The Mushroom Cloud Above, the Sunken Village Below

Let's continue down the path keeping the water close on your right.

The administrative brick building across the lakeside with the expansive lawns is the former Haus der Knappschafts-Berufsgenossenschaft, the Miners’ Occupational Accident Insurance Institution, built 1929.

After 1945, West Berlin took over the building and in the early Cold War it became an emergency intake centre for refugees from the GDR. This was the first stop for many who fled the East: registration, screening, paperwork, and routing onward.

Before the engineers sealed its veins, this was the swampland of Lietzow from the Slavic lučia meaning wet meadow. While some sources mention other folk etymology, there’s a connection to the Lietze, the Eurasian coot or Bläßhuhn, a bird you can still see on the water today. The first documentation of inhabitants, or rather stewards of the lake, is from 1239, when Benedictine nuns, who arrived with the founding of the Saint Mary's Convent, with their headquarters in Spandau. The lake remained under monastic domain until the protestant reformation, when estates were secularized in Brandenburg, in the mid 16th century. Then in 1823, Prussian General Karl Ernst Job Wilhelm von Witzleben, purchased the surrounding land and laid out his private park and summer residence. He owned a barn and an ice cellar up where the piano cafe is now, on Kantstraße, and another one roughly where the boatshouse is today.

After Prussian general Job von Witzleben created the first landscaped grounds here, the estate changed hands, in 1840 it was bought by Ferdinand Deppe, a Berlin-born horticulturist who was also a naturalist, collector, dealer, and painter. Under Deppe, the property became famous as Park Witzleben.

Deppe didn’t treat this lake as a private retreat. He expanded the park, stocked it with non-native trees or “exotics,” Deppe’s world wasn’t only Charlottenburg. In the early 1830s, he traveled repeatedly through Mexican Alta California, working on Pacific trade routes while collecting birds, plants, and shells.

Look at the edges of the park. Erwin Barth, the city gardener who drew the landscape into being in the 1910’s and 1920s, shaped the Lietzensee like a carefully rumpled carpet, a flowing Jugendstil landscape. Barth designed many of Berlin’s green landmarks. Among them, Volkspark Jungfernheide, Rehberge, Savignyplatz, Boxhagenerplatz, and many many more. Barth’s urban planning is a gentle hypnosis, not ordering you where to go, just making certain movements feels strangely inevitable. Erwin Barth was born in 1880. Half-Jewish, on his father's side, and carried the mark of the First World War in his body for the rest of his life. He returned from the front, wounded, the city transformed. and set about reshaping its open spaces with an almost stubborn tenderness.

He believed that if Berliners could sit, stroll, read, flirt, escape and breathe in beautifully designed spaces, the city itself would become more humane. At Lietzensee, you feel Barth's hand most clearly, no imperial axes, no triumphal perspectives, just subtle asymmetries. Curves that seem to anticipate you. The sense that the ground is thinking with you as you walk. It's the design of someone who knew pain, and who insisted that public space could repair something not grandly, but gently, in the way light on water repairs a mood. He took his life in 1933. No one's completely sure why, but the writing was on the wall with the Nazis, and he was openly disillusioned.

Keep going.