The Stadtbad Mitte in Berlin impresses with light coming in from all sides.
Photo: private
Out of the rain into the shower, out of the shower into the hall. The sun is just breaking through the gray cloud cover. Glistening bright light falls through the windows and forms rectangles on the large pane landscape. My heart is pounding. I understand how I this bathroom love! Although I’ve swum here a few hundred times since moving from Prenzlauer Berg to Berlin-Mitte in 1996, I had to take a trip through the city’s pools to get home.
“Wattennu with Walters Schulta,” the lady with the bun asks the other in the pink sports suit – on a Thursday evening a few years ago in the Stadtbad Mitte. I have completed my training and am drying myself off. A few lockers away, older women are getting ready for their gymnastics class on the upper floor. “I have to go under the knife, I said so straight away.” So I find out every week what’s going on with Walter and Heinz, with their daughters and sons and the new doctor at the farm hall. After a year we nod to each other in the locker room, but it will take another year for the swimming pool staff.
Above water
private
Anne Hahn is the author of novels and non-fiction books and swims the waters of the world for “nd”.
I swim with my son in my stomach and freshly healed caesarean section, after lumbago, bronchitis and lice treatment. I join a club and train in the evenings, while my son learns to swim during the day. I hit my thumb bloody on the tiles of the left wing while swimming backstroke. I massage my calves and the soles of my feet on the injectors, and the incoming water pushes me to the right line and back to the left. The pelvis becomes flat at the back. The swimmers’ area merges seamlessly into that of the non-swimmers within the 50-meter lane. Sometimes a man stands up for whom turning in a knee-deep pool is too stupid. He goes back until the water reaches his navel and throws himself into the waves.
I like touching the brass railings and looking up into the changing room galleries, into the milky light at the top. Imagine lying on the roof in the sand of the Baltic Sea and dreaming about other people’s dinner when the lights in the kitchens all around come on. I count the hall windows above me and see myself flying in their reflection, below me the blackfins from the diving club, next to me the women from the synchronized swimming group.
Muckefuck: morning, unfiltered, left
nd.Muckefuck is our newsletter for Berlin in the morning. We walk through the city awake, are there when decisions are made about city politics – but also always with the people who are affected by them. Muckefuck is a coffee length from Berlin – unfiltered and left-wing. Register now and always know what needs to be argued about.
In winter, I walk through the foyer to the elevator in a bathrobe and slippers, boots in my hands, backpack over my shoulder. We go to the sauna in the third room, where leaded glass windows by Max Pechstein show the changing of the seasons in the plunge pool room. The steam sauna is the first of my life.
It takes a herniated disc for me to enter the hall on the second floor that I have looked up at curiously for 22 years. After my treatment I can go in Physical therapy centre and finally into the ergometer room above the men’s showers. I cycle, look down into the pool and far across the park. Since the disc debacle, I’ve been swimming at lunchtime; I’m too slow for the club and its dwindling lanes. I think about texts that I want to write and hit the edge of the pool. Turn. Swimming into the light.