicyclists I keep meeting; and after a bit they move on. It's very slightly alarming, walking around the colonnade in this deserted spot: the colonnade is right on the water--no railing or anything like that between you and the Havel, out where the colonnade takes its turn around the apse of the church. The afternoon is thinking about storm, and it's damp: maybe the wind is kicking up the river, or maybe there are little sprays of rain driving sideways into the half-shelter of the colonnade.  

Heilandskirche, Sacrow. July 2016, my photo.

Ach du meine, it's remote out here. The S-Bahn is nowhere near, the infrequent Brandenburg bus is quite a way back: transit is generally thin on the ground.

But the Potsdam water-taxi does stop here. It doesn't run very often, but ... ah, here it comes, looking a bit like a Checker cab that's been flattened by a steamroller and left to float on the water.

Water-taxi on the Havel.  July 2016, my photo.

I get out of the water-taxi a few stops later, at the bottom of Glienicke Bridge, the old spy-exchange bridge.  Then it's a fine stroll across the river, high above the water, with a view across to the monumentally silly Schloss Babelsberg [see Havel 8 post, January 2016]:

Schloss Babelsberg from Glienicker Brücke.  July 2016, my photo.

It's a longish wait for the bus over on the Berlin side, but who can complain about the view? Here we are in front of Schloss Glienicke (yet another outpost of Prussian Arcadia), with its golden griffin guarding the entrance, and the lion fountains spouting in the summer afternoon.

Schloss Glienicke. July 2016, my photos.

When I get back to my admittedly scuzzy neighborhood, my comfortable-old-shoe neighborhood (absolutely no golden lions), I stop to pick up a few groceries. Our little shopping center--supermarket, drugstore, bakery, dry-cleaner, post office, florist, etc.--has a parking lot by the supermarket. Room for eight cars, or nine if they're small and well parked. The lot is hardly ever full; this is pedestrian and bicycle territory. As I come along I see that there is one parking space left, and an SUV is edging toward the space but then stopping. (Good God, what is an SUV doing in our street? We aren't that kind of neighborhood.)

Ah, I see the problem now: one of the local derelicts is sprawled across the last available parking space, dead drunk. Well, well ... it isn't Prussian Arcadia, it's just Berlin. 

Havel 10

To talk about trees is almost a crime

I'm headed for a place called Kladow in southwestern Berlin, on the right bank of the sprawly, multi-part river Havel. (Last fall I was on the left bank, which in some places is a long way from the right bank.) The Berlin public transit website says I should go out my front door and down to Bahnhof Zoo, and there pick up the express bus that runs along the main highway westward through the city. It will cross the river at Spandau and then run south to the point where I want to start.

Oh right, let's sit there sweating in the stench-traffic for three quarters of an hour or so. 

I have a better idea: let's go out the back door and catch the S-Bahn to Wannsee, and then take the ferry upriver ...  which needs a little more careful timing, because the ferry doesn't run as often as the bus, but it takes about the same amount of time altogether and will be wonderfully fresh on the water, on a sweet summer morning.

From the Wannsee ferry. June 2016, my photo.

Most of the Berlin public-transit ferries are small, and I was alarmed to see almost a hundred people lined up at the Wannsee pier when I got there. But the ferry here is a refitted cruiser from one of the big tour lines that infest the rivers and lakes around Berlin. (There seem to be more of them every year: I was down around Museum Island last Sunday afternoon, and the big tourist-cruisers were lined up almost nose to tail, shooting the one-arched bridge at the end of the island.) 

Refitting a tourist cruiser to make a public ferry consists mostly of ripping out a section of seats in the center to make room for bicycle stands. There are dozens of bicyclists headed across the water for cross-country runs in the woods and fields. 

Ah, summer in Germany .... The ferry stop at Kladow is ringed with beer-gardens, and there's a little park where you can sit by the water and watch the sailboats. An elderly trombone quartet is practicing under the trees in the park, with their bicycles and trombone cases piled around them. They have some good riffs on Hey, Jude, marred by an unwanted bloop now and then. 

**
Here's a little street, the Imchenallee, headed in the direction I want to go (Imchen is a small island in the river just off Kladow, which we sail around in the ferry on the way to the Kladow pier): 

Imchenallee, Kladow. June 2016, my photo.

So many sidetracks are possible. Here is a path going off to the left into a little Naturschutzgebiet, a protected natural area--what might this be?  It's a dry grassland: an area of such pure sand that it doesn't hold the rainwater, and so it makes a little steppe or semi-desert in the midst of the general Berlin swampiness.  There's a wandering, semi-disappearing track through it ...  Well, we can't go very wrong here, this is quite a small area and we're bound to come out on the other side eventually.  

What perfect summer it is here, with the smell of the dry-country grass in the sun. Insects buzz, and fair-weather clouds float in the intense blue behind the trees that fringe the grassland.... This looks hard to beat as a place for lunch.

Oak in dry grassland, Kladow. June 2016, my photo.

How like home this is, how like home: the outdoor summer, the sun-on-dry-grass smell in the countryside. When I was growing up, we used to walk cross-country on days like this, stopping in spots like this to sit on a fallen tree and eat apples and cheese, to listen to the insect-buzz and watch the little clouds, to talk about this and that. 

I am not sure that this would be so possible now in the US, in the same places. At any rate the experience would be different now. Some of the places we used to walk are chemical-drenched monoculture now. Some are exurban developments unfriendly to pedestrians. One of the places became a Wal-Mart parking lot, and then Wal-Mart moved on. (Not only did they pave paradise and put up a parking lot, as Joni Mitchell used to sing; they didn't even take good care of the parking lot.) 

But here ...  let us eat our sandwich in the pleasant shade and let it feel like home.

Heimat, the Germans say; and English-language Wikipedia has an article on Heimat, saying that although the dictionary equivalent is "home," it is an untranslatable term. Heimat is an interweaving of place and people: landscape, language, social customs, weather, characteristic kinds of work and culture. You're woven into all this yourself, and you can't be taken out of it without feeling as if pieces of flesh were being torn out of you and left behind.

It's harder for this sort of feeling to develop in the US because the mobility is so much greater. (My mother, growing up in the US, lived in Florida, Colorado, California, Nebraska, Kansas, Michigan, and then Colorado again. My husband's family has lived in eastern Germany since the thirteenth century.) I remember an energetic debate among German and American friends over the meaning of the question, "Where are you from?"  The Germans insisted it meant, "Where were you born," because that would normally also mean where you grew up and were socialized in certain ways and got a certain identity. And the Americans said, No, but what if you leave when you're five, or even when you're eighteen, and have decades of adult life in some quite different place? Then that becomes the place where you're from. (The Germans rolled their eyes, thinking: Of course it means, where were you born.)  Anyway, is it so different to be born in Kansas rather than Nebraska?  Nah, probably not.  

Part of the trouble with Heimat is that the idea appeals to the wrong people and lends itself to misuse. The Nazis loved it. When Stalin wanted to go after the Jews in Russia in the later 1940s, he denounced them as "rootless cosmopolitans"--that is, exactly the opposite of people with a Heimat, the opposite of patriotic blood-and-soil Russians.  

The other part of the trouble with Heimat is that, at least in the extreme, it isn't even a good idea; it's too much of a closed world. If everything is so closely woven together, then you end up in the cultural equivalent of one of those mountain valleys where most people marry their cousins and have two-digit IQs.  

Total rootlessness isn't an ideal either, of course. (Think of all those sad American suburban developments where the walls are white and the carpets are Merrill Lynch beige, because the inhabitants aren't going to stay long and heaven forbid there should be anything distinctive about the house that might put off the next buyer.) 

Anywhere you would actually want to live, anywhere that offers a humane existence, has to be a mix of people who are rooted like trees and people who just got off the boat. 

The German community in Brandenburg and points east in the 19th and early 20th century probably fancied themselves as occupants of a Heimat that was separate from Berlin, and quite separate from its Slavic and Jewish surroundings; but if they did, this was fantasy. Prussia without Berlin, Berlin without the Jews, would have been something quite different, and not nearly as attractive as these folks imagined.

Look, the street names almost always tell us something here, and when we come to the end of the path through the sand we are on Mascha-Kaléko-Weg:

Mascha-Kaleko-Weg, Kladow.  June 2016, my photo.

... and Mascha Kaléko was a German poet--someone whose Heimat was clearly the German language, but not exactly Germany. Her parents were Galician Jews (Galicia is now in Poland and the Ukraine); her father was a Russian citizen, her mother an Austrian. When she was a child in the 19-teens, her family was on the run from pogroms and war; there were several stops, the last of which was Berlin. 

  I was born an emigrants' child ...
  The old "where-am-I" angst,
  The hostile bed in nowhere,
  The foreign soap-smell on the pillows,
  So many bridges burned behind you,
  And out of their ashes again and again
  The new, the false phoenix-home.
  I could scream. (I can, thank God.)
        M. Kaléko, Notizen


Berlin was good, for a while. For a few years she was one of the celebrated poets of the neue Sachlichkeit, the style that swept through the arts (painting and architecture as much as literature) in the Weimar years, the 1920s and early 30s. (The standard Englishing of die neue Sachlichkeit, "the new objectivity," is one of those awful translations that come from looking words up in a dictionary. It's maybe something more like "the new realism," or "the new getting-to-the-point" or "the new sobriety," after all the bloated fantasies of the run-up to World War I. Think of the historicist villas that show up in the posts earlier this year about the Grunewald lake chains; and there are, in a way, literary equivalents of this overdecorated bloat in literature.) The new poetry was to be understandable by everyone, to be singable in cabarets; it was often satirical, often political--and in Kaléko's case there was a good deal of witty love poetry. (An American may be reminded a little of Dorothy Parker, though Kaléko is a better poet.)

Mascha Kaleko.

Her first book was published in 1933, just as the Nazis were coming to power. It was well received, and she published another, and they sang her songs in the cabarets for a couple of years before it was officially noticed that all this should not be happening, because she was Jewish, and her work was banned.  She cleared out with husband and child to New York, where she made a living for them by writing advertising copy. 

In one verse from her New York days, (Der kleine Unterschied, "The Little Difference") a German emigrant answers a well-meaning local who seems to have asked how the emigrant is getting along in English. The languages aren't so different, after all.  

Sure, says the emigrant, it's the same if I just substitute one word for another: homeland instead of Heimat, poem instead of Gedicht. Certainly, I'm happy here ... but I'm not glücklich ("happy" in German).

    sag ich für Heimat homeland,
    und poem für Gedicht.
    Gewiss, ich bin sehr happy,
    doch glücklich bin ich nicht.

The countries that take in the emigrants, the refugees, tend not to have a very good grip on this. They think, You ought to be so happy to be here--and of course one is in some sense happy (possibly not glücklich or its Arabic equivalent), to be alive and not dead, or not in a camp somewhere. But the locals don't think how traumatizing it is to be ripped out of even a semi-Heimat.

A few weeks ago, a Berlin acquaintance was telling me about her son the social worker, who has responsibility for some unaccompanied-minor refugees who have landed in the city, fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds from Syria and Iraq. The trouble, says the social-worker son, is that they just shut down. In some cases their families are dead, in some cases they have no idea what has happened to their families. They have no connections to the world any more, nothing makes sense; they sit and stare at the wall. Nothing is good or bad any more, nothing is anything.


**

This country around the Havel is a characteristic piece of northeast-German Heimat: the pine-woods, the grain-fields silver-gilt in the summer sun, the sober classical country houses, the gardens going down to the water. These are the places where a lot of science and literature and philosophy and history were made in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. Not so much now, perhaps. 

Gutshaus (manor house) Neukladow.  June 2016, my photo.

Otto von Bismarck's mother grew up in this house at Neukladow, which we come to if we keep going down Mascha-Kaléko-Weg. It's in process of restoration, according to the "your EU contributions at work" sign on the other side, but at the moment no one seems to be doing anything. No one's around.

Frau Bismarck's family didn't own this property very long, I think; it changed hands a lot. (There's always more change and disintegration going on in the Heimat than the ideal would allow.) In the 1880s the property passed into the hands of a cement-factory owner; and it was the cement-man's son (an art historian) who spiffed up the house and laid out the gardens and filled the place with guests in the early years of the 20th century: theater people, painters like Max Liebermann [see Havel 5 post, October 2015], writers like Gerhart Hauptmann from the Friedrichshagen group [see Spree 10 post, July 2014], and political figures like Walter Rathenau [see Grünewald Lake Chain 2, March 2016].

It didn't last, nothing lasts. The people who used to meet out here were scattered--variously murdered, heartbroken, compromised, exiled. The house was used for this and that, and then stood empty for a long time.

How unironically idyllic it is here, in spite of everything. Here are fine views of the river (from the terrace of the manor house where you might have had afternoon tea in the summer, or from the places in the garden where you might pause in a stroll):

River Havel from Gutspark Neukladow. June 2016, my photo.

Here is a noble array of trees, in vaguely English-landscape style, with tall poplars for punctuation in the rambling sentences of the garden:

Gutspark Neukladow. June 2016, my photo.

There are wild roses blooming among the trees; and then there is a mass of mock-oranges rising like a wall beside the path on an uphill stretch. False jasmine, they call it here. (Why does this poor plant get accused of imitating another, no matter which language you use to name it?  A sort of plagiarist-plant.) The flowers are like a great burst of white light.







The summer-green is so intense here, in this half-tended place. You feel planted among the lives of the plants, feel yourself breathing in what they breathe out.  

The first red poppies are in bloom, down at the foot of the mock-orange hedge.  In Flanders fields the poppies blow, and so forth. Wars were made here, over the years, as well as books and barley harvests.



**
 Brecht (famously) wrote, in the thirties:

   What kind of times are these,

   When to talk about trees is almost a crime,

   Because it’s a silence about so many atrocities? ….

These three lines are carved on the wall at one of transit stations near us. 

Brecht goes on:

   It’s true, I’m still earning my living,

   But believe me, that’s only an accident. Nothing

   Of what I do gives me the right to eat my fill.

   By chance I am spared. (When my luck runs out, I’m lost.)

Yep.

**

Back to Imchenallee, a terrifically muddy stretch of it. The whole street in some places is puddle, and so the whole street is full of sky.

Street in Kladow, June 2016. My photo.

Back to the park by the water, where the trombone quartet is still at it, an hour and a half after I heard them first. They've switched from Hey, Jude to some lugubrious Lutheran hymn-tunes. 

Time to go home, past the somber poetry on the S-Bahn station wall. Time to stop for sweet apricots, or ripe strawberries that perfume half the street, and talk a bit with our Turkish greengrocer about Turkish politics.  Not good news, these days.

**




German version of Brecht's An die Nachgeborenen:

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo

Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist.

Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt! ...

Es ist wahr: ich verdiene noch meinen Unterhalt

Aber glaubt mir: das ist nur ein Zufall. Nichts

Von dem, was ich tue, berechtigt mich dazu, mich sattzuessen.

Zufällig bin ich verschont. (Wenn mein Glück aussetzt, bin ich verloren.)

German version, Kaléko's "Notizen"

Die alte Wobinichdennangst
Das feindliche Bett im Nirgendwo
Fremder Seifengeruch auf dem Kissen
So viele Brücken hinter dir verbrannt
Aus ihrer Asche immer wieder die falsche, die neue
Phönix-Heimat. Ich kann ja schreien. Gott sei dank.

Grunewald Lakes 5

Summer, feast of light. According to the almanac, nautical twilight, when there's still a little light on the water, changes to full night at almost midnight; and the first semi-light--when the birds start racketing in the trees under our bedroom--comes back at half past two. 

The (huge) windows are open all day; the apartment (stone floors, open space) feels like outdoors. In May, when I threw the windows open first thing in the morning, the apple-blossom fragrance would come rushing into the room from a dozen floors down; and one day I found that a storm wind had blown petals all the way up to our level, so that the edge of the bedroom (in this no-windowscreen world) was scattered with pink apple-blossom.  It is June now; soon there will be linden-blossom scent, stronger and sweeter, summer-deep.

So here we are at the last couple of Grunewald lakes. Back to Uncle-Tom Street [see last post] and into the wetland of the Riemeisterfenn. Down we go into the glacial valley, in the green-gold light of an early summer morning. 

Stairs down to Riemeisterfenn.  May 2016, my photo.

Oh, I'm such a sucker for this. I love the woods. Does anybody else remember particular trees they knew in grade school? Particular trees from everywhere they've lived?

Here we come down to a lower-level path--and there's always a joker in the crowd, of course. Someone's decorated a stump down here.

Stump, Riemeisterfenn.  May 2016, my photo.

Almost everything that flowers in the woods now is white, as white as light. There are chestnuts blooming here and there, sometimes standing at the water's edge lit up by the sun, like candelabra packed with fat white candles. There is hawthorn: the Germans call it whitethorn, as do the English sometimes--though in England they also call it (or used to call it) mayblossom or maythorn or just may. If you lived in hedgerow country the lines of it all turned white in the beginning of the summer: white as may was a usable phrase in Tennysonian English.  Brandenburg isn't hedgerow country; the whitethorn  shines rather shyly in the edges of the woods--as here, where we have come to the next lake, the Krumme Lanke (crooked stream). 

Hawthorn at Krumme Lanke.  May 2016, my photo.

The crooked stream angles along: at one angle the water is blue as blue (see above)--and then at the next angle, at some little beach in the woods, it's green as green:

Krumme Lanke. May 2016, my photo.

On a summer weekend all these micro-beaches along the lake will be full of people, with their bicycles stacked against the trees (no, you can't drive your car right down to the water), picnicking and dangling their feet in the lake, taking the occasional swim. The other shore is a free-run zone for dogs (you can hear them bounding and barking on the far side of the water), and more of the shore on that side than this side has been planted with new reed-beds to filter the city runoff and keep the lake clean.  

The water is supposed to be pretty good for swimming, though there are things in the lake that are better not disturbed. Somewhere here on the lake bottom is a British bomber that crashed into the water in 1944, complete with remaining bombs, half-full gas tanks, and so on. About 1970 there were some preliminary moves to dredge it out; but the costs were too daunting, as the bits seemed considerably scattered across the lakebed, and the mud had settled fifteen feet deep on it in the years of comparative peace. (The water is horribly full of old munitions here in the north. On the Baltic beaches, where the storms roil old seabed material, you can pick up what look like pieces of amber--one of the treasures the sea does sometimes toss up--but they're really phosphorous lumps from old munitions. When they dry out they will ignite and kill you, or perhaps only burn you horribly. We hope there is nothing so hazardous here; and it's not so easy to disturb the meters of Berlin mud.) 

At the south end of Krumme Lanke, the little Wolfschluchtkanal--the wolf-gulch canal--leads us on to the next long and crooked lake, the Schlachtensee. Schlacht in German means battle, and one imagines at first some medieval fray down here, perhaps Heinrich the Illustrious and Otto-with-the-Arrow [see Teltowkanal 5 post, January 2015] having at each other, looking like the knights in medieval German miniatures who appear to be wearing buckets over their heads. But no, in a 13th century document (legal stuff, no pictures of bucket-heads), the lake appears as the Slatsee; and like so many Berlin place-name terms, slat is an early Slavic word that probably means swamp or morass (the other typical local place names come from words meaning mud) but then again it might mean something else. (If we wanted a fine literary phrase for this landscape, something like the garden of forking paths, or the wood at the world's end, could we call it the morass of uncertain meaning? Not that the Schlachtensee is so morass-like any more; the water is a good twenty-five feet deep and almost clean enough to drink. Not quite.)

Schlachtensee.  May 2016, my photo.

Oh,if you look in the right direction, it looks finely wild-woody out here, but it's really not. Berlin is good at maintaining this illusion of countryside in what is still really city, or at least dense suburb.

The path by the water is full of strollers and runners, and waterside villas peer down through the trees.

Villa on Schlachtensee. May 2016, my photo.

Not quite everything flowers white in the woods in May. The buttercups are in bloom in all kinds of odd little spots--in a patch of earth blown into the hollow of a tree, or between pieces of long-ago-fallen log.

Buttercups, fallen log.  May 2016, My photo.

The Japanese are said to have a term, "forest-bathing"--going out into the forest to let your mind soak in the forest-ness of it, to share the calm of the trees and bring your blood pressure down, and so forth.  This wouldn't be a bad place for it, where the summer woods fill the lake with green:

Schlachtensee. May 2016, my photo.

Doesn't always work, of course, to clear the spirits. The Germans, who suffer a bit from north-world gloom (not as badly as the Scandinavians, but it's the same sort of thing) tend to see the forest as a nice place to do away with yourself, if you are so inclined. Here where the lake-chain is coming close to the river Havel, there is just a little strip of the Grunewald between us and the Wannsee, the big bay of the Havel where Heinrich von Kleist--that renewer of German literature--shot himself and a woman acquaintance who wanted to be out of the world but hadn't learned to shoot. (How wonderful the language of Kleist's novellas is, simple and hard and natural as stone, in an age of often overstuffed prose.) She didn't want to go through with the last phases of cancer in a pre-anesthetic world; he was tired of his family beating on him for being a failure. (He knew he was too thin-skinned, he minded criticism more than was reasonable.)

Evening Mood (Abendstimmung), Schlachtensee, by Walter Leistikow, ca. 1895.
Photo from Wiki Commons.

The painter Walter Leistikow shot himself down here near Schlachtensee, as an alternative to going through the last phases of dying of syphilis in a pre-antibiotic world. He was a friend of some of the great painter-princes of his day, Max Liebermann and Lovis Corinth, but he wasn't as much of a success himself. He was a bete noire for Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose tastes in art ran to big animal statues and the like. The Kaiser grumbled about Leistikow: Er hat mir den ganzen Grunewald versaut. He's messed up the whole Grunewald for me, with his ugly pictures. --Though the verb versaut is a bit more picturesque: the Germans use pig-words to be expressive--it's pig-cold (schweinekalt) out there, or the prices at this store are pig-cheap (saubillig).  The Kaiser says, He's pigged up the whole forest for me. (People are sad in the woods for so many reasons.) 

We're at the end of the lake, not far from the next S-Bahn station; time to go home.