Tag: Berlin

Die Geschichte vom Volkspark Friedrichshain

The history of Volkspark Friedrichshain is worth recounting. Like everything else in Berlin, its story is astonishingly varied and extraordinary. Neither the largest park in Berlin nor the most famous (that would be the Tiergarten), Volkspark Friedrichshain was the first free land to be opened for use to the general public, and it continues to be central to the city’s civic life. The park was inaugurated in 1848 at a time when Berlin was boiling with unrest. Citizens demanding a democratically elected parliament and rights of free speech had clashed with Prussian soldiers in Alexander Platz earlier that spring. All of Europe was experiencing a spontaneous popular revolution. For the first since antiquity, common people began identifying themselves as citizens of nations rather than simply vassals of a lord or subjects to some far away king. People thrust themselves into civic life and began demanding to have a say in their countries’ destinies.

The creation of Volkspark Friedrichshain was one of the first major projects undertaken by the elected city council of Berlin. Unlike the Tiergarten, which had originally been the hunting grounds of the Hollenzohlern monarchs and was only gradually being made available to the bürger, Volkspark Friedrichshain was a completely open and public space manifested from the will of the people. It is perhaps the first place in all of Germany to be thought of as a possession of the commonwealth, belonging to the people taken together as a nation. For two generations the park was used by the newly emerging working class of Berlin for the enjoyment of their increasing leisure hours. And the, like almost every national expression of the German Volk, Friedrichshain would be seized by the National Socialists almost a century later and perverted for the new state’s senseless, militaristic purposes. Apropos of nothing the Nazis built enormous concrete bunkers in to the park’s carefully tended grounds and erected flak towers to repel air raids from Allied forces. Converted into a military installation, Volkspark Friedrichshain became a target of the war and was utterly obliterated in successive bombing campaigns.

The supporting cast also had some good actors like Wahlberg, James Franco, Mila Kumis, etc. http://www.devensec.com/sustain/eidis-updates/IndustrialSymbiosisupdateJanuary_March2013.pdf cialis price Brandon Johnston is only seventeen years old and was suffering from the problem of severe hair loss and hair thinning for the last several lowest price for levitra months. Applicants can buy Tadalafil 20mg after they check the case and find out the fundamental cause behind the issue likewise influence dosage. online prescription viagra without useful store order cialis It is approved by the governments of all over the world. During the occupation and the subsequent rebuilding of the Berlin, Friedrichshain was used as a dump for the prodigious quantity of rubble and debris left behind from the city’s destruction. The two well-known climbing hills in the park, Mont Klamott and Kleine Bunkerberg, are actually enormous heaps of wreckage covered over in earth. I remember climbing the larger one, Mont Klamott, without any notion at all that I was walking over the interred ruins of the old Berlin, a separate and forgotten city that existed before the war was fought. I do not recall there being a historical marker to tell the story of the hill’s identity. Maybe it is a fact that Berliners would prefer to forget. Then again, maybe it is so commonly known that it need not be mentioned. Almost every German city has a similar rubble pile, covered over and planted with trees and grass. They are so frequent in the landscape of Central Europe that the Germans have a term for them: “Schuttberg.”

Volkspark Friedrichshain was rebuilt by the Deutsche Demokratische Republik once again for the enrichment and well-being of the people. The communist government was redeveloping a new East Berlin. Architects educated in the Soviet Union designed the central city so that it would be egalitarian and functional, with none of the bourgeois conventions that had come to characterize what Berlin had been. They built wide avenues and high-rise housing blocks inspired by Le Corbusier. Individual residents were given much less personal space. To compensate, the volksparks were expanded and improved. These became the city’s backyard. Where children once played make-believe with their siblings in the courtyards that existed in the center of every Berlin block, during the time of the DDR they went to the park after school and played large, organized games with all of their classmates. I remember spotting an old neglected and vandalized ping-pong table in Friedrichshain that dated from the communist era. It attracted my attention because I had never seen a cement ping-pong table before, nor had I ever seen table tennis played in a park. In the United States, ping-pong is decidedly a rec room game. We play it in our houses when entertaining guests. In a socialist country one only owns his paddle. He goes to the park to find a table and people to play with.

Passing Time in Urban Parks

The picture above is an aerial view of Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin, Germany. I once stumbled upon this place while wandering the city. I remember being delighted by all the winding trails and secret meadows I found there. There were placid little duck ponds hidden away from the main paths, trysting places for the teenagers to fool around in, occasional statues and fountains. I went on a Sunday, so the park was teaming with people. Berliners seem to use the park for afternoon jogs and walking their dogs. Sometimes you’d see a pairs kicking a soccer ball around or playing Frisbee. The most common activity was just laying in the sun, not for the sake of getting a tan—the Northern European sun is too feeble for that and almost everyone was clothed anyway—but just to be outside, among people. I recall thinking that this park seemed very foreign to me, and that they way people were using the space felt very novel. It is unusual to find parks like Friedrichshain in the United States, with manicured landscapes made to resemble an idealized version of nature. If Americans wish to visit the wild, we get into our cars and drive there. Cities I the United States do tend to have little parks where people can have cook outs on the weekends and walk their dogs on grass to get them to shit. These parks are pretty often under maintained and they aren’t particularly well planned either. They always seem to open and exposed, never enough trees and usually no bushes or interesting flora. I’ve always found that American parks are designed to accommodate a specific set of prescribed activities. They tend not to be places to lay around an loiter. When one goes to a park in the United States, it is usually to play sports, or ride around in a paddleboat, or do something that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in your own backyard.

 

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This next picture is of the north section of Humboldt Park on Chicago’s west side. With its lagoon and spacious grounds, it could be a very beautiful and bucolic place in the middle of a dense, big city neighborhood. Its designers could have planted dense forests, and they could have carved labyrinthine paths into them like with Friedrichshain. Of course, because of the suspicion everyone in Chicago has for one another and the general anxiety about petty crime, the park is left exposed and only lightly wooded so that it can be easily surveilled. For some reason, all of the interesting spots around the lagoon have been plowed over and made into ball fields. I count seven baseball diamonds and five more diamonds for softball. There is also some sort of ballpark on the left for competitive league play. Continuing to add to the inventory, there are four different playgrounds, four tennis courts, a soccer field, a boathouse, two sand volleyball courts, and the stocking shaped pit in the upper left I believe is an ice skating rink. This is not a place where people go to simply sit and relax. People convene here to play sports. They are keeping busy attending to the performance of an activities. The only people I’ve ever seen lying down in Humboldt Park are the homeless men who live there.