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- Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin's Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house's various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city's familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.
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‘From the first moment I heard Kirsty Bell read from her writing, I have yearned for the book she was then working on. And now here it is, perfect and perfectly balanced, a clear-eyed and beautifully written account about place, about consciousness. I treasure The Undercurrents, and so will you.’
— Hilton Als, author of White Girls
‘It is easy to be carried along by these submerged currents, by the momentum of the prose, the motion through a resisting city. As in other classics of urban discovery, the personal becomes universal, and the past that demands to live in the present is revealed like a shining new reef. As we return, time and again, to the solitary figure at the window.’
— Iain Sinclair, author of London Orbital
‘With The Undercurrents, Kirsty Bell does for Berlin what Lucy Sante has done for New York and Rebecca Solnit for San Francisco; she tells the stories recorded in the city’s stone and water, and in the hearts of its inhabitants.’
— Dan Fox, author of Limbo
‘I read this watery, engrossing book in the bath, following along as Kirsty Bell’s reflective curiosity leads her onward along the Landwehr Canal, in and out of the archives, novels, memoirs and stories of her building and her neighbourhood. Evocative and fascinating, The Undercurrents is a liquid psychogeography of Berlin that had me mulling over the psychic charge of place not only where Bell lives, but where I live too.’
— Lauren Elkin, author of Flâneuse
‘Kirsty Bell has achieved a real work of art: she tells of Berlin’s sunken past as a freshly emerged present – and she explains the energy of this city from the history of the people, the streets, and the hopes that have shaped it.’
— Florian Illies, author of 1913: The Year before the Storm
THE UNDERCURRENTS A STORY OF BERLIN
KIRSTY BELL
CONTENTS
PRELUDE
A large pool of water had appeared overnight on our kitchen floor, so silent and unexpected it seemed to be a mirage. Tap water had been dribbling from a loose pipe beneath the sink and leaking noiselessly down through the two storeys below us. This scene, which we woke up to on the morning of our son’s ninth birthday, was the most dramatic but not the only incident of water damage. For several months before and after, a collection of plastic buckets and basins had become a semi-permanent, wandering feature, brought out to catch leaks in different parts of our home. One evening, a few months after the kitchen flood, our elder son noticed water dripping from the plasterwork rosette in the centre of the living room ceiling. Looking up, we saw an ominous spreading patch of brown as water leaking from upstairs traversed the terrain above our heads. Water always finds its way. My sons and I fetched the buckets and basins once more and laid out towels to soak it up. It was as if our new apartment was trying to tell us something.
The apartment we had lived in before on the east side of the city, with an Edenic plasterwork of vines, fruits and flowers twisting around the columns of its façade, exerted no such influence. We were there for ten years – husband and wife, two sons, two cats – and throughout this time, regardless of our difficulties, that apartment was consistently neutral. It did not make its presence felt or stir up any overt feelings. It was simply a container, benevolent if anything, in enabling the maintenance of the status quo. Our new apartment, closer to the boys’ school in the west, was awkward from day one. Aggravating and interfering, it kept producing warning signals that could not be ignored. It intervened and forced itself into the role of the protagonist.
—
There are things you can see and others you can only feel, that you sense in a different way, as a whisper in your mind, or a weight in your bones. A nugget of doubt had crystallized and been disturbing the everyday flow of my thoughts for weeks already. Like a silty clot of debris, its vague contours had gained definition when we moved east to west across the axis of the city. Its shape was of unhappiness. And now here it was, clotting up my mind as I paced between the many rooms of our extravagantly proportioned new home. A cultivated emptiness in the mind can allow for rippling, drift and snag. It can draw out things that don’t want to be seen.
That early morning encounter with a glassy pool of water on the kitchen floor was an unequivocal sign of rupture. Something had broken its banks and could no longer be contained. After years of emotional repression, subconsciously practised to maintain a functional family life, this spontaneous display, this uncalled-for outburst – this flood – was a symbol of almost hysterical clarity. It asked for an equally extreme response, which duly came in a sudden, brutal and final break. A severing of the family unit, whereby one part was broken off and the other three parts remained together. My husband went away for work and never came back to our home.
—
Water always finds its way. Winding through the crevices of this old building. Seeping into smoothly plastered and painted surfaces. Appearing suddenly in damp bruises of mould in high-up corners. Inducing patches of plasterwork to blister off external walls. There was always a logical explanation, a cause to put it down to. Heavy rainfall on unsealed roof tiles; pipes drilled into or fixed up faultily; blocked drains in overflowing showers. The builders at work on the penthouse upstairs were clearly a slapdash bunch. Still, the relentlessness of these various cases began to feel oppressive. It was as if the surfaces of the apartment refused to be sealed; its infrastructure would not hold tight. Whenever it rained, I was anxious. As the months progressed, I felt an urge to map out the stains and marks that had been left on the ceilings, walls and floors. If I were to plot out their topography, could I devise a map to read and make sense of these minor domestic disasters?
I had a persistent and uneasy feeling of intent behind these incidents. One that could not be seen straight on, but rather accessed sidelong through some form of divination. Like the hydromantic method of scrying, reading the ripples on a surface of water, lit by the light of the moon at best. As the boundaries of the apartment became porous, containment was no longer an option, and neither was silence. There would be no more holding things at bay. External events, emotional truths, historical incidents, all would find a way to make themselves known.
By the time the pool of water appeared on the kitchen floor, our marriage was already broken, but this occurrence induced its final rupture. In contrast to the steady drip of sadness that we had both grown accustomed to and comfortably ignored over the years, the break was violent. The flood precipitated a crisis that extended beyond the many hours spent mopping up. A crisis for which the apartment seemed to share responsibility, brought to a head through its very own plumbing. I was grateful for this sign of what seemed to me like solidarity, a compassionate act that fortunately caused no lasting physical damage. Our own wooden floorboards dried out fast and no trace on them was left behind. The apartment below us, that bore the brunt of the leakage, was in-between tenants and empty. The enormous dehumidifiers, brought in to dry the walls and air, could do their noisy work without disturbing anyone. In the painter’s studio on the first floor, the flood ran down the only wall on which no canvas was hanging. Miraculously the huge paintings on the other two walls, which she had spent the last six months painstakingly composing, were spared. The glass globe lamp in the ground floor entrance hall, in which the last dregs collected, was simply unscrewed and emptied out, like a goldfish bowl no longer needed.
‘Sometimes when water is flowing it means the house is mourning,’ I read online. ‘There is an excess of emotion that needs to be expelled.’ The image that formed on the surface of the pool of water did not just reflect a broken home, it also reflected the house itself. These tears of mourning were the building’s own. It would soon become my subject.
—
At the same time as all this water damage was troubling the apartment, I began to notice how insistently the view from my kitchen window was presenting itself. It seemed to draw me to it, away from the calamities occurring inside and towards its offer of a broad sky, treetops and buildings leading towards the horizon. This position became a recurrent refrain in the passage of working days at home. A female figure at the window, seen from the back and looking out. Motionless at this threshold, the body separate from its thoughts, as the inside is separate from the outside. In the building’s vernacular, the window is the cut.
The first ever photographic image, taken by Joseph Niépce in 1826, was the view from the window of his studio. It shows a shadowy arrangement of soft grey planes and solids, the angle of a roof. Twelve years later, in 1838, the first photograph of a human being, by Louis Daguerre, was the view outside his window. A sweeping vista down a tree-lined street, flanked with imposing buildings but otherwise deserted, save two static, ghostly figures. These early photographs were a form of basic research, an examination of material facts that started at the most obvious point: the view, from the inside looking out. A location of self within a place, a certain kind of anchoring. Christopher Isherwood in Goodbye to Berlin famously adopts the same approach. ‘From my window, the deep solemn massive street,’ begins the chapter titled ‘Berlin Diary’ from 1930. Isherwood himself becomes the photographic apparatus: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ But the female figure at my window isn’t quite so passive as she looks across at Berlin’s cityscape. She is wondering about orientation, just how did she come to end up in this place? And what is this place in any case, whose surface seems so fraught with secrets?
—
The building we moved into in the summer of 2014 stands on the banks of Berlin’s Landwehr Canal: with its feet in the west, it looks across the water towards the east. In Berlin, this city of extremes and interrupted histories, the simple denominations of east and west are loaded with ideological import. Location, literally, is make or break. The plot on which my building stands was peripheral in the mid-1800s when it came to first be built upon, lying just beyond the customs wall that had circled the centre for a good hundred years. But in the fast-paced industrial development of the decades that followed, the city’s axes were refigured, and this plot came to occupy a ring-side seat looking onto its theatre of action: the centre of government, journalism, transport and metropolitan life. When Berlin was divided into sectors in the second half of the twentieth century, it shifted again to the desolate outskirts. But now in the early 2000s, its position in a capital city still adjusting to unification, has come to be re-centred.
Berlin’s sharply defined residential districts each possess a distinctive character, but while this building straddles several, it doesn’t fit squarely in any one. Though officially in Kreuzberg, it occupies its northernmost tip, a block from the border with the Tiergarten district, while Schöneberg spreads out behind. This area is not densely inhabited, but spacious and full of hesitant gaps, temporal jumps and wild moments of greenery. The Canal banks are called the Ufer, and ours the Tempelhofer Ufer, the banks that originally lead to the village of Tempelhof. Despite the area’s comparative spaciousness, the view from my third-floor kitchen window is dense with a patchwork of city history. But beyond its visible components, something else seems to be at work. An unsettling sense of a past that snags attention but won’t let itself be clearly seen. A downward pull that seems to halt the present.
I begin searching out historical photographs, literature and archives, combing them for evidence of this place. Books about its architecture and early urban development. Literature from a century ago that took place in the streets around me. Grim online address books from the 1930s, inventories of all the houses with Jewish occupants. Eyewitness accounts from the last street battles of the Second World War. I watch Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire, which I saw as a teenager when it first came out, in Manchester’s art-house cinema in 1987. Now I scan the screen for places I recognize and views familiar from my current daily life. They are there: the train tracks that run behind my house, the swans afloat on the Canal, the ruined railway station I can see from my window in the middle distance. I begin to plot my own experience on to these accumulated layers of time, words and images. This is a beginning.
—
In the summer of 2001, I had arrived in Berlin from New York, one more in the most recent swell of newcomers, to a city formed historically by its successive waves of immigrants. Following a strong gut instinct that overrode cautions of the rational mind, I had left my job, my friends, my New York studio and moved in with my German boyfriend, to his vast Berlin apartment. All high ceilings, pale grey linoleum, barely any furniture, and the biggest bathroom I’d ever seen. Landing a good ten years after the city’s unification, I already felt belated. Artists, musicians, writers, film makers, actors, designers had been flocking here for years by then, inhabiting Berlin’s derelict apartments, setting up studios and turning any abandoned building into a bar, club or gallery. The sheer space was a palpable relief after the density and compression of life in New York City. There was a wildness here bordering at times on desolation. So much was empty, so much uncertainty. I had just turned thirty and was looking for change. The availability and undefined potential of this place seemed to offer an openness in which one could act. Perhaps it could help me start to write. I packed two suitcases, sublet my New York studio with everything that was in it, and left to begin a new chapter in this unknown place.
When I arrived on his doorstep, my boyfriend was living on Mauerstraße, near Checkpoint Charlie, in the dropped-pin centre of the city. A strangely forlorn neighbourhood, it seemed devoid of purpose or atmosphere, populated mainly by straggling bunches of tourists, and not a tree in sight. Even the buildings here appeared withdrawn, eyes downcast to their own foundations. It seemed ironic to live on a street named Wall Street, in this city bent on self-invention following the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the Mauer its street name referred to was a different wall: the eighteenth-century customs wall that once had stood nearby. The view from my boyfriend’s bedroom window was taken up entirely by an enormous brand-new office block, designed by Philip Johnson and finished in 1997 in Berlin’s post-unification boom. There was something awkward about this slick and massive building, as if it had been put down in the wrong place. I didn’t know it then, but the American Business Center, as it was called, was built on the site of the Bethlehemskirche, an eighteenth-century church – one of the city’s oldest, until it was destroyed by bombs in 1943. In 2012, a Spanish artist installed a steel framework outlining the form of the disappeared church, but when we lived there, I knew nothing of the disappeared building, this missing puzzle piece. A similar unease and silence surrounded that house and the one I live in now. Something reticent and dislocated. An uncanny weight hanging in the air.
Shortly after I arrived in Berlin, my boyfriend and I left Mauerstraße and moved to the more accommodating neighbourhood of Prenzlauer Berg in the city’s former East. In an area about to be reconfigured by the homogenizing forces of gentrification, we unwittingly ticked all the relevant boxes. Within six months I was pregnant, and we became one of this neighbourhood’s many young families. Here we had our babies, bought our first flat, tied the knot and adopted pets. Caught up in the on-going task of welding family and work into one seamless whole, we got distracted and lost sight of each other. We let our marriage run aground. A fact that was not yet apparent, however, when twelve years later, we moved across the city, from centre east to centre west.
—
Whoever ‘seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging,’ advises Walter Benjamin, Berlin-born and a resident on-and-off until his exile in the early 1930s. Is this a kind of geomancy, to read the ground of history? ‘It is undoubtedly useful to plan excavations methodically,’ writes Benjamin. ‘Yet no less indispensable is the cautious probing of the spade in the dark loam.’ I start digging in this medium, trawling and sifting through the past, without knowing really what to look for. Retrieving memories that aren’t your own is a messy business full of traps. But perhaps it can elucidate the porosity of a place and how its past affects its present? So I begin at the most obvious point: here alone at the kitchen window, on the inside looking out.
I set myself the task of writing a portrait of the city. An impossible task perhaps, but the house seems somehow to suggest it. What follows concerns memory, the past and its retrieval, but it does not follow a single path, or proceed step by step. The memory of a place does not lie flat on a straight line of time; it is syncretic and simultaneous, layered in thin sediments of event and passage, inhabitation and mood. It is a compound of assimilated actions bound up in the material of streets and houses, or recorded in words and images that gather over time, or else it has no tangible form and must be felt out, reimagined.
When we found this house on the banks of the Landwehr Canal, I had thought of living on the water as a way to find a current. To write about the place in which I live could be a way to make an anchor and counteract the drift. Particularly if the things I write of are themselves the stuff of drift – flotsam of the past washed up on shores of consciousness. But this subject – this city – refuses neat containment. The writing has become sprawling and unruly, and so it begins to resemble the city itself, spread out wide without any discernible banks. Berlin.
I. DITCH
There is an enduring appeal to living on the water. Its surface suggests a depth otherwise unavailable in an urban landscape. A break in its concrete crust and relief from the relentless push of traffic, the flow of people, the upward thrust of buildings. Water simply lies there and offers back reflections – of sky, of trees, of passing birds, of the buildings lined up on its banks. An inverted image of the city through which it courses.
A canal is not a river, however; it doesn’t course through anything. Its path is carved out and its waters contained by constructed concrete banks. Some days the canal outside my window seems to move in one direction, some days in the other. But mostly it is still and barely moves at all. A blue ribbon laid out on the map, from northeast to southwest across the city, with thirty-six bridges to hold it in place.
The Landwehr Canal is the first thing I see when I look out of the kitchen window. But it is not like the English canals I have known. The Manchester Ship Canal is narrow, deep and dirty, designed to serve the industries in the redbrick warehouses and factories alongside of which it skirts. The Bridgewater Canal, where my parents would take my brothers and I for weekend walks, runs straight and flat on raised embankments with single-file footpaths either side. The Regent’s Canal I got to know in my early twenties in North London is just as narrow, carving its pass through the built-up inner city. My Berlin canal is generous: broad and tree-lined, as wide as the two-lane streets that flank it, as it glides through Berlin’s residential districts. The two lanes of traffic on my side of the canal lead straight down into Kreuzberg, while the two lanes on the opposite bank head up through the Tiergarten district to Charlottenburg in the west. ‘Berlin was built from the barge’, an old saying goes, and indeed, rather than serving smoky, dirty industries, this canal was used primarily to build the city’s houses.
A pencil drawing from the early 1840s by Adolph Menzel, Berlin’s foremost artist of the nineteenth century, shows the flooded Schafgraben, or sheep’s ditch, as one stretch of the canal was known back then. A gnarled tree trunk bent over double is submerged in a still-standing pool of floodwater. A fence of wooden planks shores up the water on the right, while the flank of a house, its back turned away, is sketched out on the left.
The Landwehr Canal follows the path of the old Schafgraben, or Landwehrgraben, as it was more commonly known. This defensive boundary running east–west was laid out in the 1400s. Landwehr, or the defence of the land, was crucial in these early years, when the Hohenzollern Prince-Electors took hold of this small trading town – an unremarkable place save its position as a gateway between Hamburg, the Baltic and the East. Their determination to transform it into a formidable hub of politics, power and administration, was backed up by an army of considerable size. From this point on Berlin’s power grew, consolidated through a combination of rigid Prussian bureaucracy and brute militaristic force. When the Kingdom of Prussia was established in the early 1700s, with Berlin now its capital, the path of the Landwehr Ditch was formalized. It served to channel floods and high waters away from the grand architectures of the new city centre, and towards the sleepy rural outskirts seen in Menzel’s pencil sketch.
—
When I search for the Landwehr Canal online, two things come up immediately. The first is a reference to a gruesome song from the Weimar years about a corpse found floating in its waters. The second is a newspaper headline from 4 January 2009: ‘Twenty-one year-old crashes car into the Landwehr Canal’.
A photograph shows the rear-end of a black compact car, ropes attached to its two back wheels, being hauled up out of the water. It is not the first car that ended up in the canal, the article tells us. In February 2002, a thirty-one-year-old missed a curve and too crashed into the water. That summer, a twenty-two-year-old woman drove into it, as did another, no age given, in December 2006. On 3 November 2007, a twenty-four-year-old woman drove her car into the canal, for no reason that could be discerned. That woman escaped to the car’s roof as it sank into the water, and was rescued by police who brought her to shore at the corner of Tempelhofer Ufer by the Schöneberger Bridge. This corner is almost in front of my building. Would I have witnessed this accident had I lived here already? Would I have seen the woman, frantic and soaking, clambering onto the roof of her car, waving for help as it sank beneath the glassy surface? Would I have been the one to help? To call the police, and rush downstairs, to stand on the bridge and throw her the red and white life-ring that hangs, ready and waiting for service, on the yellow-painted railings of the Schöneberger Bridge?
—
It was not until 1840 that plans were made to turn the Landwehr Ditch into a ship-worthy thoroughfare. These plans were drawn up by Peter Joseph Lenné, celebrated landscape architect turned city planner. Born in Bonn in 1789 to a family of gardeners, Lenné had arrived in Berlin, young and ambitious, in 1816. He began immediately in the service of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and was set to the future King’s estates and parks in Potsdam, relieving their stiff formal symmetry with a fluid archipelago of lakes and land, meandering bays and copses of trees. The ‘landscape garden’, with its appearance of a nature left free to run its course, was Lenné’s particular talent and, as he liked to say, water was his main material. His vision resonated with the aesthetically attuned Crown Prince, enamoured of the trappings of pomp and ceremony, and Lenné was quickly elevated to the position of Chief Royal Gardener. By 1838 he was living in a newly built villa in Tiergarten, with his wife ‘Fritzchen’, two old parrots and several generations of Newfoundland dogs. A year later the street on which his villa stood would be renamed Lennéstraße.
In 1833, Lenné had begun work on the redesign of the Tiergarten, Berlin’s oldest park. Back in the fifteenth century, the Hohenzollern princes had turned its marshy forests into their private hunting grounds. Lenné had the Tiergarten in his sights as early as 1818 when, only two years into his job as gardener’s assistant in Potsdam, he submitted a proposal to the Crown for its redesign. This faded drawing, which I find in a catalogue of his complete works, shows the Tiergarten’s original radial axes embellished with an embroidery of watery pools, open meadows and finely looping paths. Such elements devise a perambulation not fixed on destination or the formal promenade, but rather on the sensual experience of walking from densely shaded woods onto broad sunny lawns, along grassy banks and over gently arching bridges. This precocious vision, unfettered by practicalities, was swiftly rejected at the time. But the modified version Lenné submitted in 1833, this time bearing the official stamp of the Royal Court and Garden Directorate, was embraced. ‘In the service of His Majesty the King, I am concerned to transform the Tiergarten of Berlin into a healthy and pleasant place for the relaxation of the residents of the capital city,’ declared Lenné in his successful proposal. His Tiergarten was to become Berlin’s most public place, a Volksgarten as he put it – a Garden for the People – where all strands of civic society could gather, across the strata of class and income, for the first time in the city’s history.
Lenné’s concept was to extract a romantic, picturesque landscape from the existing raw and marshy terrain. He drained much of its forest areas to accommodate winding footpaths, which wove through clusters of trees and fragrant shrubbery, opening out onto broad green meadows traversed by streams and connected by bridleways. Serpentine lakes were dotted with little islands and crossed by countless bridges. Bodies of water and outlets of land intermingled until it was no longer clear which was island and which mainland. An infinitely spreading country landscape was conjured within the confines of the park. With few clear lines of sight, the Tiergarten was not to be a thoroughfare, but rather a destination in itself, a place to relax and indulge in the experience of simply passing time amongst the reviving elements of water and nature. Offering the privacy of shaded seclusion as well as open lawns on which to gather, observe and be observed, Lenné’s vision marked the emergence of leisure within the urban landscape. It was a foil to the city’s rapid growth and industrial development, which by this time was drawing ever more peasants in from the countryside to an urban working life.
—
When I arrived in Berlin in the summer of 2001 and moved into the apartment on Mauerstraße, I came to the Tiergarten to sit in the grass and work in the sun, amongst dog walkers, playing children and surprisingly naked sunbathers. I was tackling my first real writing job, composing hundred-word texts for a compendium on contemporary art. When I needed a break, I would ride my bike along the winding paths, invariably getting lost, my sense of direction befuddled by the fluid interchange of meadow, woods, and water. Even now after all these years I still can’t find my way. The park I get lost in is Lenné’s Volksgarten, his Garden for the People.
This was also Walter Benjamin’s park. He spent his early childhood years here and in the surrounding Tiergarten neighbourhood. His family home as well as that of his grandmother were a short walk from the park which to him exuded a maze-like influence. On the one hand, this place ‘unlike every other, seemed open to children,’ but it was nevertheless ‘distorted by difficulties and impracticalities,’ confusion, inaccessibility and dashed hopes. Benjamin’s description in his book of reminiscences is thick with the haze of childhood perceptions. The Tiergarten park was unknowable, a place full of secret corners, heard of but never discovered.
Although Lenné authored the plans for the Tiergarten that still exists today, he did not oversee its final execution. Frustrated by small-minded Prussian civil servants who quibbled over paperwork, withheld payments and objected to even the slightest of deviations from procedures stated in the plans, he resigned in 1838. By this time in any case, his interest in landscape had expanded to take in urban-planning of a socially-orientated kind. A visit to England in 1822, which at that time was further along the one-way road to industrialization, convinced him that the pressures of city life must be alleviated through light, air and greenery. From then on, he designated himself a ‘Garden Engineer’. As the population expanded, more than doubling between 1820 and 1848 to reach over 400,000, Lenné imagined a city designed to counteract these pressures. In 1840 he presented a grandly titled plan to the Interior Ministry: ‘Radial Geometry, Synthesis of City and Landscape, and Decorative Border Areas for the Royal Seat Berlin’. This was his vision of a lush garden city that would accommodate and care for its ever-growing citizenry.
The central aspect of Lenné’s grand plan was the canalization of the Landwehr Ditch. This would drain the marshlands in the southeast, alleviate the busiest part of the River Spree, and provide a comfortable means of transport for the city’s expanding industries. The canal was to follow the meandering form of a natural riverbed, accompanied by avenues of trees and greenery. Once again, the waterways were the soul of Lenné’s plan.
Running six and a half miles long, the Landwehr Canal was to be lined by a broad shaded boulevard with double rows of trees, 5,518 of which were to be planted along its length:
On Köpenicker Feld 888 lime trees, up to Potsdamer Chaussee 1240 lime trees and 1240 elms, from Potsdamer Chaussee to Zoologischer Garten 534 buckeye chestnuts and 534 oak trees, up to Charlottenburger Chaussee 151 limes and 151 elms, and up to the opening into the Spree 390 silver poplars and 390 sweet chestnuts.
A sketch from 1846, creased and yellowing along its folds, stamped with Lenné’s official Royal Gardener seal, shows two options for the planting along the westerly banks of the Tempelhofer Ufer, where my house later would be built. In aerial view and cross-section, rows of trees and borders of low shrubs are finely drawn and shaded in pale washes of green and brown. No tarmac surface or relentless traffic, just a soft dirt track and peaceful shade beneath which to walk along the water’s edge.
The Landwehr Canal was opened to waterborne traffic in September 1850. In less than a decade, the tranquil waterlogged scene that Menzel had depicted was replaced by the bustling and active waterways of a city in the making.
—
In search of more of Menzel’s drawings from this period of Berlin’s development, I visit the library of the Kupferstichkabinett, which holds the drawing collection of the Gemäldegalerie, the Museum for Paintings near to Potsdamer Platz. It is a short bike ride from my home: left up the canal, past two bridges and over the third, the Potsdamer Bridge, that leads to the Kulturforum. This cluster of museums was planned in the mid-1980s to house the portion of the city’s art collection that had ended up in West Berlin’s hands. It was only finished in the late 1990s, however, by which point the lay of the land had changed irreversibly. Unlike the stately steel and glass modernism of the Neue Nationalgalerie at the nearby canal corner, there is something oddly municipal about these brick buildings set back off the main street, huddling behind the car park that surrounds the nineteenth-century St Matthäus Church. It is always surprising to find the phenomenal collection of Cranachs, Holbeins, Van Eycks and Rubens sequestered in their lower halls.
A man in a white lab coat behind the desk in the Drawings’ Department Library informs me that they have Menzel’s entire estate. Over 900 drawings in all. What is it that I want to see? I am looking for early works, from 1840 to 1860, but the lab-coated man tells me that the collection is arranged by subject, not chronology. It’s hard to say what subjects I am looking for. Local landscapes? Buildings? Trees? Vague energetic undercurrents? There are four archive boxes of trees alone, the lab-coat tells me as he looks up ‘Landwehr Canal’ in his computer database. One drawing appears with this tag, so he orders the box that this is in. I suggest some other themes – architecture, railways, interiors – and additional boxes are ordered. Ten minutes later, another white lab-coated assistant wheels in a trolley laden with cardboard archive boxes, each containing a stack of drawings mounted on thick mats. He lifts the first box from the trolley and sets it on the desk in front of me. Number 167: the label reads Leichen, Gefangene – Corpses, Prisoners.
I unlatch the small brass hook and open the box. The very first drawing on the top of the stack, shows a man kneeling on a flat barge, his clothes and moustaches pencilled in dark, hoisting a naked body up out of the water with what looks like a giant pair of forceps. Beside him another man, sketched in quick pencil lines, steadies the boat with a long wooden pole. Only the back of the corpse’s head, covered in dark hair, and one of its shoulders, washed in watercolour pink, are visible above the water’s surface. The drawing is titled, dated and signed: Kanal, 1862, A.M. Below this is a close-up sketch of the dead man. He lies on the shore amongst tufts of grass, his head turned to the side and eyes closed, as if enjoying a nap on the canal’s green shore. The next drawing in the box shows the barge man now on the canal banks, hauling the garish pink body beneath its outstretched arms, like a carcass of meat. Another page of rapid studies captures the two men’s movements as they lift the dead weight of the third. At the top left corner, in a barely legible script, are notes scrawled by Menzel: ‘As soon as the corpse was brought to the shore, it stood upright, probably because of the current, stooping slightly with its head hanging forwards.’
There is something enthralling about this forensic attention with its pre-photographic compulsion to bear witness. I imagine Adolph Menzel, an unusually short man, only four and a half feet tall, stout in his frock coat, walking along the canal on the outskirts of the city, with sketchbooks, pencils, watercolours stuffed into his pockets. (Did he add colour to the sketched corpse then and there, I wonder, or touch it up afterwards when he got home?) Drawings in the other boxes, labelled Landscapes or Places: B describe his appetite for other low-key kinds of human drama, beyond the tragedy of a drowned man.
There may not be much photographic evidence of this time, but Menzel’s early realist works are vivid visual documents. Beyond the depictions for which he is best known – of the court of King Wilhelm I, who succeeded his brother Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1861 – there are countless incidental pieces that depict a city being made and how it is inhabited. In one of the boxes is a drawing from 1846 that shows St Matthäus Church being built, the church that stands in the car park, that I passed on my way to the library. In Menzel’s sketch, the blocky form of the church is supported by a sketched-in grid of wooden scaffolding. A great many pencil sketches show builders sleeping, lying with arms folded on scaffolding planks, napping in their breeches beside wooden handled buckets. As I sort through these stacks of thickly mounted drawings, enthralled by the particularity of Menzel’s chosen vantage point, the bells of St Matthäus Church strike midday, their chimes reverberating back through a century and a half.
A whole theatre of incident can be found in the countless peripheral details that Menzel captures in his work. Laundry washing, iron-rolling, train travel, beds, bicycles, musical instruments, the countryside beyond the city’s walls. These pencil drawings, gouaches and sketches picture Menzel’s daily journeys which follow a meandering, diversionary logic to see what the streets and rural lanes could offer up by way of subject matter, in parts of the city still to be built. Backyards and alleyways, gates and fences that border on scrubby unkempt brush-lands, areas that ambiguously straddle both urban and rural, where the city seems to lie in wait, gathering on the horizon, like a missive from the future.
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‘The population was swimming in the frenzy of progress and was almost only concerned with locomotives, steam ships and other technical achievements,’ reads Peter Joseph Lenné’s biography, written in 1937 by a fellow landscape-architect. ‘Only a few men, of whom Lenné was one, understood and endeavoured to counteract this development, and to preserve the citizens’ most precious cultural assets, amongst them the German landscape. […] He aimed to maintain the organic structure of the city, but he had underestimated the extreme pace of its rapid – and unhealthy – development.’
Lenné’s prioritization of landscape over practical efficiency fell foul again of the Prussian purse-string holders. He called for a higher water level in the Landwehr Canal, in part to prevent the Tiergarten’s pools and lakes from stagnating and suffusing the Volksgarten with their foul stench, but also to protect its oldest trees, some eight-hundred-year-old oaks among them. His recommendations were disregarded, but despite this compromise, the Landwehr Canal is one of the few elements of Lenné’s original city plan that was completed and remains visible and in use now, a century and a half later.
Journalist and writer Franz Hessel, close friend and colleague of Benjamin, devotes a chapter of his 1929 book Walking in Berlin to the Landwehr Canal. He begins with a picturesque image which follows the waterway as it ‘meanders through so much urban idyll that its name has a placid ring in our ears’. Hessel, like Benjamin, spent his childhood in the late 1800s in the Tiergarten area, by which time the Landwehr Canal was known as the ‘green shore’. It provided a liquid seam between the city’s urban and rural aspects, and was crossed by bridges ‘as if they were crossing a garden stream’.
At the Cornelius Bridge, the park landscape of the garden banks transforms into a city landscape. And the atmosphere in this area, which combines a whiff of park, city and water, displays a subtle wealth of colours seldom found in Berlin’s greyish contours. For anyone who spent their childhood in Berlin, no sunrise over the mountains or sunset at the lake can outshine the sweet dawns and dusks over the canal’s spring and autumn foliage.
