Lethargic Man (anag.)

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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).

In retrospect, it's a little puzzling that in my first few years in Berlin, I hardly ever cycled out of the city to explore the countryside, given how much I'd enjoyed doing precisely that in Newcastle and Edinburgh (and the one time I went on a bike ride in Cambridge). It must have been the legacy of fifteen years in London, where by the time I'd reached the countryside, I'd had enough and just wanted to turn around and go home again.

Berlin is a third the size of London, but it took the pandemic to teach me that. Meaning: When my work sent us all home from the office, I wanted to do as much cycling each week as I would have done commuting, to keep myself fit. After a few weeks exploring the city, I reached the countryside and rediscovered that it was really nice (duh).

Shortly afterwards, I discovered that the sections of the Berlin Wall Trail on the city edge (including my favourite bike ride in Berlin^*) nicely combine cycling through pleasant countryside (on, generally, at least one side) with well-maintained cycle paths.

* The route takes you through fields, past a small lake then through a pine forest, with sandy areas, then along a raised boardwalk over a marsh, with signs along the way showing the wildlife in the marsh.

After I'd been cycling thus for a little while, I decided to mark out the Berlin Wall Trail on the map where I'd been tracking my cycling progress:

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The result inspired me to cycle the rest, and today I closed the last gaps in my coverage (almost entirely in chunks of no more than two hours, that I could squeeze into the time I would, pre-pandemic, have been commuting by bike, plus my lunchbreak) of the 100 mile (160 km) course of the Wall:

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Key:
Dashed line = where the Berlin Wall Trail departs from the route of the Wall.
Dotted line = route of the Wall, but not of the Berlin Wall Trail.
Light blue = remaining sections of pipe-onna-wall outer wall. (Other sections of wall remain but are not so obvious.)

And here's how I did the cycling:

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My bike ride on 9 March took me to a place called Steinstücken, which is a settlement of only a few streets:

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Property transactions in the eighteenth century followed by the incorporation of surrounding areas into Berlin resulted in this becoming an exclave of Berlin surrounded entirely by Brandenburg. When the city was divided after the War and at the start of the Cold War, Steinstücken was left cut off, with the inhabitants having to pass through two checkpoints to get into the rest of Berlin.

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(The roads crossing the state line today obviously did not exist during the divided Berlin territory. Where I took my photo above from, where Bernhard-Beyer-Straße meets Steinstraße on the map above, was at the time the route of a mini-Berlin Wall, complete with a killing field outside it.)

Eventually, in 1972, a deal was done in which a corridor of West Berlin territory was created to connect it to the rest of Berlin, in exchange for West Germany ceding six uninhabited other exclaves to East Germany, and paying four million marks.

This is the approach road that this deal resulted in becoming usable. The road itself is in Berlin (what was West Berlin), but everything immediately to both the right and the left is Brandenburg (what was East Germany).

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(There's no signs indicating this on the road itself, which I found a little disappointing, though there is a sign in Steinstücken.)

At the southern end of the road, the geography gets even more fractal, as the road is in Berlin, the railway line to the right in Brandenburg, and then the area to the right of the railway line Berlin again.

This sign amused me:

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No, there was not a T-junction in the Berlin Wall here, but the Berlin Wall Trail has a three-way split: the original route ignored the shenanigans around Albrecht's Tar Kiln and left the route of the wall for a spell, but there's a new route under construction following it more accurately. Here's where the old route and the new route converge.

You've heard of the Great Wall of China? Well, here's the Extremely Short Wall of Berlin.

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(All right, I've made that joke before, but this is a more extreme example.)

Actually what's interesting here is that the final iteration of the Berlin Wall, erected in 1970, immediately identifiable by the pipe on top making it difficult for anyone climbing over to get a handgrip on the top, took a shortcut here, cutting off about a hundred square metres of marshland at the top of the Groß Glienicke lake; as a result the corresponding section of original 1961/2 Berlin Wall wasn't demolished, leading it it being one of the few remaining pieces existing today. You can see it in the background, behind a metal fence which was another part of the border fencing, and which dates to the late sixties. It was originally topped with Y-shaped wire deflectors.

(Sorry there's no better picture of the 1961/2 wall; this was a long ride and I was in a hurry to get back to work, and shot photos rapidly and only fully read the infoboard afterwards.)

The house in the background is actually only half a house. The wall went through the middle, and the half in the East German border area got demolished.

Unrelated linguistic/historical note: There are multiple places around Berlin with the name Glienicke; I looked it up, and it comes from a Slavic word meaning "lime". The Germans fled west, from invading peoples like the Huns and Alans, from this area into the Roman Empire in the fourth or so century, and the Slavs subsequently occupied it. During the Middle Ages the River Elbe, which flows diagonally across Germany into the North Sea, was the limit of German settlement, and to this day placenames to the east of that river tend to reflect a Slavic origin, rather than a German.

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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).