Paul Sullivan reviews two books that explore the city and its environs through its waterways…
Given that Berlin is famously built on marshland (its name allegedly derives from the Slavic word berl, meaning ‘swamp’), is surrounded by thousands of lakes, and threaded with so many canals, rivers and tributaries that it purportedly has more bridges than Venice, it’s something of a mystery that not much city literature has dipped into its aqueous aspects.
Most accounts of the capital, whether fiction or nonfiction, have focused almost exclusively on its built environment, quite ignoring the fact that together with the surrounding state of Brandenburg, the German capital has the largest network of inland waterways in Europe—some 6,700 kilometres by all accounts.
A couple of recent books have changed that, one of the most notable being Jessica J. Lee’s Turning, published in 2017 by Virago in the UK, and by Piper as Mein Jahr im Wasser in Germany. Although several guides to Berlin’s lakes (and wild swimming in general) do already exist, Turning is a much more considered project, blending the author’s quest to swim in a different lake each week with elements of personal memoir, her knowledge as an environmental historian, and her talents as a nature writer.
That said, the book emerged as a guide of sorts when Lee published a 2015 article on this very website by way of introducing her swimming challenge and generously profiling some of the lakes she had enjoyed swimming in. Not mentioned in that article, however, were Lee’s motivations for undertaking the project—namely, a broken heart and related period of depression—which Turning elegantly expands on.
The lakes in Turning are thus places of healing as well as natural phenomena to be investigated, and sites of cultural and regional history too. As she charts her weekly swims, Lee gradually reveals to us parts of her own background: growing up in Ontario, Canada; an early and misguided marriage (and subsequent divorce); the breakup of her parents’ marriage. The flashbacks also trace her personal relationship with water, including the trauma of a near-fatal drowning incident as a young child, and regular swims with family and friends at lakes and YMCA pools in Ontario as well as in Florida, where she spent family summer holidays as a teen.
“Water feels different in each place,” she writes. “The water I grew up with was hard, cutting, and when I go back to visit it now, I feel it in my ears when I dive in. something different, more like rock. The lake a whetted blade. The water in Berlin has a softness to it. Maybe it’s the sand, buffing the edges off the water like splinters from a beam. It slips over you like a blanket. There’s a safety in this feeling. In the lakes here, there is a feeling of enclosure and security that Canada can’t replicate. And it shouldn’t – the pelagic vastness there is entirely its own, and I’ve learned to love that too.”
After study…