8 See Hoffmann’s Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier: Blätter aus dem Tagebuche eines reisenden Enthusiasten [Fantasy Pieces in Callot’s Manner: Pages from the Diary of a Traveling Romantic] (Bamberg, 1819); and “Die ästhetische Teegesellschaft [The Aesthetic Tea Society]” in Die Serapionsbrüder 4, Poetische Werke, vol. 8. [1819–1821].
9 “Des Vetters Eckfenster” (1822), in Späte Werke, eds. Walter Müller-Seidel and Friedrich Schnapp (Munich: Winkler, 1965).
CHAPTER 5. Berlin Guttersnipe
I bet that if you try, you can remember seeing wardrobes or armoires with colorful scenes, landscapes, portraits, flowers, fruits, or other similar designs inlaid in the wood of their doors. Intarsia is what it’s called. Today I’d like to present you with some scenes inlaid not in wood, but in speech. I’ll be telling you about the childhood of a Berliner, who was a small boy roughly 120 years ago, and about how he saw Berlin, about what kind of games and practical jokes were common back then. Amid all of this, I’d like to inlay the story with a few things that have nothing at all to do with our subject, but will, or so I hope, stand out from the story of Ludwig Rellstab’s youth as vividly and colorfully as does intarsia in paneled wood.1
Don’t worry that you’ve never heard the name Ludwig Rellstab. And whatever you do, don’t ask your parents; they’ve never heard of him either, and they won’t have a clue what to say. This Rellstab is not a famous man. Or rather, to be more precise, in his time he was one of the best-known people in Berlin. The short of it is, little remains of him. Today he is not even known for his greatest accomplishment: his autobiography, parts of which I’ll read to you later.
That this autobiography should be so beautiful without there being too much of any importance to say about its author isn’t all that surprising. For it is not always the most famous or gifted people who retain the profoundest love and memories of their childhood. Moreover, this is rarer for a city dweller than for someone who has grown up in the countryside. It’s hardly common for a child to forge such harmonious and happy connections with a large city so that later, as a mature man, it’s a joy for him to recall his boyhood memories. Rellstab knew this joy; you can sense it throughout the book, even if he never explicitly says that his childhood was a particularly happy one.
Now let’s dive right into the story. What do you say to the fact that his father “took a house in the country with his family every summer”?2 And where do think it was? Right there in the Tiergarten. Let’s let Rellstab himself tell us how the Tiergarten looked at a time when you could take a summer vacation there:
As far back as I can remember, I see myself in summer in the green of the Tiergarten, which back then had a more rustic character than it does now. It remains the most beautiful setting of my earliest memories, as well as of those that would come much later. In those days it was even more suited to playing than it is now. The woods provided large areas where everything was left to become overgrown. Except for the road to Charlottenburg, there wasn’t a single paved way, only deep sandy paths that crossed the terrain. So there were relatively few wagons even in the larger avenues, and they moved slowly and with difficulty. When I look at the Tiergarten now, I can hardly believe that it once housed genuine wilderness, where raspberry bushes grew between thickets on the moist meadows, and their bountiful fruits would quietly ripen for us, the inhabitants. The strawberries also provided abundant harvest. To us everything seemed far removed from people, and as lonely as a primeval forest. We literally took it over. Each playmate claimed his own rightful plot. We carved out lawns, made rustic lodgings from the dense thickets, and wedged small boards in trees to sit between branches; we even made a border out of little pickets stuck in the ground like a garden fence. All told, we ruled over our lots as if they were our very own. We could go for weeks without visiting our little wilderness colony, but when we did return, nothing was disturbed, so solitary was the forest back then. Today it has been transformed into a garden, terribly noisy and overrun with people.3
Thus did an old Berliner describe the Tiergarten of 1815. I find this description very beautiful. But now, time for an inlay. I would like to show you how a friend of mine, born eighty years after Rellstab, described his Tiergarten childhood. And, despite the differences, this description shows that the true Berliner never stops loving it. This new true Berliner is my friend Franz Hessel, who writes in Spazieren in Berlin [On Foot in Berlin]:
In the waning twilight it is still as rough and disorienting today as it was thirty or forty years ago, before the last Kaiser had the nature park transformed into a more open and respectable place. While his orders to clear the undergrowth, widen many of the paths, and improve the lawns are certainly commendable, much of the Tiergarten’s beauty has been lost: its charming disorder, branches crackling underfoot, the rustling of leaves along neglected narrow paths. However, he left a few wild spots that managed to survive into the days of our childhood. What I remember most from this time are the tiny sloped footbridges spanning the streams, which were sometimes presided over by vigilant bronze lions, holding in their jaws the chains that served as guard rails.4
Hessel goes on to describe the entire Tiergarten up to where it borders the Cornelius Bridge. If we had more time, there would be so much more to say, for example, about this bridge that still today clings to its private, almost rustic appearance. This formerly seldom used and rather isolated bridge now funnels all the city’s automobile traffic as it spills toward the west. If you think about it, this bridge’s fate is as remarkable as that of many men.
But now back to Rellstab. In the whole of his tale of youth, there’s one thing he complains about repeatedly and never seems to have completely got over: the music lessons forced upon him by his father. These after-school lessons were the worst part of his day. He relates how unhappy he was that they forced him to forgo the games and antics his schoolmates would use to prolong the way home from school. Many of these games were rather curious, and we hear about how they were already being diligently prepared during class. “For some time,” says Rellstab,
it was our habit, while still in school during our last class, to make little boats out of paper and bark, and then, and this was especially entertaining after a strong rain, to let them float down the gutter until they vanished at the corner of Mohrenstraße and Markgrafenstraße, where the runoff feeds into an underground canal. There was nothing more interesting than following the routes of our little boats; we held our breath watching as they disappeared into a little drain tunnel and greeted them with joy as they reemerged on the other side. I had the hardest time tearing myself away in order to head home along my solitary path to my piano lessons.5
You can imagine that it was no easier for him to leave when “Zillrad” was the game of the day. But what was this inexpressibly magical game, as he calls it? Thank goodness he explains it to us; otherwise we might wonder forever and never find out. Here’s how it works. A bunch of boys — the more the merrier — would climb atop an empty hay wagon, a common sight in the streets back then. One boy, chosen by counting out a rhyme, would run around the wagon trying to tag the feet of the boys above. Whoever was tagged then had to climb down and give it a go himself.6