Potsdamer Park Babelsberg: When wind turbines become beautiful

An asphalt path leads from the observatory entrance into Babelsberg Park. It's basically his back entrance. Anyone who goes in feels like they are in a mixed deciduous forest, no view of the castle, no flower-filled pleasure ground, no golf-green bowling green, just trees. The trees are there because they have to, not because they can; the Ice Age terminal moraine is not ideal ground for beech and oak trees. But that's how it is in the planting business, the purpose justifies the tree species.

You can walk straight ahead on the asphalt path into the park comfortably and with clean feet, whatever the weather. Left and right, drought and heat are transforming the dense deciduous forest more and more into a savannah landscape every year. Fortunately, there are still enough trees to frame the attraction at the very end of the path, which is reached after a sharp left turn and a gentle right turn, slightly uphill: the Victory Column.

She stands gracefully on the Babelsberg and looks over the treetops, paths and meadows far down to the Havel, since 1866. Anyone who approaches her from behind, from the entrance to the observatory, or from the north side, coming from the castle, will see her shining through the trees on the winding paths, delicate and magical. Created by the sculptor Christian Daniel Rauch, the lord of the castle park, King Wilhelm I, had it erected to celebrate Prussia's military victory over the Austrians.

In this column, Heike Holdinghausen writes about nature and how humans shape and destroy it. The setting is the Babelsberg Palace Park, where she has been walking almost every day for years. It's never boring because the park is 124 hectares in size and its network of paths covers over 20 kilometers. This is only half the size of Berlin's Tiergarten, but almost three times larger than the Vatican.

At its feet is a small viewing platform from which various viewing axes guide the view over Potsdam, for example to the Belvedere on the Pfingstberg, the Brauhausberg and, accidentally, also to the prefabricated buildings in the east center. The neo-Gothic steam engine house on Glienicker Lake remains hidden from view. You can see that it stood in the shadow of the wall for a long time and is quite run down. In 1843 it was all the rage, as behind its medieval-looking walls it hid a state-of-the-art 40-horsepower steam engine that pumped water from the Havel to the Babelsberg to green the sandy hill.

The building “celebrated the central role of the machine within the organic unity of the palace and park,” enthuses Norton Wise in his essay “Using steam power and engineering to create a blooming landscape garden.” Windows gave a clear view of the flywheel, pistons and gears. Modern technology and lovely landscapes went together when packaged in a medieval way. In the ideas of the park's creator, Hermann Fürst zu Pückler-Muskau, everything was panorama, perspective, surface. He designed with terrain, buildings and plants - he had little interest in nature, and that would make him, it seems, very much a child of our time.

Technology is allowed to destroy the climate and the habitat of people, animals and plants - but not the image of the landscape. Home is a panorama, not an ecosystem. But can imagery, a new view of beauty, be trained? Wouldn't some artist collective perhaps want to find a new place for the Victory Column in the park, to alienate it and give it a different meaning, also in the spirit of Austria? A wind turbine could be built on the freed-up space and proudly stretch its wings into the wind high above the city. Visitors from the Uckermark would be amazed: a wind turbine in the castle park – that works there too.