Our group made a strange impression as we walked along the banks of the Spreekanal on the Fischerinsel in swim caps, goggles and bathing suits. A bemused crowd – including a couple of women in Ordnungsamt uniforms on a nearby bench – looked on as we reached a small boat launch underneath Leipziger Straße, climbed over the fence and leapt into the water.
The cool Spree water was refreshing on a warm June evening, and for a few minutes my fellow bathers and I bobbed gleefully, splashing around in the shadow of the Spittelmarkt U-Bahn station before swimming a few hundred metres under the bridge and down the canal, following the gentle current. The occasional pigeon feather floated past.
Three years ago, in almost the exact same spot, I’d accompanied a pair of teenaged magnet fishermen as they yanked all kinds of junk from the bottom: bicycles, pipes, unexploded bombs from World War II. But today, while shadows from the the tall channel walls made the surface appear dark, the water was surprisingly clear.
Around the turn of the century, there were numerous bathhouses dotting the Spreekanal and the river.
This was the weekly after-work dip for Flussbad eV, a group that’s been fighting for years to bring public bathing back to the side-channel of the Spree that loops around Fischerinsel and Museumsinsel. Most of the swimmers are well acquainted to these waters – so it was something of a shock to be greeted by sirens and a whole squad of police when we climbed up the cast-iron ladder.
“IDs from everyone who was in the water!” an officer demanded as our group – dripping wet – scurried back over to Flussbad’s small canal-side shack to grab wallets from our trousers. We were being detained, an officer explained, under suspicion of violating a long list of laws and regulations about water: Berlin’s Wassergesetz, Badegewässerverordnung and even federal inland waterways rules. This was unusual – Flussbad had swam in these waters many times, and never encountered trouble.
This stretch of the Spree was once a Berlin bathing hotspot. Around the turn of the century, there were numerous bathhouses dotting the Spreekanal and the river. But they were shut down in 1924, with local authorities citing hygiene issues in a river increasingly choked with pollution from industry and the booming metropolis. Berlin’s new bathing regulations the following year essentially outlawed swimming in the urban stretches of the Spree.
A century later, Flussbad is trying to bring public swimming back to central Berlin. The group called for a demonstration in the canal on May 20 to protest 100 years of being denied the right to dip in the river, and more than 300 people signed up to swim along.
Berlin’s water police forbid the demonstration at the last minute – citing not water quality, but other safety concerns, including the narrow stairs and ladders leading to the water. Undaunted, Flussbad rescheduled the demo for June 17. Hundreds showed up to take a dip in the shadow of the TV Tower and the Berliner Dom, under a sign that read “BADEVERBOT WEGSWIMMEN” (“swim away, swimming ban”).
“You stand outside and look down, and you think it’s dark and it’s kind of spooky and so on. But once you’re in, you suddenly discover that it’s really spacious. You have this different perspective on the city. And it just feels very natural to reclaim that,” says Jan Edler, one of Flussbad’s founders. “The Spree, you know, was disconnected from the city for such a long time with the Wall and the division of Berlin – and being part of that division. Maybe we can go back.”
Jan and his brother, Tim Edler, have been interested in swimming in the Spree since the late 1990s. The pair were working at Kunst und Technik, a group of artists and designers who’d set up shop in an old laboratory building on the Spree in Monbijoupark. Their most successful project, as Jan puts it, was a “typical illegal nightclub” in the space – with revellers sometimes taking plunges into the water on hot nights. With Berlin’s entire city centre being rethought after reunification, Tim Edler noticed that little attention was being put on what to do with the water.
The brothers pitched the idea of public swimming in the Spreekanal, and it generated a surprising amount of buzz: “There was some journalist at the time, from the German Press Agency, and he wrote that it would be the longest swimming pool in the world, and things like that are catchy.” That put the idea into the public conversation, but they made little tangible progress until 2011, when they won a prestigious international sustainable architecture award with a $100,000 prize and got the attention of some local politicians.
The interest eventually landed them several million euros in grants, which they used to launch the Flussbad nonprofit and start studying what it might take to bring safe swimming back to the heart of Berlin – after all, there’s all manner of junk on the riverbed, including rusty bikes, pipes and even unexploded bombs from World War II.
“In the beginning, we thought that the water would need to be filtered in order to go swimming,” says Jan. “And then through an intense evaluation of water quality for several years now, we have learned that the water quality is much better than we thought.” Except after very heavy rains, bacteria levels in the Stadtspree are within acceptable ranges (although not as clean as upstream around the Müggelsee or the Havel).
The tricky part, though, is that most European swimming guidelines are aimed at bodies of water where quality remains relatively steady. Wolfgang Seis, a research group leader at the Berlin Centre of Competence for Water (KWB), says that conditions in the Spree can swing from perfectly fine to absolutely catastrophic during heavy rainstorms, which overflow the sewer system in central Berlin and send untreated wastewater straight into the river.
Flussbad partnered with Seis and KWB, who created a model that generates real-time estimates of water quality conditions in the Spreekanal by combining data on weather, discharge from Berlin’s sewers and river flow rates. The up-to-date forecasts are posted on badberlin.info. Flussbad also recently installed a flagpole along the Spreekanal, which they envision using to signal when the water is safe for a dip and when it’s not.
There’s all manner of junk on the riverbed, including rusty bikes, pipes and even unexploded bombs from World War II.
Seis says it’s ultimately up to public health authorities to decide whether to allow swimming, but in his opinion – at least during periods of good water quality – there’s no clear reason to forbid it. “I think this can be subject to personal risk preferences, if people want to swim there.”
Hopeful Spree-swimmers have good reason for cautious bureaucratic optimism. Petra Nelken, a spokesperson for the Senate department of Mobility, Transport, Climate Protection and the Environment, tells The Berliner that they’re examining whether it’s safe and feasible to regulate swimming based on the fluctuating conditions on the water, and whether there may be additional, as-yet-unidentified pathogens, with further finding expected this year.
“Whether and to what extent the Spreekanal is suitable for bathing from a hygiene point of view on the basis of these results remains unclear and completely open,” says Nelken. The city also included funding for the construction of a pilot bathing spot along the Spreekanal in next year’s urban development budget. In an interview with taz, Mitte city councilor Ephraim Gothe noted that Paris plans to open three public swimming spots along the Seine this year after the French capital made a big splash by holding Olympic swimming events in the river. “What Paris can do, Berlin should be able to do too.”
The Berlin police told The Berliner that ban-breaking bathers haven’t been an issue. “In principle, swimming in the Spree-Oder waterway is not a problem for [us]. The WSP [Berlin Water Police] has not currently received any complaints or reports of hazards to shipping traffic.”
If Flussbad succeeds in figuring out how to make swimming in the Spree safe without expensive filter systems, Jan Edler says that “opens the door to conquer other parts of the waterways in Berlin”. In the meantime, while Berliners wait to see whether the 100-year ban will continue for another century, I’ll learn my own fate when a letter from the Polizei shows up in my post box.
