Friday, 17 May 2024 Disembarkation, Pottsdam, then Berlin
Written 21 July 2024
Friday morning, we duly set our packed and black-tagged luggage out in the corridor by the 8 am deadline and went to breakfast. At 9:15 am, we piled onto the black-tag bus, waved farewell to the Beyla and her crew, and headed for Berlin. But that trip would take only about an hour and a half, so Viking had scheduled a few stops along the way.
A large brown bird with a scissor tail wheeled overhead as we left. Shipmate Pam told me it was a kite, and study of my French bird book leads me to think it was a red kite, Milvus milvus.
As we left Wittenberg, we passed the yellow baroque mansion on the left and the half-timbered structure on the left. Note the two posters affixed to the pole in front of the latter. These were political campaign posters—an election was approaching, and all the political advertising took the form of posters like these. The seemed to be of a standardized size, and almost all followed the same format—a photo of the candidate's face, party affiliation, the office being sought, and perhaps a two- or three-line slogan. Much more civilized than our unsightly mishmash of billboards and forests of yard signs infesting street corners.
Along the way, our guide explained that we were leaving Saxony and passing through the neighboring state of Saxony-Anhalt, on our way to the Federal State of Brandenburg, where Potsdam is located. Berlin, where we will spend the next couple of days, is surrounded by Brandenburg but not part of it—Berlin, Hamburg, and Bremen are city-states, that is, cities that are also states. She pointed out that, as we study the buildings we pass, in general, the lower the house, the older it is.
Once in Brandenburg, we passed through Beelitz, its epicenter of asparagus production. (I think I called it Seelitz in this day's postcard, but that's another town altogether.) At the left here is a field of green asparagus awaiting harvest. It will be picked today, because asparagus spears grow so fast that they'll be leafed out and useless by tomorrow. Workers pass down the rows with special curved knives, cutting the spears by hand, and they'll do the same again tomorrow and the next day, cutting spears as they reach the right size.
At the right is a field of white asparagus, with sand heaped up over the growing shoots and white plastic coverings that to ensure that all light is excluded. White asparagus is white because it has never been exposed to light, which is necessary for the formation of chlorophyll and the process of photosynthesis. After a certain period early in the season, harvesting of both green and white asparagus must stop, and the shoots must be allowed to grow up into the tall, feathery, green plumes we know as "asparagus fern," so that they can photosynthesize and repelenish the reserves stored in the roots that will fuel the following seasons harvestable shoots.
I didn't know how field-grown white asparagus is harvested. Our guide said it is also cut by hand, but how do the workers find and cut the large spears without accidentally topping and ruining the ones that need another 12 hours? I had to find a video on the internet that showed the process. Each day, workers throw back the plastic covers and look for little white tips pushing up through the mounted soil. When they find one, the dig out around it with their fingers, then cut it near the base and pile the dirt back into its space, recovering each row with plastic as they finish it. Harvesting must be much faster and easier in areas where they just grow asparagus in blacked-out greenhouses, without piling soil over it.
Brandenburg produces a lot of white asparagus, as well as dairy cattle, a lot of rye for bread and liquor, all kinds of other grain, potatoes, a little colza, and lots of vegetables. The town of Werder is famous its fruit, including apples, peaches, and cherries.
We passed vast solar farms and saw solar panels on roofs as well.
Brandenburg also has pine plantations for wood production, but in keeping with modern practice, they are trying to change the plantations gradually into mixed forest, which is better for wildlife. Our guide said that Brnadenburg is very large in area but sparse in population— 2.5 million people, as opposed to 3.8 million in Berlin alone.
It has a lot of wildlife—hares, foxes, lots of deer, and a real plague of wild boar. During these last five years, she said, they've come right into the city and into our gardens; "they even go into cemeteries and dig out your relatives"! They even have wolves (that should help with the deer if not the wild boar). The border with Poland used to be fenced but isn't any longer, so they even have elk. I suspect she doesn't mean the elk we have in the U.S., the wapiti; she probably means the animal we call the European moose.
The river we paralleled for some of the way, and which runs through Potsdam, is the Havel River. Along our route it's a wild (undammed) river, and it forms lakes and bays. We saw patches of scotch broom blooming by the road, and the guide recommends elderberry pancakes.
We spent most of the day in Potsdam, capital of Brandenburg and long-time royal residence. The town was settled at least 1000 years by a mixture of slavic and germanic tribes.
The town is an island surrounded by lakes, the Havel, and streams. Like Berlin it is a "water city" and is connected by water with the two northern seas.
We started with a driving tour of some of the city's architectural highlights. The most prominent landmark was the green dome of the St. Nikolai church (basic baroque, early 1800's), which unfortunately, I didn't get a good photo of.
At the left here are the stables of the royal palace (note all the horse statuary on the roof), now a film museum. It was an orangerie even before it was stables. At the right is a building I haven't been able to identify. I think the eight figures across the top are from Greek mythology—the one at the far right is pretty clearly Hercules.
At the left here is another our guide pointed out but I can't identify. Searches for an obelisk in Potsdam turn up only images of one at Sanssouci Palace, and that clearly isn't Sanssouci in the background. Perhaps this is a copy of the one at Sanssouci. In any case, the guide said the hieroglyphics carved on it are fake, as it dates from before discovery of the Rosetta stone.
At the right is a smallish arch, erected according to its inscription, by Friedrich Wilhelm IV (King of Prussia 1940–1861), to mark an anniversary of construction of Sanssouci, if I'm translating correctly. It's not one of the three surviving gates in the city wall that are now freestanding arches.
Our guide also mentioned Babelsberg Studios, where all the old communist films were made. It's now been privatized and is still active.
At the left here, on a sidewalk in the historic area of the city, is a cage containing (I'm pretty sure) the giant weathervane from the steeple of the Garrison Church, which is still under reconstruction. The components include, among other, a huge gold crown and a large black bird (a cock, perhaps).
At the right is an edge-on view of Potsdam's Brandenburg Gate. It's one of of the three surviving gates from the old city wall. It's smaller but older than the more famous one in Berlin (the only surviving gate of 18 in that city's old wall).
Here, as elsewhere, just about all the reconstruction dates from reunification of Germany in 1990. The city is another Unesco World Heritage site, a compact baroque city, almost complete.
Another landmark I didn't get a good photo of is the Potsdam "mosque." Again, it was never really a mosque—it covered the old Siemans steam power plant that drove the fountains of Sanssouci. Because it had a smokestack, a moque was a convenient disguise for it, because the stack could be built in the shape of a minaret. The system it powered involved 85 km of underground pipes, but the guide said never really worked very well.
From the center of town, we then drove out toward Cecelienhof Palace, for a walking tour of the outside. It's located in the third and smallest of Potsdam's three large parks. On the way, we passed the building at the left, which the guide did not comment on but which I found quaint, if out of keeping with the generally baroque theme of the city.
At the right is a large restored mansion we passed on the way.
First, a little orientation: At the left is a map of the "New Garden," the name of the third park. Cecilienhof is the largest red structure, near the top and beside the round red "you are here" spot.
Here's the plan of the two floors of the palace. The red and orange sections are included in the interior tour (which we didn't do on this occasion). The oval with the star in the center of in the central courtyard is a flower bed, and the star is always kept planted with red flowers, indicating that it was part of the Russian sector when Germany was divided.
Our bus parked at the very top of the map, below the "T" of "Garten." To get there, we drove the length of the "nonpark" section to the left of Cecelienhof, a section of very upscale houses indeed. Those mansions including the one at the left here and the one described above as "a large restored mansion we passed on the way," were private houses until this area became a part of the Soviet sector of Germany, at which point they were commandeered by the Russian government. Germans were not allowed in this neighborhood at all without a special pass, and the houses were given to high-ranking Russian officers, who lived there with their families for the next 35 years.
East Germany was occupied by 7.75 million Soviet soldiers, of whom 37,000 were stationed here in Potsdam.
In one of the yards, I spotted this flowering bush, which I initially took to be an azalea, but the flowers were a little asymmetrical and the leaves weren't right. According to the app on my phone, it's Kolkwitzia amabilis, beauty bush. Lovely.
From the bus parking, we strolled the gravel paths through the park to the palace. Here, at the left, is the little snack-bar/souvenir-shop/restroom complex installed in its east wing. As we waited near the entrance to the palace for all the stragglers to finish the stroll, a redtail was hanging around. We finally spotted her feeding her young in a nest up under the porte cochère. At the right is a view of the west side of the palace itself, looking east.
It's a beautiful little palace, worth a tour in its own right, but its real claim to fame is that it was the site of the 1945 Potsdam conference, the one where Stalin, Truman, and Churchill met and thrashed out the plan for the division of Germany into four sectors, and within the Russian sector, the division of Berlin into four sectors. France wasn't represented at the conference, but the "big three" decided to invite France to take a sector afterward. De Gaulle got the offer five days later and accepted it.
Here are a couple more views of parts of the palace. I wasn't able to get an overall shot of the whole place. It was chosen to be the site of the conference because it was the only surviving intact palace available. The American and Soviet delegations each had 12 rooms reserved for them. The delegations actually lived elsewhere, only their offices were here. Stalin had his office in bottom of the corner turret in the right-hand photo.
The talks were actually held in large bay-windowed room on the ground floor (directly above the star flower bed on the floor plan). Eisenhauer was a member of the delegation. The first question that had to be decided was where the Polish border would be—they settled on the Oder River. In Yalta, they had already discussed dividing Germany into four pieces: a big Soviet zone, French in the west, America in the South, British in the north. The goals for Germany were the four D's: demilitarization, democratization, decentralization, and denazification. Germany had to vacate parts of Czechoslovakia, parts of Poland, the Baltic states.
As a result many more than 10 million people were forced to leave their homes and their countries. Germans living outside the new borders of Germany had to be accommodated within them. Polish people who were living in what is now Ukraine had to move to within Poland's new borders—Poland was effectively shifted to one side, shrunk on one side and expanded on the other. Theoretically the Polish people could move into the towns that the Germans were forced to vacate, and it was all supposed to be done in a humane way, but of course it wasn't. I remember from my childhood hearing about aid to displaced persons, and I assumed at the time that those people were just those who fled their homes to escape fighting and those who were deported to camps, but I realize now how many more people were displaced by these decisions.
Our guide also said that Truman arrived at the decision to bomb Hiroshima during the conference, but the actual order was given when he was on the way home.
Here at the left is the terrace on which the famous photo of the "big three" was taken. You can see a small image of it to the left of the floor plan, second from the bottom—left to right, Churchill, Truman, and Stalin sitting in wicker chairs during a break in the meeting. Alas, the border around the lawn, usually full of blooming flowers, had just been dug up for replanting.
Out of sight to the right of my photo, a small set of stone steps leads down from the elevated terrace to ground level, and it's flanked by a pair of stone balls. Those balls are heavily marked by graffiti incised in them during the conference, including a large Soviet star you can see part of in my photo.
One of the charming details about Cecelienhoff is its chimneys, which are all different. These are red brick but carved into intricate motifs of waves, diamonds, and flowers.
We enjoyed the view of Maiden Lake from the palace's gardens. This view would also have filled the bay window of the conference room. Today, you can take a steam-boat ride across that lake and into nearby interconnected waterways. But Potsdam is just outside Berlin, and our guide said that, for decades, until reunification, that view was entirely blocked because the Berlin wall, the actual Berlin wall, cut across that meadow, between the palace and the lake.
As soon as Stalin died (1953), the palace transformed into a museum of the Potsdam conference, but locals couldn't come to the restaurant here, because it was for tourists and accepted only foreign currency.
The palace itself was constructed just before and during WWI and was the residence of Crown Prince Wilhelm (the son of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last kaiser) and his wife Duchess Cecilie of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. Hitler was here as a guest about three times starting in the 1920's, but word is that after the third visit, in 1935, Princess Cecelie threw him out and burned his chair.
Our guide also said the Monuments Men were here, but she didn't say what they found, if anything.
German royalty and quasi-royalty are the very devil to keep track of because (1) they're all named Frederick (= Friedrich) or William (= Wilhelm) or Frederick William or William Frederick and (2) they're not linear—that is, Frederick III of Saxony might rule simultaneously with Frederick II of Brandenburg and Frederick IV of Prussia. But here's one line I think I've figured out: Frederick III of Prussia (German emperor) married the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England (Vicky to her friends and family). Their son grew up to be William II, last German emperor, the notorious Kaiser Willie of WWI (so, you'll notice, William II was first cousin once removed to Queen Elizabeth II of England, who was a great grandchild of Queen Victoria; Elizabeth's father was the Kaiser's first cousin). William II's son, Crown Prince William (1882–1951) was the one who married Cecilie (1886–1954) and lived at Cecilienhof until the end of WWII; they had six children. After they left, the palace became a childrens' hospital, and their oldest daughter became a nurse and worked here at the hospital, where she met an American Monuments Man. They married in 1949 and moved to the United States.
On our stroll back to the buses, we passed this little hunting blind entirely clad in squares of tree bark. It shows up (in tiny print) on the map above as the Borkenküche, which looks to me as though it should mean "bark cake" or maybe "bark kitchen."
Back in the bus, we drove back through the section of commandeered homes. The one at the right here, named for Empress Augusta, is now a senior-citizen home. During the Russian occupation, it was the world's westernmost KGB headquarters. After reunification, the authorities traced the original families and gave the houses back to them. Many then had to sell them, because reconstruction and reoccupation was prohibitively expensive and subject to many restrictions because of their historic nature.
Here are the other two surviving gates in the Potsdam wall. At the left is the "Jägertor," the hunters' gate. At the right is part of the "Nauentor." It's a really bad photo; the gate is actually flanked by two huge, gray medieval-looking crenelated towers, which are entirely cut off by the bus roof.
Written 22 July 2024
We were to be on our own for lunch in Potsdam, so the bus took us back to the center of town. On the way, we passed the "Dutch quarter," a whole section of 135 little red brick houses and gardens built in the Dutch style, with ridgepoles at right angles to the street and gable ends facing the street. They were built to house a colony of Dutch gardeners brought in to build and maintain the various palace gardens (the ones supposed to be served by those 85 km of underground piping). They housed four generations of Dutch gardeners serving four generations of Prussians kings. A campaign in 1989 saved them from being demolished. (It turns out that the Prussian kings of the time were also Princes of Orange, connected with the Dutch royal family.)
The buses dropped us off next to this church, the Roman Catholic St. Peter and St. Paul (though Potsdam is majority Lutheran), at the opposite end of Brandenburger Street from the Potsdam Brandenburg gate.
David set off into the town like an asparagus-seeking missile, reading menus and rejecting several as not "Spargelzeit" enough, until at last settling for the Gutenberg Brasserie, where in addition to a full asparagus menu, he found this tall glass of beer from the Potsdam Braumanufaktur.
The place had many French touches to it, and some of the muzak was in French. (It also included, for some reason, White Christmas.) I asked the proprietor, but he said that all dated from before his time. I wonder whether the brasserie was so old that it dated the 17th century, when for a time, French was the educated common language in this part of the world. Even "brasserie" is a French word, meaning "brewery."
We each had a big plate of white asparagus with potatoes and hollandaise. Mine was accompanied by a timbale of herb-scrambled eggs. David chose a pork schnitzel to go with his. As you can see, it completely covered the asparagus. We both might have wished for a little more hollandaise, but otherwise, it was an excellent meal.
We munched our way happily through it and were easily back in the parking lot in time to catch the bus to Sanssouci Palace for our afternoon tour.
Sanssouci is in the largest (I think) of the city's three large parks, and this bronze relief map covers it and and its immediate grounds. The guide's finger it pointing out the windmill (show here at the right), the second one on this site, that served as our rendezvous point after the tour and our free time at the end of it.
Nothing was ever said about whether the windmill ever worked or was merely decorative, but since the grounds were designed and constructed by Dutch gardeners, I suspect it pumped water at some point. It is, of course, now a museum. (The number of times I've used that phrase in my travel diaries! "This is the [fill in the name], now a museum.")
Between the guide's finger and the legend on the corner of the map nearest the camera, you can see two long lines of something. The one nearer the guide is the palace, and the other, long and double, is an allée of trees ending in a belvedere tower.
Back in the day, carriages approached the palace from the left-hand side (as viewed here). Our guide said there was a "staircase" for horses, but I think she meant a ramp. (She had a number of odd usages, like "we will surround the palace" when she meant "we will walk around the palace.") The slope led up to a vast semicircular "cour d'honneur" (courtyard of honor) embraced by long curving double colonnades. On the right-hand side, the palace looked out over a series of terraces to a fountain and, on a hill in the distance, a folly.
We approached on foot from the bus parking lot beyond the windmill.
Sanssouci was built by Prussian King Frederick the Great (aka Frederick II of Prussia, aka "Old Fritz"), who ruled 1740 to 1786, as a summer retreat—he came here from April to October. The name is French for "without care." He married in 1733 for political reasons, but never spent much time with his wife. As soon as he acceded to the throne, he allowed her to move out and establish her own household. (She was only ever at Sanssouci once, and not while he was there.) He died without issue, so he was succeeded by his brother, Frederick William II of Prussia, whose line led, several generations later, to Kaiser William II of WWI fame.
Fritz looms large in the history of Potsdam. He built the Potsdam Brandenburg gate, as well as many other monuments.
When first built, Sanssouci was only 14 rooms, but it eventually grew to 40. Voltaire was a good buddy of Fritz's, so he came to stay, often for extended periods. He had his own little palace here, and one of the roads leading to the park is even named for him.
Before going in we walked around the outside of the palace. At the left here is part of one of the colonnades enclosing the cour d'honneur.
At the right is a pergola on the terrace decorated with gilded motifs. Several were just decorative, like the garlanded lute just above the guy in the Tilley hat, but the tilted sunburst over the doorway is apparently a masonic symbol. Fritz introduced freemasonry to Prussia.
He was a musician and composer. He played the flute, wrote 120 flute sonatas, and had his own band. CPE Bach was employed as his orchestra conductor for almost 30 years.
Here's a view, from the terrace overlooking the fountain and folly, along the façade of the palace. The statuary is by Pigalle.
And at the right, the view from that terrace down the central axis to the fountain and its pool and, beyond that, the folly (just peeking out between the trees, probably not visible in this size). Our guide said that the folly, the usual fake classical ruin, symbolized the "transcendence of life," but she probably mean the transience of life. The folly also conceals an ice house that was intended to work the fountain, but the guide said it only worked for a few minutes—she didn't specify whether she meant "at a time" (because it ran out of water) or "ever."
On the horizon, you can see a tower crane, and to the left of it, four lumps sticking up above the trees, the first one perfectly aligned with the axis from the palace. Our guide told us they were Soviet-era apartment towers, placed there deliberately as a communist statement that these were the palaces of the real people.
Between the paved terrace where I stood and the fountain below, the slope steps down in seven terraces, where grapes were grown. They apparently still harvest grapes there and make (a small quantity of) wine, probably Müller-Torgau, the guide said. Fritz also had his gardeners grow tropical fruits like pineapples and bananas in glass houses, hoping they would help with his gout.
At the left here is a slab marking Old Fritz's grave. As you can see, it's covered with potatoes. That's because he introduced the potato to Prussia, thus averting many a famine and beginning a long culinary tradition. Today, people still bring potatoes to leave on his grave in commemoration.
He wanted to be buried here, but others insisted he was too important, so he was buried elsewhere. Only in 1994 were his wishes honored and his grave moved here. The smaller slabs beyond are the graves of his dogs, which he apparently loved more than people.
The palace's central rotunda served as its formal reception hall. Each of its columns was carved from a single monolithic block of white Carrera marble.
At the right is its ceiling. The style of both the palace and its furnishing is "Prussian rococo," a trademark of which, according to our guide, is fruit and melons. Sure enough, despite the rather martial theme of the ceiling's decoration—shields, spears, armor, helmets—everything is decorated with clusters of grapes.
At the left is a hallway we passed along, moving from room to room. Sure enough, the gold trim along the top of the sofa includes little heaps of fruits and flowers.
The room at the right was Fritz's music room. The glass case on the wooden table dispays his black wooden flute.
We were shown many of the palace's 10 guest rooms, each of which had two doors, one on each side of the bed niche. One led to a water closet and the other to a small servant's room. This one had a particularly ornate ceiling and walls.
In one room, my eye was caught by this lovely mosaic grapevine inlaid into the marble floor. Another section of the floor featured vines bearing, yes, melons.
The king actually had his own porcelain factory in the Tiergarten in nearby Berlin (one of several set up by different interests once the formula was leaked), but our guide assured us that the vases on this mantle piece were from Meissen.
The last room we were shown was this yellow one with 3D wallpaper. A small lamp has been positioned to emphasize that the birds on the walls (the stork in the spotlight and the red parrots perching on rings above) as well as the garland of flowers at the top stand out in high relief from the surface. That room must have been a nightmare to navigate if you got up in the night to visit the water closet—you could easily (a) damage the decor or (b) damage yourself if you ran afoul of that stork's beak!
Here's more stuff we learned while walking around or on the bus to Berlin.
In Berlin, we and our luggage were dropped off at the door to the Grand Hyatt. The entryway was decorated with this wonderful assortment of wooden sculptures. Large and small logs of wood had been nailed together into big masses, then milled into the shapes you see, where the outer surfaces were formed by the resulting cross sections of the logs.
If you looked carefully at the surfaces and the spaces between the cross sections, you could see the nails. Some had even been cut through in the milling process and formed part of the surface. For example, in the right-hand photo, in the shoe-sole-shaped piece just above the large piece in the front, the dark spot about where the big toe joint would be is the cross section of a metal nail head.
In the broader part of the lobby near reception was this huge planter. Sorry the photo is so blurry, but it shows the overall effect.
The much clearer closeup at the right shows that it is made up of many, many little variegated Sanseveria's and edged with reindeer moss.
I like this place's designer.
For dinner, we chose just to go to the hotel's high-end restaurat, Vox.
The amuse-bouche was sweetbreads and chanterelles, pine nuts, and little dabs of green pea puree.
David's starter was salmon (with the crispy skin on the side) with a vinaigrette-dressed salad consisting of a layer of very thinly sliced Granny Smith apples covered with a layer of very thinly sliced raw mushrooms.
Mine was an unagi roll—eel sushi, in which the avocado was replaced (at my request) with cucumber. Yummy.
David went on to tuna tataki with potato "pasta." The latter consisted of potatoes cut into the shape of spaghetti and undercooked so that they held together. Okay, but nothing we'd try to duplicate at home.
My main course was pan-seared cod with a mixture of chanterelles and tiny mussels and a foamy herb sauce. Very good.
I don't have a photo of dessert, but I think we ordered a hot soufflé.
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