Montpellier Thanks America

Down near the train station in Montpellier is a small park. In it is this monument.



The place is marked on the map as Square Planchon, and this inscription (sorry, it's only partial) is another clue about what it's for.



As it turns out, Jules Émile Planchon was a French botanist who was the head of the botany department at Montpellier University when the phylloxera plague started killing off all the French grapevines. In collaboration with Pierre-Marie-Alexis Millardet and the American Charles Valentine Riley, he discovered that importing American grape rootstock and grafting French vines onto it made the vines resistant to the organism that was spreading the plague.

So what we've got here is a thankful farmer offering thanks to Planchon and an inscription noting that it was the Americans who saved the French wine industry. See? The French don't hate us completely!

Treehugging And Its Discontents

There is a tiresome meme, particularly in America, that goes "scratch a German and you'll find a nazi." Get one of these people worked up enough, the thought seems to be, and the inner authoritarian antisemite with delusions of world conquest comes out. Nobody who's lived here for more than ten minutes, let alone anyone who's ever actually met a real live German believes this, of course, but it persists.

No, the real meme is "scratch a German and you'll find an animistic pagan."

The early Christian missionaries must have really had a hard job in these lands, because they never really succeeded, in my opinion. Could the ancient Germanic nature-religion really have been wiped out when 2008 years after the birth of Christ nobody thinks twice about naming a child "wolf-path?" (Well, what did you think Wolfgang means?)

This is why, when German cinema first started making Westerns, it went straight to Karl May, the German writer who never left Europe and ground out pulp novels about the Old West which centered on the Indians. German Westerns weren't ahistorical: the Indians always lost, but they were also clearly the tragic heroes. They lived in close harmony with nature, and revered it. Why, they were almost Germans!

It's why Germans have those little settlements of garden houses everywhere there's enough space to wedge them in, and it's why they go mushroom hunting at the crack of dawn on weekends in the fall. It's why, when they go to America, they head to the National Parks, drive down Route 66, or groove on the Arizona desert. It's why they number the trees in their parks and forests (and really, if you don't believe me, go look: there'll be a little tag there somewhere, placed in the name of Ordnung).

And it's why my street is about to erupt into a seething cauldron of civil disobedience. Or not.



Early last week, some official-looking papers were taped to the doors of our buildings informing us that tomorrow, Monday April 21, city workers would fell most of the trees on our street and some adjoining ones. The trees in question were black cherry trees, and had, according to a Herr Doktor at the Berlin Environment Office, developed a root syndrome which might result in their falling over and hurting cars parked beneath them. The reaction was swift: more signs appeared, taped to the trees in question. One of them had word from yet another Herr Doktor questioning the accuracy of the first Herr Doktor's report. All of them noted one truly unfortunate detail: the city didn't have funds to replace the trees being felled.

In a repeat of something I've seen a lot before, signs resembling funeral notices appeared on the condemned trees, with a big black cross. "CONDEMNED TO DEATH" read a huge headline. A more reasonable sign in green then went up, calling for a mass demonstration. "The report of the root damage to the black cherry trees is doubtful," it says. "Not all the marked trees must be taken down. There is no money to replace them."





Then some red and white striped tape was stretched between the trees to be felled, along with no-parking signs effective at 7am on Monday. Sometime last night it vanished.

Today at 2pm, a demonstration was scheduled. About 30 minutes into it, I went to check it out. A merry old chap with a beard was pounding black wooden crosses into the patches of ground where the condemned trees were standing, as a television crew documented it. A pair of grim young men unfurled a huge sign that said "FIRST THE TREES...THEN THE PEOPLE!!" and just as quickly unfurled it after they'd gotten some attention. There was a table set up, at which signatures were being collected, and some guy walked down the street sticking copies of the mock-obit flyers under people's windshield wipers. The center of attention seemed to be another old guy with one of those contraptions of stick and string which make gigantic soap bubbles, and clusters of young parents stood around with their kids and chatted. A couple of bored cops checked every car coming into the street and otherwise stood around.

Will any of this cause the city to reconsider or put off the date of the trees' doom? Can demonstrating on a Sunday, when you'd better believe any relevant office is closed, do any good? Will this end up like every other instance like it I've ever seen in Berlin, with officials nodding their heads in sympathy and going ahead and doing what they'd intended to do anyway? And...are these trees really such a menace to automobiles and real estate? I don't know.

One thing I do know: it's not smart to mess with trees in Germany. It really does seem to call forth an atavistic response from people, as if the tree spirits had spoken to them and reminded them of the symbiosis that binds the Volk to the Bäume.

Another thing I know is that I've never yet seen the city of Berlin dissuaded from doing anything, no matter how stupid, once it had made up its mind to do it.

My heart's with the trees, but my money's with the chainsaws.



(The doomed eight, above, in green).

UPDATE: Went out at 1pm on Monday, all trees gone. A new, badly-painted sign declated it a SAW-MASSACRE!!

Go Directly To Jail

When I first moved here, I lived in a neighborhood known as Moabit. The name is a corruption of the French term "terre maudit," or cursed land, but it's most familiar to Germans as the name of a prison, which, sure enough, stood right up at the end of the block. It was where many of the Baader-Meinhof Gang were held, for instance, and, during my tenure in Moabit, it was the home of the famous folk-hero/extortionist known as "Dagobert," which is what the Germans call Scrooge McDuck. Dagobert had extorted money from several department stores, and kept getting away with it. Once, the cops were hot on his trail, and in a very Berlinisch moment, lost him when they slipped in dogshit on the sidewalk while chasing him. One of the buildings there is quite old, and has classic barred windows. Women gather in the park across from the prison on good days and have their kids wave at Daddy.

So I thought that was all there was to Moabit Prison, and my obsessive walking through the neighborhood during several months' total unemployment saw to it that I knew the surrounding area very well. Leave it to Berlin, though, to confound that idea.

Last week, I had an appointment on Kantstr., way over in scary West Berlin, and, for old time's sake (and because I'm once again totally without work), I decided to walk. The easiest way is to head to my old neighborhood via Invalidenstr., past the Hauptbahnhof, then across the Spree and follow the S-Bahn. I gave myself lots of time so I could take the occasional diversion down back streets for old time's sake.

But I'd no sooner gotten just past the Hauptbahnhof and all the myriad new streets the tunnel there has spawned, when I found something which must have been there in the old days, but which I'd totally missed. It was now a new park: Moabit Prison Historical Park. I took a glance in and told myself I'd be back. And today I was.



The bland outside, it must be said, masks an even blander inside. Had it not been for the glass-encased explanatory posters, I'd never have guessed what this was. I was shocked to find that it had once housed Wilhelm Voigt, the "Captain from Köpenick" himself -- the Dagobert of his day. Several notable Socialists were also thrown in the klink there by the Nazis as was one of the 1944 Hitler plotters. But most of the inmates were just run-of-the-mill criminals, something Berlin never had a shortage of in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Inside, there isn't much to see, mostly because the thing was almost totally destroyed by Allied bombs. Instead, it's filled with symbolism.



I forget what the cube represents, other than the center of the buildings' wings. The trees planted within the walls all have symbolic meanings, as, no doubt, do the small concrete posts with constellations etched into them. A couple of the building's wings are represented by trenches, one of which you see here. I kept having to run outside to one of the entrances to see what symbol I was standing next to at any given time. There's a dolorous poem whitewashed across one of the walls, the beginning of which is visible here:



The tall building is one of the houses where the "civil servants" (ie, the guards) lived. I have no idea why the signage uses that name. Here, however, is where most of the folks lived:



Well, not actually. That's a reproduction of the dimensions of one of the cells, and, according to the list of symbols, contains a sound installation. I not only couldn't hear it, I couldn't find any means by which it would be broadcast, so maybe that's a coming attraction.

Although the place is pretty stark and uninviting, there's a climbing wall and see-saw for kids, and a couple of nicely shaded picnic tables. Despite the fact that it was a nice day, I was usually sharing the park with no more than two other people -- on one occasion two huge women and their three huge dogs, one of whom came up to me to get his ears scratched, which I did, but apparently not enough, since he refused to leave until he felt he'd been properly appreciated.

Maybe it just hasn't been discovered yet: it only opened last year, apparently. Or maybe the symbolic sculpture and landscaping make it hard to use. Or maybe Berliners are getting tired of feel-bad monuments, since this one certainly does evoke the starkness and isolation of imprisonment.

Naaah. Can't be that last one. Berliners love to feel bad.