Where We Live

Now spring is coming! Overnight 20° C, and we can sit outside a café at the Viktoria-Luise-Platz, drink cappuccino and watch people. 

The cranes flew over our house – and I am reassured. They do that every year, in Hildesheim, in Hamburg, and now in Berlin: always directly over our house, and when I hear their strange cries early in the morning I run outside or on the balcony and try to take a picture of them – mostly a row of tiny dots on their way north.

A further indicator for spring: the gardeners at the Viktoria-Luise-Platz, which is just around the corner, plant the curved beds with pansies – no ‘love-in-the-idleness’ but a lot of hard work, because the ‘Ornamental Square’, as they were called then, is huge. 

Georg Haberland, who planned the Bavarian Quarter (where we live) in one draft, put out for tender a competition for the design of the square, which the Royal Horticultaral Director, Fritz Encke (1861 – 1931) won.

The square – rather uncommon – is an elongated hexagonal, where six small streets flow in, but by the planting you get the impression that it is oval. In the middle a big fountain, at the west side arcade-like colonnades (nowadays they put a large sandbox in the middle of it)

and on the other side the entry of the U4. This underground was hotly discussed even at its opening in 1910: it serves only four stations from Innsbrucker Platz to Nollendorf Platz – a subway only for the Rich? 

At least the square offered a compensation: different from others at that time it was not only for representation, but had many benches for recreation – and today even the lawns are well used. Yesterday at lunchtime a lot of young people lay on the grass (and in the back of my head my mother started to warn that one should never lay on grass in months with an “R” inside – not MaRch, not ApRil – earliest: May :-).

The initiation of the Viktoria Luise Platz in 1900 was a big social event and Haverland splurged several thousand electric bulbs (in the rest of Berlin they still sat in dim gaslight), and in the evening the fountain shone in splendour as “fountaine lumineuse.” Haberland wrote:

“Till this day I see old Mr. Ludwig Pietsch before my inner eye, on each knee a laughing young girl. Half an hour after midnight I ordered to shut off the lights so that the atmosphere wouldn’t become too jolly.”

But that is what I wish for us all: a very jolly spring!