• Berlin
  • Berlin boomerangs: What goes around, comes around

Berlin

Berlin boomerangs: What goes around, comes around

Christian Kliem, owner of Berliner Bumerang, talks about the physics and art of the boomerang.

Photo: Nils Bornemann

If you asked Christian Kliem to make you a boomerang, pulling out the Instagram app and recording a looping six-second video would likely be the last thing he thinks to do.

“I can build a boomerang very well. But everything that has to do with computers, I’m totally bad at,” he jokes. For the last 25 years, Kliem has owned and operated Berliner Bumerang, making and selling boomerangs from locally-sourced materials and teaching workshops for aspiring aerial-toy athletes from his studio space in Lichtenberg. He also hosts team events for companies and children’s birthday parties, which are popular – the boomerang, as a tool for sport, is all-ages. “I’m 46 years old with three children. All of them can throw boomerangs,” Kliem says, noting that his youngest, three, “has a good rotation throw”. 

Kliem has been an enthusiast of the spinning wooden objects since he was a teenager; he estimates that he’s built, at minimum, 30,000 boomerangs over the course of his lifetime. A handmade one takes him about 20 minutes. With electric-powered tools, he can do it in 10.

The allure of the boomerang is relatively easy to understand – watching something that you’ve hurled away from you come back to the very spot you stand defies understanding (though perhaps not in the case of exes). But for that moment to have retained its satisfaction for, in Kliem’s case, hundreds of thousands of throws, is unusual. It’s just not something he gets tired of, he says. “It’s a fascinating feeling when you throw a 20-metre-far distance boomerang and it comes back to you, it falls right into your hand,” Kliem explains. “If you have [that feeling] one time, you will have it more and more.”  

WOOD YOU RATHER

Kliem’s love affair with the boomerang has been going strong for three decades. Born near the North Sea, he moved to Berlin when he was in Kindergarten. He stumbled on a children’s television documentary on the boomerang, and obsession took hold. “Everything that had to do with throwing or shooting, I always found fascinating, like bows or stone slingshots,” he says. “I tried to get a book on how to build boomerangs, which was not so easy 30 years ago. In Berlin, there was one shop you could buy [from]. From the book, I learned the basics.” A year later, he started creating his own boomerangs, drafting up original designs. 

Kliem went on to study Holztechnik, basic wood technique, and a specialisation of education he calls “adventure pedagogy”. He combined the disciplines to start teaching youth workshops, where teens could learn to build and then throw their own boomerang. Soon, he was also training adults – most of whom are local beginners, but some of whom travel to learn the craft from him specifically. “People come from all over. At the last workshop, there was someone from Norway. Another one from Austria,” Kliem says. “I don’t know how much the Deutsche Bahn [has] earned because of my customers, but it’s a lot.” His workshops, available in German or English by request, are usually held once a month. In the space of five hours, Kliem offers a bit of the history behind the boomerang and the science that gives it flight, then helps participants construct their own and teaches them how to throw it. 

For the perfect throws, you must be in total harmony with the wind and with the boomerang.

At the workshops, he’ll ask people what other sports objects they can comfortably chuck – a frisbee? A snowball? – to determine what kind of boomerang might be best for them. “When a kid is seven years old and he plays in a handball club? Okay, no problem, he can throw. For sure, he can throw well. Or when somebody plays Ultimate frisbee – not one time a year, but one time a week. Okay, no problem, you can throw a 30-metre boomerang. It depends on the individual,” he explains. As his students are learning, he offers course corrections. “I see what the mistake is. I see it by the flight, by the movement, and I say, “Hey, you, next time, [move] more like this, more like this. And then after three, four tries, they can do it.” 

Those already confident in their wrist-flicking prowess can buy a boomerang at one of the Berlin markets he sells at, or directly off Kliem’s website for prices that range from €39 to €99. There’s the classic form – the inverted V – and many three-pronged configurations, some with jagged outlines. The shape, plus the profile of the edges, the type of wood and its weight, change how far a boomerang can fly. In his workshop, a few of his more advanced custom designs are displayed – a wide blue anchor, and a birch boomerang that resembles a Venetian gondola. Kliem spent eight months in Venice in 2015, invited there to be part of their famous Biennale. Every day, he and a colleague threw boomerangs off the roof of the German Pavilion. “If you found a boomerang there, falling down off the trees, that was mine,” he says.  

He’s been in his workshop – which he shares with another woodworker, who makes longbows – since 2009, when he became one of the 90-plus artists and craftspeople to work in BLO Ateliers, an eclectic lot of studios on the grounds of the former Berlin-Lichtenberg railway depot. In July 2024, their 20-year lease agreement with Deutsche Bahn ended, and they’ve since been in a protracted fight with the rail company to hold on to the beloved cultural space. In the meantime, he says, the heating was cut off, and their landlords have declined to help with any repairs. Kliem is one of the luckier tenants – he has a wood stove. 

Photo: Makar Artemev

He’s particularly proud that his boomerangs, unlike many of the mass-production sellers on Amazon, are what he calls “an ecological good”. The wood, which is often birch but can be oak, eucalyptus, mahogany or cherry, is all from Europe and carries a Forest Stewardship Council designation that means that for every tree cut, another is planted. “And my boomerangs are not finished with chemical plastic stuff, like lacquer or something. I use plant-based oil,” he says. 

This time of year, he’s just come off of his busiest season, for which he preps for months: six weeks on the Christmas market at Alexanderplatz, selling wooden wares stamped with a logo of a boomerang flying around the TV tower. “It’s a perfect gift,” he says. He points buyers to his three-minute instructional video for beginners, though he adds, “you can write books about how to throw a boomerang”. 

BOOMERANG BOOM

For an object that has been airborne since the Stone Age, the boomerang flies mostly under the radar today. As a sport, it’s growing – the 2024 World Boomerang Championships, held in Colorado, drew spectators from around the world to watch the world’s best throw at speeds upwards of 129 kilometres per hour. But in Germany, Kliem says, it’s still a fairly niche activity. 

“There was a boomerang hype in the 1920s in Germany. Quite a lot of people did it here. Then there was a war,” he says. He’s waiting patiently for another boom, ideally brought on by Hollywood. “It all depends on the media. Everybody wants to be like Legolas,” he says, referencing the Lord of the Rings character who wields a bow and arrow, and later Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games. “It depends on when Hollywood decides to make an Avengers superstar a boomerang thrower. Probably then, the people want to build boomerangs … There was Suicide Squad, and there was one boomerang guy. It’s a drunken Australian man. Nobody wants to be like him. It’s not Legolas. We need a Legolas.” Kliem cites one of US President Franklin Roosevelt’s former vice presidents (he couldn’t recall the name, but turns out it’s Henry Wallace) as among the historical figures known as recreational boomerang throwers – but he’s not the kind of celebrity that compels newcomers. 

It depends on when Hollywood decides to make an Avengers superstar a boomerang thrower.

Perhaps the biggest misconception, in Kliem’s mind at least, is geographic. “Normally people think the boomerang comes from Australia,” he says. “But if you take a look at the archaeological accounts, the oldest boomerang that was ever found is in Europe.” He’s talking about a 23,000-year-old mammoth tusk carved in the shape of a boomerang, found in a cave in Poland in 1987. Of course, boomerangs are a big part of the culture and history of indigenous Australia; the oldest boomerangs found there are 10,000 years old, though rock art imagery dates back much farther. Other ancient ones, used primarily as a tool for hunting, have also been discovered in Egyptian tombs, in North America and Eurasia. 

The physics behind their flight, on the other hand, is a much more recent understanding. “We just developed the knowledge about this 150 years ago,” Kliem says. “We really understand why it comes back, because we have the brothers Wright with the wings, [and] Leonardo da Vinci.” He cites Bernoulli’s law of aerodynamics and the gyroscopic effect. “These two physical laws in perfect harmony lead to the boomerang coming back. Our grand-grand-grand-grand-grand-grandfathers and mothers, 20,000 years ago, they knew the knowledge of these two laws. This is, for me, always fascinating.” 

Berlin is a great place to put the science of the boomerang to the test, he says. “It’s flat, we have a lot of parks, we have a lot of free sporting areas, and we don’t have so much wind here.” Kliem is always checking the forecast. “Rain doesn’t matter. Wind is bad, the more wind the worse. It’s the same if you’re kiteboarding or a pilot – you must check the weather before you use the winds.” He keeps a few boomerangs in his car, in case a good moment to throw arises. “In the field or on a beach, wherever you are – it can be in every Tasche, no problem.” This is the convenience of the boomerang. “For me, it’s meditative, because for the perfect throws, you must be in total harmony with the wind and with the boomerang,” Kliem says. “I can throw, catch, throw, catch, and I don’t think about it. The beginners, they are always thinking – which degree, which angle … but when you have thrown 1,000 boomerangs, your body doesn’t make the mistakes. It becomes a reflex.” 

Talking to Kliem about his homegrown business, it’s clear that there’s something philosophical behind it for him. He points to one of his slogans, which reads, “You always get what you give.” Another, stamped on a boomerang: Gutes kommt zurück. Good things come back.