Above water – The Elbe is still the same

The Elbe is familiar to me like no other river. When I was growing up, there were a lot of open spaces in my hometown. Magdeburg was founded by an emperor, given to his beloved, eradicated twice and rebuilt twice. As a child, I ran from Karl-Marx-Strasse to the slope on Jakobstrasse in five minutes, and there was the Elbe in front of me. A sparkling wide river. On the right the ruins of St. John’s Church and then nothing left until the Monastery of Our Lady, on the left the Restaurant des Meeres and a curved bridge down to the fleet pier. Above all the cathedral.

Barges and excursion boats sailed on the river, and on the Elbe promenade there was ice and a large concrete screw. We played hide-and-seek in cellar ruins and the canals on the quay. I learned to swim in the Elbe swimming pool and ice skate on the Elbe meadows with my brother.

For years we stalked with our father through the floodplains near Pretzien in search of the Elbe beaver. One harsh winter we found three wild boars that had broken into the Old Elbe and were frozen while trying to escape. In summer we cycled along the river to Lake Salbker and in autumn we stood with mushroom baskets on the Elbe ferry from Kreuzhorst to Westerhüsen. If that Pretzien weir was pulled, millions of liters of Elbe water poured into the flood canal, and we feared for the beavers. He remained invisible. Once a fox and a hare drifted past us sitting together on a tree trunk.

Above water

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

On the beach of the Old Elbe, which connects with the Stromelbe behind it Stadtpark Rotehorn united and prone to drying out in the summer, I found shells, fossilized bones and my first love – a canoeist who was practicing the descent at the waterfall. “Just don’t fall into the Elbe” was the motto of my youth and the joke “What does the eel learn in the Elbe? Chemical skilled worker!” omnipresent. The Elbe stank. I used to have it here River swimming pools given, said the old people in the Buckau bars where I learned to drink. But in 1954 it was over, the river was too dirty.

Sometimes we drunkenly went to the Buckau Elbe harbor, stole a boat and played run-off until someone flopped in, we pulled him out and made off. One friend liked to balance on the iron railing of the river bridge, another actually swam across the brown river to his shift at the Fahlberg-List chemical plant. That’s long history.

Today, at every home game of 1. FC Magdeburg, the cathedral bells ring in the Heinz Krügel Stadium and 25,000 people sing “Is the Elbe still the same?” The Elbe has recovered. The legend can now be imagined according to which an Elbe mermaid once appeared on the Magdeburg market square wearing a dress the color of the blue Elbe flood, which always appeared a hand’s breadth wet at the bottom.

Last summer I was looking for the place on the Old Elbe where my father had led us, tripped, collapsed and fell into a dark cave, onto something soft. I opened my eyes underwater and saw a beaver escaping. I followed him.