Brandenburg Woods
I’m looking forward to leaving Berlin for the next place. Some of it is just geography. It’s not Berlin’s fault. Even though everybody thinks it’s grim, it’s lush a lot of the year. On final descent into the airport, you can see how the city is encircled by woods and lakes that have neat white docks and boats criss-crossing them. Parklets pock every neighbourhood and enormous green swathes erupt all over. In the summer, the lakes teem with bathers taking bracing dives and sunning themselves alternately. If you take a train in any direction, you’re amongst it in under an hour.
We started a circumnavigation called the 66 Lakes Trail one summer and were blown away by the endless woods and unspoiled pools. We never finished it and I have no desire to. At some point, rolling into a small Eastern train station evocative of crimes against humanity for another leg, I’d had enough. I saw that the woods were all the same. I saw that the land was relentlessly flat and low.
Taking a high speed train to France, I felt how much Germany there was between there and Berlin. It just keeps going, exhausting all variety long before the language on the signs changes. The North European Plain can feel like a single mud flat from Bruges to Belarus on a bleak midwinter’s day. Our Brandenburg was just one mote of it.
It’s a seductively flat corridor. Caravans, cavalry, and tank divisions have rumbled back and forth all over it for centuries. Looking east from the Rhineland, people have let the thought that there’s no terrain to speak of between here and Moscow germinate in their minds to terrible ends. Knowing stuff about World War Two seems to be to do with maturing my male drone in my thirties, but also with living in this open air museum.
Walking through the forests of Brandenburg one day we came upon some weathered trench lines and earthworks. I recast the brutal melodrama of the Battle of Berlin of my imagination where I stood. I bought a book called Berlin and found its hundreds of pages were not sweeping history but minute-to-minute detail of the fall of the city in ’45, and I found that this time, I recognised the neighbourhoods falling one by one in two afternoons. They generally have good nurseries now. I was primed to see the tanks from the Oder line bullying through the woods, the Scots pines exploding into shards under fire.
Those pines were identically planted into rows in sandy soil. I managed to put my finger on the sense of doldrums on those hikes, despite the peace and the green. By then I assumed grimly that the whole place had been blown flat by explosives in the twentieth century and replanted by orderly East Germans, but it went back further. The Prussians stripped the soil with heavy logging and replanting. They appreciated the efficiency of acres of uniform gridded forests. Though the Nazis had dreamed of rewilding the place into a fairytale of their imagined past, the war machine came first.
When we walked past a flooded gully where the water had killed every tree standing in it, white and stripped and petrified, I was glad of it. It was frank. It was the only thing for miles that looked like what had happened to it.
Once I’d realised what I was looking at, I grumpily wrote it off. I squinted suspiciously, trying to discern the politics of the towns and villages we passed through. I looked again at those terrible railway stations. It’s more history than geography, I realise, the excess of it.