Berlin is a city built on a river. The Spree weaves through the center of everything, past the Norman Foster-ized Bundestag and the new presidential palace. A cruise shows these up close, and also reveals the bullet scars in the Baroque buildings left from the fighting at the end of the Second World War. The river was for a time a part of the Berlin Wall.
About a 90 minute drive from Berlin is the Spreewald, where the Spree lazes through a flat, forested area. Although tourism is the main living for the area it isn’t especially popular with non-Germans other than the few who know that in Goodnight Lenin the mother’s favorite treat was a Spreewald pickle. German reunification was the start of cripplingly high unemployment in the area, however it did mean that the Spreewald became a UNESCO biosphere reserve.
One entry point to the Spreewald is Lubben, an old Prussian town not yet scrubbed of the Red Army memorials and boxy concrete construction from Communist times. Given that the Polish border isn’t far away, it doesn’t come as a surprise that more than 80 percent of the town had been destroyed in the fierce fighting at the end of the Second World War. Only a few fragments of the medieval past remain. Men in wifebeaters lean out the windows of their apartments, smoking and watching the streets.
In the natural beauty of the park the freight of the past and the burden of the future simply fall away. Paddling a kayak in Berlin’s river but in the midst of wilderness is a meditation, punctuated only occasionally by a canal lock that brings a group of boats either up or down into the next section of the park.
Among the small number of houseboats along the river, a few have an imbiss, a little snack stand, at water level. It is hard to describe what it feels like to paddle down the Spree with a hot pretzel, a sausage and a beer, except to say that sometimes life can be perfect.
—CK LeRossignol
