The Berlin Stories: Part 1

Urban hiking in the world's wildest city

As a professional hiker (my acupuncturist’s words), I consider my occupation to be a threefold act. I seek out an eclectic range of environments. I try to find interesting ways to pass through them. And I pause to appreciate the unique charms of each environment along the way. That last part is really important when it comes to urban hiking, since we don’t usually think of urban environments as hiking venues. In this newsletter, we’ve savored the surprising environmental beauty in gritty cities such as Worcester and Pittsburgh, in the spirit of a flâneur. AKA a “botanist of the pavement.”

But ever since getting into urban hiking during Year One of the pandemic, I’ve yearned to return to a certain city whose calm, chirping green spaces and graffiti-festooned, pulsating built environments offer a dizzying cocktail of bucolic and cosmopolitan hedonism that few other cities can compete with.

I’m talking, of course, about Berlin.

Back in the Weimar Republic days of the 1920s, Berlin was arguably the world capital of artistic and sexual revolution. At one point, before the Nazis came to power, there were more than 100 gay and lesbian bars operating in the German capital. Black musicians like Josephine Baker who were marginalized in American nightlife found their way to marquees in Berlin. The question as to how the Weimar Republic failed and yielded the horrific backlash of the Third Reich is too complex to completely lay out in an introductory graf. (See Benjamin Carter Hett’s The Death of Democracy for a full account.) But crucial factors include the inflation and economic hardship that Germany experienced after World War I, the virulent scapegoating of minorities by right wing groups, and an idiotic decision by conservative politicians to try and co-opt the rising fascist movement, which Hitler and the Nazi Party successfully exploited.

The war left Berlin in ruins, and the next war cleaved the shell-shocked city in half for nearly three decades. But when the wall came down in 1989, something remarkable happened. Residents of the east side, long deprived of cultural freedoms, re-mingled with the residents of the west side, who were predominantly younger thanks to a law which had exempted West Berlin residents of mandatory military service. With city neighborhoods in varying states of ruination and recovery, the youth of Berlin turned derelict spaces like crumbling bunkers and abandoned factories into their own social venues, often livening up their get-togethers with primordial techno records—imported from Detroit’s burgeoning electronic music scene with the help of American GIs. By the mid-1990s, these DIY gatherings had evolved into a new circuit of urban nightlife, with roots in the city’s queer, punk, and kink communities. It was a darker, wilder, more erotic, affordable, and adventurous version of the nightlife one finds in cities like New York or London. It drew millions of travelers to Berlin and by 2009, when I first visited, Berlin’s club scene had become a pillar of its tourism economy, and its reputation.

SO, you can understand why I’ve been wanting to get back to Berlin as an urban hiker. I’ve often written about how urban trails will sometimes pass by cultural institutions like galleries or concert halls, that you could avail yourself of by simply stepping off the path. And Berlin is full of pathways, from the rustling and rippling 520 acres of Tiergarten park, to the dreamlike walkways along the Spree river, to the vaster and more foreboding hemlock forests on the city’s fringes. I was especially intrigued by those forests, having shot through them on the train when leaving Berlin previously. And last year, I was thrilled to learn that there’s a trail which literally encircles the entire city for 258 miles, passing through these quiet woodlands, meadows, and wetlands.

This is the epic 66 Lakes Trail. It was established by a local hiker named Manfred Rescheke, and like San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail or Boston’s Walking City Trail, it consists of pre-existing trails and roads, mapped and linked into one gargantuan urban hiking route. It passes through suburbs like Potsdam and Melchow, which are connected to Berlin’s urban center via train and bus. And true to its name, the trail passes by 66 serene bodies of water around the city’s edges. (In fact, according to Rescheke himself, the total number of lakes along the trail is actually in the 70s.)

I traveled to Berlin with a good friend and regular hiking accomplice to watch her run the Berlin Marathon this past weekend. (She absolutely crushed it.) But I had two full days to enjoy in the city before the race. It didn’t take long for a plan to emerge. Each morning, I would hop on the S-Bahn, head to the suburbs, and hike sections of the 66 Lakes Trail. And each night, I would take a nap, swap out my hiking apparel for black leather or latex, and visit some of the city’s most thumping, uninhibited nightclubs. It would be the ultimate urban hiking trip—an odyssey into the idyllic and the erogenous.

Now I will say, this took some strategic packing. For economic and practical reasons, I decided I would travel with a small backpack and a carry-on bag. (If an airline loses a bag with hiking gear, your hiking plans are basically fucked.) But after trial-packing a couple of outfits and looking up laundromats near my hotel, I successfully crossed the ocean and started my adventure this past Friday. With a train station croissant, I boarded the S-Bahn and was whisked off to Hennigsdorf on a gray, spritzing morning. Industrial infrastructure outside the windows gave way to corridors of verdant leaves. Within half an hour, I was standing on the sleepy Hennigsdorf train platform with the 66 Lakes Trail map queued up on AllTrails and the better part of a day in front of me.

I’m used to urban hiking trails that involve a marriage of rustic and urban elements, and the first thing I noticed about the 66 Lakes Trail is that it really makes you feel far removed from Berlin. A quick walk through the streets of Hennigsdorf took me over the Havel river to a busy greenway, which I sprinted across to enter the immersive forests of the Stolpe nature preserve. And here, through the towering, barren hemlock trunks, I started to see glassy bodies of water, disturbed only by the occasional duck floating across the surface of the water. I spent a solid hour walking on dirt roads through these woods and the only person I encountered was a runner passing under a railroad overpass, across which a red Deutsche Bahn train rumbled, as though on cue.

The Stolpe woods reminded me of Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, with those thin, creepy-looking trees shooting up from a sea of discolored ferns. The glowering skies added to the atmosphere. And the mosquitoes were relentless. If I so much as stopped for a second to take a picture or look over my shoulder, I would have to slap them off my exposed calves. Given my nocturnal plans, this started to concern me. I didn’t want to show up at the doors of clubs covered in bug bites! Originally I had planned to hike from Hennigsdorf to the village of Wensickendorf: a journey of roughly 15 miles. But the beauty of urban or urban-adjacent trails is that you can easily decide to shorten or extend your hike, if public transportation is available. So I adjusted my plan and chose to finish at Birkenwerder instead, cutting down my hike to a more agreeable 8 miles.

As if complimenting my decision, the mosquitoes trailed off once I emerged from the Stolpe forest at the edge of a little suburban neighborhood called Niederheide. Here I followed the sidewalk past rows of classic German timber-framed houses, but even out here, the community was imbued with modern touches like established bike lanes and a handsome public toilet by a playground, which I happily availed myself of. From here, I passed lovingly manicured gardens, hatchback cars that were just the right size for a family camping getaway, and at one point, a pair of loud, excited French bulldogs that probably weren’t used to encountering lone urban hikers.

And yet, the layout of Niederheide made it pretty clear that foot traffic was common around here. I encountered two runners and soon after, I found an inviting dirt side-path that took me between several houses into my next immersive green space—a huge, flowering meadow that served as transitional ground between Hennigsdorf and Birkenwerder. This was when my 66 Lakes hike went from eerily atmospheric to flat-out impressionistic. I followed a barely visible path of trampled grass through this meadow past crooked fences and a wooden bird watching tower, aiming for a distant colony of trees. When I finally entered these trees, I found myself at the Briessteig: a creekside trail into the densest woods yet. The trail soon transitioned into a winding boardwalk through a wormhole of greenery. Occasional groups of waterfowl floated down the creek. A woman walking her dog kindly greeted me with a Hallo, which I gamely parroted back at her. The sound of cars slowly bled into the creekscape, a wooden bridge delivered me to some stairs, and just like that I was in the center of Birkenwerder—only 10 minutes from the local S-Bahn station, and deeply satisfied.

What happened next further demonstrates the freedom and possibilities of urban hiking. After stretching my hamstrings on the train platform, I boarded the S-Bahn, rode back to Berlin, and hopped off at the bustling Alexanderplatz plaza for three errands. First, I bought some groceries at an Edeka supermarket (a few bags of leafy greens, to supplement my street food indulgences, and a few beers that would cost a lot more back in the U.S.) Next, I wandered into an electronics store to pick up another European power adapter, having unwittingly tripped the circuit for my hotel room the other night by foolishly using a power splitter with my years-old adapter. Finally, upon the recommendation of a friend, I visited Schwarzer Reiter, a well-regarded kink and fetish apparel store where I bought a pair of black latex briefs for one of the more decadent—and dress code-enforced—nightclubs that I was planning to visit later on.

And I did it all while wearing my hiking shoes, shorts, and wind shirt: fresh off the trail.

And yet, there was a tinge of disappointment to being back in Berlin’s urban core. As gorgeous as the 66 Lakes Trail had been, I had also missed the city’s urban elements! Feeling removed from a city on an urban hike *can* be rejuvenating if you’re weary of the city. But given my limited time in Berlin, I didn’t want to distance myself from the urban core again. So that night, as I chomped into a juicy doner kebab—a dreamlike Turkish specialty that’s basically an open faced sandwich heaped with with rotisserie meat and salad—I decided that for my second day in Berlin, I would take the opposite approach to my hiking and go for an improvisational adventure through some of the city’s centermost parks and greenways. And when I approached the 11pm queue for Tresor, a legendary underground techno club in the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, I felt vindicated for my pivot. The bouncer took a stern glance at my black low tops, black jeans, and black tank top, and waved me inside. I forked over a shockingly agreeable 15 Euros. And within minutes, I was on a neon-accented dance floor crammed with hundreds of people, contorting and undulating to dark, LOUD techno that sounded like hellfire synthesized for collective consumption. Within minutes, I was just as sweaty as I had been while approaching the end of the Briesstieg pathway, earlier that day.

And it was only Day 1 in Berlin…

CLICK HERE for sectional AllTrails maps of the entire 66 Lakes Trail

CLICK HERE for a map of the Hennigsdorf to Birkenwerder section

And stay tuned for Part 2 of this Berlin dispatch