Berlin: Thälmannpark swimming pool: In Lehmann’s woods

Above Lenin: the Thälmann monument in the prefab residential area on Greifswalder Straße

Photo: imago/Jürgen Ritter

Above water

Photo: private

Anne Hahn is the author of novels and non-fiction books and swims the waters of the world for “nd”.

It smells intense. Fir, pine? Something with forest. I close my eyes. It’s quiet for a few minutes until the door opens and someone steps through the fog. The renovation of the Ernst-Thälmann-Park swimming pool took two years, and the sauna has also been open for a few months. Rarely do you enjoy squeezing yourself into so little space (three hours, twelve euros). Log cabin sauna with outdoor lawn, sanarium, Finnish sauna and steam sauna, all aromatized. The steam sauna is large and lined with real stone slabs. A tub shower and plunge pool as well as two foot basins in a seating niche also fit in what was once the favorite sauna of the future Chancellor – this is where Angela Merkel experienced the evening of November 9, 1989 and made a nighttime pilgrimage across the Bornholmer Straße border crossing in her bathing suits.

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A decade and a half after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demolition of the monument in the park of the same name was discussed. Ernst Thälmann was allowed to stay. Ultimately, destroying monuments is not a contribution to coming to terms with history, said Berlin’s top monument conservationist in 2013. Luckily, the gasometers of the Berlin gasworks that were previously located here were blown up in 1981 against public protest and despite nice ideas for converting it into a bathing area, for example. The planned Ferris wheel also remained a sketch. An ensemble of prefabricated buildings, planetarium, school, swimming pool and cultural center as well as gallery and theater in the former gasworks building was built in 1986.

The swimming pool is decorated in shades of blue, the bare metal pool sparkles, insulated walls absorb noise. I slide through a tangle of legs to the two roped lanes, fly the 25 meters back and forth and only collide once in 30 minutes. There are white plastic loungers set up all around where the “track nerds” can relax from their exertions in the evenings. Says my friend Annett, who usually comes here late at night. People then jostle and plow through the water as if they wanted to break records. Often with a watch on the wrist and a final half panel in a butterfly style, giant waves on top.

I’m spared that at lunchtime. I take a little shower or a back massage in the non-swimmer pool and then stroll into the sauna. Minimalistically optimized enjoyment, four women’s showers are enough, the collective changing room is overcrowded, hairdryers work and I end up outside in the hallway foyer. Lockers, turnstile, drinks and gummy bear vending machine, job advertisements, swimming badge board, November gray and Thälmannpark.

I set off, light on my feet and smelling a little of the forest. See the huge head with half a torso enthroned on Greifswalder Strasse. He clenches his fist and frowns, looking over trees that are almost as tall as he is. 100,000 people are said to have attended the inauguration of the 50-ton monument in April 1986, surrounded by a sea of ​​flowers and snow-white high-rise buildings. “Lehmann”, as Ernst Thälmann’s bust was popularly known, is now, like the surrounding park, a listed building, has been provided with classifying works of art and is regularly cleaned. He remains a Lehmann, half Lenin, half Thälmann: The sculptor Lew Kerbel is said to have been working on an oversized Lenin head when he was asked for a Thälmann. So he created the lower half of the head (from the nose) as an image of Thälmann.