Lethargic Man (anag.)

In a café in central Aachen a few years ago, I found on the bookshelf a two-century-old tome, the name of which I forget, which was a (British, I might add) guide to the countries of the world. In the section on Germany, where for other countries the capital was listed, the author hedged a bit before settling on Vienna. (The story of whether Austria was or should be part of Germany between the advent of Napoleon and the mid-twentieth century is a fascinating one, which I might reserve for another blog post if anyone is interested.)

Which raised the question of how Berlin came to be the capital, if it was Vienna then. (One might also add that Aachen was itself the capital in the time of Charlemagne.) The answer turns out to be that because a unified Germany was driven by Prussia (and in particular the Prussian Prime Minister Bismarck), the capital of Prussia became the capital of Germany.

But this only pushes the question one level further back: how did Prussia come to dominate Germany? I'm not going to go here into how Prussia grew and ate up smaller German states during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; I'll skip back to its origin in the seventeenth century in the personal union (through marriage) of the Margraviate of Brandenburg, of which Berlin was the capital, with the Duchy of Prussia, which until that point was confined to the Baltic region and outside the Holy Roman Empire.

So now our question about Berlin shifts to the origin of Brandenburg, at which point I abandon Wikipedia and take you with me on a couple of bike rides. Whilst looking for interesting places to cycle to last September, I noticed a Jaczo Tower on the map. Having already cycled along a Jaczostraße nearby, my interest was piqued, and I turned to Wikipedia, where I read that Jaczo (a.k.a Iakša or Jaxa, meaning James) of Kopnik (today Köpenick, part of Berlin) was a Polish prince who in 1157 fought a German leader called Albrecht the Bear for possession of Brenna (today Brandenburg). Jaczo was defeated, and escaped by fleeing down a gorge to the river Havel. Wikipedia says the capture of Brenna is generally regarded as the beginning of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The tower is located at the head of the gorge Jaczo fled down.

I was intrigued to have a look at it, and here it is, pointed out by an admirer of Albrecht the Bear:

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On further investigation, however, it transpired the tower, which marks the route Jaczo used to escape to the Havel, only dates from the start of the twentieth century and was built by an industrialist called Beringer, whose family claimed descent from Albrecht the Bear. I found this interesting, because -ing meaning "people of" or "descendants of" is something you get a lot in English placenames (e.g. Birmingham, Washington) but I haven't otherwise seen in Germany.

Nine months after this bike ride of mine, I discovered while making another one that the story continues further. Jaczo had shaken his followers off by plunging into the river, but the Hafel is 750m wide at that point, and his horse didn't have the strength to get across. When Jaczo's cry for help to the Slavic god Triglav ("the Three-Headed") found no answer, he promised in his distress loyalty to the God of his enemies, if He would let him reach the eastern bank safe and sound.

Then, says the legend, it seemed to him as though a hand took hold of his raised shield, and held him above water until the prince and his horse finally reached a tongue of land on the far side. There Jaczo, in gratitude, hung his shield on an oak and recognised the Christian God.

I've been cycling along Schildhornweg for almost a year now, but never until now realised why it was so called (partly because I didn't realise that „Horn“ in this context means "monument") until I reached this monument (dating from 1845) on the peninsula where Jaczo reached the shore:

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(In case it wasn't obvious, that's a shield hanging halfway up the monument on the far side; but the only clear line of sight from the other side involved photographing into the sun, so I stuck with this shot.)

Why is there a field here, surrounded on all sides by the Parforceheide forest a bit under a mile outside of the Berlin city boundary?

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Answer: This is Wüste Mark (Waste March), which name apparently indicates it is the site of an abandoned village. There was a village called Gerhardsdorf here (or possibly somewhere else nearby with a similar name) in the Middle Ages; possibly it was wiped out by the Black Death.

In the 1910s, an organisation called the Zweckverband Groß-Berlin bought up large amounts of forests and open space around Berlin so that the growing city should have green spaces available in perpetuity to its inhabitants; for reasons I do not understand, Wüste Mark was included in this, even though the surrounding land was not. When in 1920 the city borders were greatly expanded, Wüste Mark became an exclave of the city.

You can probably guess where this is going, now: When the city was divided, this ended up as an exclave of West Berlin surrounded by East Berlin. There were quite a few of these; I already posted about the village of Steinstücken, for which a road corridor was created in a deal between East and West Berlin; Wüste Mark is the closest uninhabited one to me.

In 1959 a West Berlin farmer called Hans Wendt rented the land, and got special permission to drive his tractor through the Checkpoint Bravo border control on the motorway to farm the land.

In 1988 another land deal was done, which transferred Wüste Mark and two other exclaves to East Berlin. Astonishingly, Wendt was not informed of this, but he died shortly afterwards anyway.

The irony is that though no miniature Berlin Wall was erected around the field (because it was uninhabited), when I went to have a look on Monday I found it surrounded by an electric fence (presumably to stop people trampling on the crops).

On Whit Monday, I took advantage of the public holiday and the presence of my in-laws (to look after Rafi) to go on a bike ride to the northernmost section of the Berlin Wall Trail (which turned out to be a 43 mile ride in total).

On the edge of Hohen Neuendorf (or, technically, just across the state line and former border in Frohnau), there was a substantial exhibition on the Wall, located outside of one of the few remaining watchtowers.

I found this exhibition interesting not least because it featured an infoboard about the East German border guards who portrayed the Wall. Rather than being psychopaths who volunteered for the chance to fire upon their fellow citizens, many of them were soldiers who had to serve involuntarily on the Wall, and feared being put into the position of having to open fire on people trying to escape to the West:

One day in October 1989 Holger Westphal found himself with fifteen soldiers and a Kalashnikov in his lorry in the Berlin hinterland, to protect this area. On the day in question demonstrations were announced, therefore the security level was somewhat raised.

Shortly before leaving the lorry, the officer gave the order to shoot in the case of an attempted border crossing. Later this order was, however, disclaimed. The fifteen soldiers, who had to take up positions every fifty metres, decided in advance though not to shoot, which would have been punished as high treason.

(Translation by myself.) Westphal goes on to say the fall of the Wall was his happiest day as a soldier.

From another infoboard, after mentioning that the Wall stood 2-3m inside East German territory:

Feared by me were the inspection rounds on the other side of the Wall. As a soldier I had to proceed with a machine pistol, behind me an officer equipped with a pistol.

Sometimes it happened that French soldiers waved (this being alongside the French occupation zone of West Berlin); I could just run away and make off. Then I heard a quiet click. The officer behind me had released the safety on his pistol. And it was fully clear that he would not fire upon the French. Just don't stumble now, I thought in a panic.

Another infoboard related the life of those living in houses in Hohen Neuendorf in the border zone, whom people had to get permission to visit, which was almost never granted to non-relatives. Guests were not allowed inside their houses, which meant that to receive guests they had to carry tables and chairs onto the street; and their children were never able to host birthday parties.

Another showed how at Bernauer Straße in central Berlin, the border area was progressively widened: At first, a wall was only constructed across street mouths, and the windows of houses facing into West Berlin were walled up. Later, a border strip was created and the houses were demolished, except for their façade, which continued to serve as part of the Wall; later still that was replaced with the well-known concrete wall with a pipe on top (to make it difficult to purchase handholds for anyone trying to climb over).

As part of this, part of a cemetery adjoining Bernauer Straße was turned into the killing field in front of the wall, and the graves were moved. I couldn't help but find myself wondering, though, whether this was because the authoritarian communist regime viewed having soldiers patrolling through the cemetery as a descration, or whether they were worried about the dead defecting to the West...

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As you can see, the forest is beginning to reestablish itself there, but obviously there are no trees under thirty-one years of age.

A relic of the border post:

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In the summer of 1962, the 42-year-old West Berlin resident Hermann Döbler was shot dead near the old border crossing when his sports boat entered East German border waters in the Teltow Canal. His female companion was badly wounded and permanently disabled. Although the boat had already turned back, the East German border guards deliberately fired aimed shots at its occupants.

Most people probably think of the Wright brothers as the first to successfully pull off powered heavier-than-air flight, but the reality is more that they were the first to reach the finishing line, so to speak, without succumbing to an aviation disaster along the way.

Amongst those who were ahead of the Wright brothers in the field was the British aviation pioneer Percy Pilcher, who was planning a trial flight with a motor-driven aeroplane in 1899 when a strut broke on his hang-glider and he plunged to his death. (Some of you might have, along with me, seen a fascinating Horizon about him in 2003.)

But Pilcher in turn had his researches influenced (as did the Wright brothers) by German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, who was the first to fly a heavier-than-air aircraft, after studying (and publishing a book on) the avian wing as the basis for artificial flight. Lilienthal developed eighteen different glider types, and carried out more than two thousand flights, but died when he was unable to recover his hang-glider from a stall in 1896.

Lilienthal used the rubble from a brickworks near where he lived in Lichterfelde, near (now in) Berlin, to construct a 15m high hill from which to conduct his flights, and I went for a look at it as part of a bike ride the other day.

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Leicht ist es wahrlich uns Menschen nicht gemacht, frei wie der Vogel das Luftreich zu durchmessen. Aber die Sehnsucht danach lässt uns keine Ruhe; ein einziger großer Vogel, welcher über unserm Haupte seine Kreise zieht, erweckt in uns den Wunch, gleich ihm am Firmament dahinzuschweben.

It is truly not made easy for us humans to sweep, free as a bird, through the airy realm. But the desire for it leaves us no rest; a single large bird describing its circles above our heads awakes in us the wish to float along in the firmament like it.

—Otto Lilienthal, „Weshalb ist es so schwierig das Fliegen zu erfinden“, in Prometheus Nr. 261, Berlin, 1895

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This is just one of quite a few disused airports and airfields around Berlin, but this is probably the least readily identifiable today. Others include include Tempelhof Airport, which you might know through its appearance (actually a lookalike building) in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, which was once the world's largest building, where you can now go skateboarding along the runways, and where some of the grass between the taxiways has been turned into a birdlife sanctuary; Gatow Airport, which was once an RAF base; and the recently shut Tegel, which was named after German aviation pioneer Otto Lilienthal, on whom see my next post (once I've got around to translating an infoboard).

In today's post, I continue my little tour of the lesser-known sites of Berlin with the grave of Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811), playwright, novelist and journalist. It's not often that you'll find me visiting a grave, but this one is in a cohen-friendly location.

Photo by Dennis Kornek, on Google Maps

There's a park named after Kleist in Berlin, which is how I know his name; but I think he's reasonably well-known to Germans. He had the bad luck to fall in (platonic) love with a terminally ill woman, Henriette Vogel, at a time of financial despair. The two travelled to the Kleiner Wannsee (a subsidiary channel of the River Havel), near (now in) Berlin...

Photo by Jasch Zacharias, on Google Maps

...then on the banks of the river he shot first her then himself. His grave was erected at the site:

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The inscription on the one side reads:

Er lebte sang und litt
in trüber schwerer Zeit,
er suchte hier den Tod
und fand Unsterblichkeit.

He lived, sung and suffered
In a cheerless hard time.
He sought here death
And found immortality.

On the other side it reads „Nun, o Unsterblichkeit, bist du ganz mein“ ("Now, o immortality, you are completely mine").

If anyone wants to know more, here's the infoboard at the site (click through for higher resolution):

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...complete with a reflection of myself to prove I was actually there.

I was browsing Google Maps the other day, looking for new places to go on the cycle rides that have replaced commuting as my form of exercise whilst I am working for home, and noticed a peculiar finger of land pointing northeast, at the northernmost point of the city-state of Berlin:

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Only a hundred or so metres wide, it narrows to half of that at its northernmost point. Aside from wondering why on earth the boundary did that,^* I thought: I have to go there and see what it looks like, at Berlin's northernmost point.

* Almost certainly due to the interchange of land ownership by the nobility (and minor royalties) during the Middle Ages (due to buying, selling, and marriages) that led to the internal divisions of pre-1945 Germany having such a fractal complexity; my guess is that the boundaries of Buch were determined by which lord owned which land at some point, and then in 1920 the entirety of Buch was glommed onto Berlin.

So I did. It was a substantial bike ride—a full hour less loose change from home—and what I was surprised to find was that although the end of the finger of land ran alongside a path, the northwest side ran along no obvious property boundary, but rather through the middle of a field:

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(Berlin coloured by me in purple, Brandenburg in natural colours; boundary demarcation approximate.)

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There was also no indication whatsoever that this marked a state boundary.