The Garden and the Forest: Natural Space in Berlin

chapter 19 The Garden and the Forest: Natural Space in Berlin

Illustration 19.1 Prospectus page from Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad (1869) Courtesy of the Mark Twain Project, The Bancroft Library University of California, Berkeley

Im Walde, in dem Rauschen, ich weiss nicht, wo ich bin Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, “In der Fremde” (qtd. in Bollnow 219)

In colonial days, Leo Marx suggested, America’s landscape often played ‘garden’ to Europe’s ‘house’ in European thought, while, “the old world,” Laura Mulvey writes, supplied Americans with “a metaphor for the formative ‘before’

The Garden And The Forest 265 in the before/after divide between the mother’s exclusive, dependable love and a child’s journey into the outside world of independent subjectivity” (1992: 75). Still, “[e]very large city,” suggests Nabokov’s “A Guide to Berlin,” “has its own, man-made Eden on earth” (95),1 and its images are easily produced in a capital boasting “the largest green area of any city in the world” (Carter 67–68).2 In Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, Berlin’s Tiergarten at first seems to herald hope- ful return to the New World, a retreat urged by a husband hoping to bring a wife back from her dangerous fascination with European city life, much as America itself had earlier offered “a possible setting for a pastoral retreat,” its “garden image” embodying “something of that timeless impulse to cut loose from the constraints of a complex society” (Marx 36, 42–43), making it “diffi- cult for Americans to think of themselves as members of a world community because it has affirmed that the destiny of this country leads her away from Europe toward the agricultural interior of the continent” (Henry Nash Smith 260). Sam Dodsworth repeatedly presses this symbol of pastoral America into the work of calling home a rebellious American wife, attempting to “lure” her back from the city’s unwholesome diversions into “the thick woods” (289) at the city’s western frontier, claiming her as American in a way almost as, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote, in “the crucible of the frontier […] immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race” (23). Yet Fran com- plicates the (now rather hackneyed) symbolism Sam seems to impose on this space. She in turn uses it as her own symbolic horizon to explore a beckoning European landscape, attempting to find refuge “just off” the Tiergarten while plotting her escape from an overbearing husband and a suffocating life in the American Midwest. If the West “is but another name for the Wild” and “in Wildness is the preservation of the World” (Thoreau “Walking”: 2), as Roderick Nash mused a century later, the term “wilderness” “is so heavily freighted with meaning of a personal, symbolic, and changing kind as to resist easy defini- tion” (1). Charged with symbolism, Sam and Fran’s Tiergarten offers a double metaphor, for Sam presaging return to America, for Fran, the frontier of a new- found freedom in Europe. Much as nineteenth-century Americans, seeking “something uniquely ‘American,’ yet valuable enough to transform embarrassed provincials into

1 “The progress Nabokov’s tour of Berlin in this story recalls that of Dante’s excursion in The Divine Comedy” (Shrayer 76). Shrayer maps the story’s spaces to render them as having been intended as direct literary references to the stages of Dante’s journey (from Berlin’s sewage pipes to its “Eden” just off the Tiergarten). 2 Carter contrasts urbanized East Berlin with West Berlin’s “lakes, parks, and woodlands with deer and wild boar and forests” (67).