A Walk along the Wuhle

This morning I woke up in time to have a nice early breakfast with my mother and two youngest brothers. Plain Schrippen (buns) and croissants and a bread pretzel stick and so on, with marmalade, and coffee.

Three of us set forth before noon to Berlin-Mitte to browse the English and humanities books in Dussmann, as well as the music scores in the basement. I bought Bruch's violin concert in g minor, but — as I suspected — the piano reduction of the orchestral part is not piano-solo-friendly at first glance; and I don't recognize the violin part yet although I was convinced that it would sound familiar. In terms of English-speaking books, I saw that Michelle Obama's autobiography does not seem to be out in paperback yet; and in the foreign language book section I picked up Gösta Berlings saga hoping that at some point I'd finally begin reading Swedish.

Standing in the bus that was replacing the S-Bahn line whose tracks are under repair over the weekend, I broke off the return trip home when Ge. pointed out to me that I would be quite late to a walk with colleagues if I didn't go straight there. So I disembarked at Potsdamer Platz, jogged awkwardly from the large intersection to the U-Bahn entrance that was under construction and closed and then ran along the track of setts that marks the former location of the Berlin Wall across the lawn to the elevator which was amazingly quick to arrive, and just missed my train. The next train came in 4 minutes so it was no tragedy.

At Alexanderplatz, I waited up on the S3 platform as S7 and S9 train after train arrived and left, all touching on some of the same stations as the S3 line. I became too nervous and took a 'wrong' train for part of the route, to Ostkreuz. There I saw at last that the S3 train had a sparser schedule than the S7 and S9, but that there was no construction or anything that would block it from arriving. In the end, I disembarked at S-Bahnhof Köpenick with merely the expected 4 minutes' tardiness.

The S-Bahn journey itself was newly explored ground for me, after Ostkreuz was past. At Betriebsbahnhof Rummelsburg, for example, there was a magnificent industrial landscape with lines of rail tracks as far as the eye could see that partly exuded real pride in labour and technology. It was a mixture of epochs. A building that could not have been much older than thirty years was steaming in greater billows than ever in the winter cold. But there was also a haunting former brick roundhouse that suffers desuetude and has lost its windows likely to vandalism, that looked a bit older and more Prussian and obviously not so elegant. A pale brick water tower that must be a remnant of the age of the steam engine was less disruptive to the overall impression I have in retrospect, that the scene was a friendlier kind of Futurist scene, all 1920s curves and contours.

I liked that the residential area to the east has shed the monotonous DDR gloom. Instead you have the feeling — or I have the feeling — that pre-WWI Berlin has revived. You can imagine that working or middle-class people might afford their own home with its own acre, or you can see parents and children taking the train in chattering masses to leave town for a day's or weekend's getaway along stations that have purposely been brightened and decorated to attract them. The birch forest along the tracks felt natural and unregimented: its ground sank and rose again, old branches and trunks rotted fruitfully to prepare the way for more vegetation, it breathed and thrived in its thin-soiled way.

But if Wuhlheide was Brandenburg in feeling remote from the urban grind; and if a few of the buildings along the way also hinted at insouciance; Köpenick was Berlin again: shopping centres and densely plotted apartment buildings — but maybe less high than what you'd see in my neighbourhood — and traffic.



The colleagues and I walked along the Wuhle river until we reached Biesdorf. I thought I spotted a few early signs of spring — forsythia flowers and crumpled-looking winter aconites — along the way. It was formerly a town of its own but absorbed into Berlin in the early 1900s. I was shocked to see that we were in Marzahn-Hellersdorf, a district of Berlin around which many stereotypes hover: depressing East German architecture, apartment buildings in urban wastelands that don't have any nice shops or schools or community life of any sort planned into them, alcohol and drug abuse, right-wing sympathies (or antipathies, if you will), dead-end careers, etc. But we didn't see that here.

A hill rises above the town. It may look like a bump to the glance of the outsider, but if you know all the stories or if you find an unexpectedly safe footing on it during floods of human or natural catastrophe, it likely dominates the landscape like a mountain. Literally iron and bronze, in colour, at least — all right, it was really mostly grey or dark brown because it's January — the aged tree crowns breathed the atmosphere of long occupation. — Or so I've imagined, maybe especially after reading the relevant online encyclopaedia article and seeing that the area has been lived in for 3,000 years or so.

On this hill there is a palace from the 1860s, in 'Italianate late classicist style,' which had partly been in the hands of the Siemens family but then served as quarters for various admirable (library) and far less admirable (Nazi party) public functions. The location on the hill overlooking an old church is charming, the trees and the cobblestones of a steep drive that must have been bad for horses and coachmen, and then the clean lines of the landscaped trees behind the building. The building itself, not ill-suited for a summer in the foothills of the Alps, admittedly looked a little out of place in a Berlin winter.

Its façade has been painted pink but looks unpicturesquely mottled with grey or green at human-height. This is not due to mad design or lack of cleaning, upon closer inspection, but due to the frequent need to cover up graffiti.

Inside, the furnishing has been reduced to a white-painted interior with clean floors in honey-coloured laminate wood. Museum staff whose manner was pitched perfectly at 'friendly yet politely reserved,' likely to assuage the self-righteous rage of touchy visitors who'd rather die than be greeted, were attired in suits that I seem to remember were navy blue.

Beyond an atrium with a star shape in blond and dark wood cut into the floor, there was a café of three rooms and a niche. A reddish-brown chandelier hung in the middle of one of the rooms. And the chairs with pastel beige-pink pleather cushions were soft and thoroughly cushioned. From white-framed windows we had a view of the garden.

I had my doubts about the aesthetic, to be honest, because it didn't seem 100% harmonious. But I guess that there were budget constraints, and I feel that there was a sense of care and pride about the place anyway.

We wanted to drink and eat something, so we ordered cookies, cheesecake (I liked that the baker had tried something new: giving it a delicate touch of almond flavour instead of lemon), tea, caffè crema and cappuccino and an espresso there. And then the colleagues and I had a long talk about work.

The trip home was also nice, travelled together with the colleagues in the trains.