Poemas del río Wang: abril 2021

In hard times like these, one gets used to skinning a weasel with a stone ax. When traveling from Berlin to Prague, I instinctively get off at Bad Schandau to take the local train to the border town of Schmilka, where I cross the Elbe by ferry, then walk on hiking trails over to the Czech side, where I take the bus in the border village Hřensko to the first town, Děčín, to catch the train to Prague. But times are changing, and nowadays packaged weasel fillets are available in the store, as they used to be. When getting off in Bad Schandau, on the neighboring track there is already a small Czech train with the lofty label “Děčín, main railway station”. Whatever may ensue, I board it, as if it were a normal world. Crossing the border is officially still bound to a 48-hour Covid test, but the car is full of Czech guest workers, and none of them is waving it to show it off. The conductor goes around, selling tickets in Czech. The closely watched train rolls along undisturbed to the other side. Welcome to the East European Absurd.

I still have one hour until the train to Prague. I walk out in the town. Děčín – Tetschen – was a German spa town in the Bohemian/Saxon Switzerland until the deportation of the Sudeten Germans in 1946. This is still remembered by the Art Nouveau villas that decay in melancholy. Over the Elbe, on the edge of town rises

the Tetschen Castle, founded in the 12th century, and then rebuilt in Renaissance and Baroque style. In 1808, Caspar David Friedrich painted his Tetschen Altarpiece (or Mountain Cross) for its chapel, where he for the first time elevated nature to the rank of religious painting, according to the creed of German Romanticism. The pines and the crucifix that rise on a lonely cliff fit very much to the castle rising on a sandstone cliff on the banks of the Elbe. And here Chopin wrote his “Valse brillante”, whose melancholic ebbs and flows coincide well with the atmosphere of the river pulsating beneath the castle and of the former small German town forgotten on the other bank.

Chopin: Valse brillante Op. 34. No. 2. a minor. Performed by Arthur Rubinstein

Caspar David Friedrich: Tetschen Altarpiece or Mountain cross, 1808. Dresden, Galerie Neue Meister

The sketch of the painting (1805-6), on the basis of which Countess Theresia von Thun-Hohenstein ordered the altarpiece

Caspar David Friedrich: Morning in the Giant Mountains, 1810-11. Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg

There is an Art Nouveau restaurant on this side of the river, opposite the castle. It is also reminiscent of a lonely castle, and sometimes it was the first house of the city for a passenger coming from Germany. So it was probably the former customs house. This is indicated by the name of the restaurant – U Přístavu, To the Harbor, while there has been no harbor here for a long time –, but even more so by the carefully preserved Austrian imperial coat of arms on the corner of the building.

The portrait of the emperor could be shat upon in rebellious Prague, the column of Mary, tied to the Habsburg power, pulled down by revolutionary vandals, but here, in the German Sudetenland, which was not so enthusiastic about the collapse of the Monarchy, the symbol of former unity was preserved. And now that nostalgia for the Monarchy is once again appreciating such relics, it has been nicely restored as well. So as for centuries before, now again it welcomes those coming from Germany to the territory of the former Monarchy. Welcome home.

The Skadarlija, Belgrade’s bohemian street, descends from the old town to the suburbs. Its lower end at the market is marked by an Ottoman-style fountain, a copy of the Sebilj at the Sarajevo market, while at the upper end, there is a memorial column, whose long text lists the great kafanas – cafés, music pubs – that worked in the street in the past century, as well as the great poets, painters, musicians and other literati that made the kafanas famous in Belgrade and across the country.

Some nearby pubs were made famous by other kinds of people. Near the upper part of the Skadarlija stood the kafana Kod Albanije, founded in 1860, where the assassins of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo wove their plans in 1914. Since we have already dedicated a special picture post to their oeuvre in Sarajevo, let us have a picture of its Belgrade bridgehead as well. In 1939 it was replaced by the Palata Albanija.

In the early 19th century, after the removal of the ramparts of the fortress of Belgrade, Gypsies settled here, along the Bibijin stream running down between the ramparts, which also determined the trail of the Skadarlija. The Gypsy quarter, like the Albaicín in Granada, Rixdorf in Berlin or Tabán in Budapest, soon became a bohemian residential area, and later a suburban party neighborhood, far from the iron fist of urban regulation. Its development was facilitated by the large brewery built in 1892 by the Czech Bajloni company in the lower part of the street, which constantly supplied the kafanas with fresh Aleksandar beer.

In 1945, the brewery was merged in the all-encompassing state-owned BiH brewery chain, which went bankrupt in the early 2000s. The huge block of the factory was recently converted for new purposes. On its Skadarlija Street front, the Bohemian Hotel has opened, which, with the factory’s preserved façade and its painted retro architecture, as well as with the use of industrial elements in the interiors and rooms, strives to maintain the visual heritage of the neighborhood. And within the factory’s block, corridors, inner courtyards and warehouses, a seemingly spontaneous maze of small bars has developed, enlarging the street’s old school entertainment choice with the characteristic ruin pub feeling of recent decades.

The forced closures imposed by covid is used for renovation in the Skadarlija district. The allegedly hundred-year-old cobblestones are being re-laid on the streets, and the ruin pubs reconsider their furnishings. A walk in the once bustling, now empty complex is a spooky urbex experience. It is like wandering among the ribs of a long-extinct gigantic animal with an unknown anatomy. What would Berlin not give for such scenery, magnificently ruined and then set up with a well-considered spontaneity.