Slavic Farmers and Fishermen

Continue straight on Suarezstrasse.

800 years ago, this was open ground, wetlands and meadows and shallow ponds feeding into the Spree. Most of the residents at that time lived about a kilometer northwest of here, roughly around the area of today's Schloss Charlottenburg. The people here were Slavic farmers and fishermen, who slowly became Germanized after the 12th century's eastern expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. The marshy lake behind the modern houses was their livelihood, a source of fish, reeds and ice in the winter. By the 1500s, Lietzow had become a quiet farming hamlet under the jurisdiction of Spandau.

Travelers heading to Berlin would cross these fields by horse cart. As you approach Dernburgplatz, you might notice signs of reconstruction. This project involves a massive underground waterworks project, part of a system that channels groundwater from the Lietzensee basin towards the Spree. The pipes below your feet are the modern descendants of the drainage ditches that once carried water from the marshes of the Lietzensee. Vladimir Nabokov, who lived just on the other side of the S-Bahn tracks, had a section in his Berlin guide devoted to pipes.

He wrote “I go out into the flat, gray light of early morning. An even stripe of fresh snow stretches along the upper side of each black pipe. Today someone wrote ‘Otto’ with his finger on the strip of virgin snow, and I thought how beautifully that name, with its two soft O's flanking the pair of gentle consonants, suited the silent layer of snow upon that pipe, with its two orifices and its tacit tunnel.”

Nearly a century later, the same quiet poetry lingers in these utilitarian forms, in the hum of buried pipes, in the rhythm of trams, in the way the city reveals its beauty through infrastructure and decay.

Keep going straight ahead.