Pete Carvill visits Berlin’s most idiosyncratic viewing tower…
Brandenburg, the state that surrounds Berlin (itself a city-state), is famed for being incredibly flat and relatively featureless. No matter where you travel within it, you see the same repetitive combinations of trees, grass, mud, and water, with barely a concession to variety or a natural wonder such as, say, a hill.
Ultimately it’s the type of scenery one passes through on the way to somewhere more interesting. Even Jessica J. Lee, who managed to write her recent memoir (Turning), based on swimming in the lakes of Berlin and Brandenburg, struggled to wax too lyrical. “It’s a place marked by flatness,” she wrote, “by flat agricultural ground crowned with forest. Today, the highest points are wind turbines, scattered like seeds across the land.” Even the woodland, she adds in a later passage, is ‘the predictable, managed kind’.
Yet there is much to recommend about the region, especially for walkers, cyclists and nature lovers. I’ve been exploring it regularly since 2012, and it has never felt tiresome. Its flatness is, in fact, its strength in terms of planning day hikes: with no unexpected mountains or steep slopes to surprise and drain you, it feels as measured out and predictable as a familiar cooking recipe.
The landscape is also reassuringly tame; it would be some kind of achievement to find oneself in serious trouble out there. Many hiking partners have ventured out with me over the years, without carrying even basic essentials like raincoats, food, or water and—despite the best attempts of inclement weather—have survived. That’s not something you would get away with in the wilds of Canada, Australia, or the USA, where ‘nature’ can feel like it’s out to kill you.
Brandenburg is also highly accessible from Berlin. The train from Hauptbahnhof to the Grunewald takes about fifteen minutes—faster even than going by car—and you can get reach the woods of Wannsee, Buch, or Kladow in less than an hour. It’s also agreeably civilised—and by civilised, I means it’s practically impossible when in Brandenburg to be more than a kilometre from a Biergarten.
Brandenburg has also been something of a life-saver during the last year of the Coronavirus pandemic…