Verena Mörath
Lichtenberg is a parrot bird
I simply cut Lichtenberg out of the city map of Berlin. The district looks like the outline of a parrot bird in 2D. The beak is Falkenberg. And at the bottom right is Friedrichsfelde, where the zoo is located.
Lichtenberg surprised me when I realized my plan to explore it by walking and hiking at a slow pace. At the beginning, I tried to simply walk the outer boundary of the district, which is around 54 km long. Unfortunately, that didn’t quite work out, as I would have had to swim through the middle of Lake Rummelsberg, for example. The cartography didn’t take my plan into account. But I walked a total of 79.81 km in Lichtenberg and actually went to all the districts in Lichtenberg. For example, I specifically visited the Berlin animal shelter, the largest of its kind in Europe. From above, it looks like a washing machine drum with individual round soap bubbles, the size of 22 soccer pitches. Here I met a few of the 1,300 animals and a handful of the many animal keepers and volunteers who work here. I was impressed that there are even monkeys living here and Australian striped-headed bearded dragons. A very busy area of 16 hectares.
In comparison, I found my other many walks and runs rather lonely. Even in Alt- and Neuhohenschönhausen, I only met a few people. I often asked myself, where are all the residents of the tall blocks of flats – almost 56,000 people lived in Neu-Hohenschönhausen alone in 2023? Sometimes I stood at a doorbell in Lichtenberg and could see cornfields, touch asphalt and meadow at the same time. I thought it was crazy and I thought it was diverse. Urban and rural at the same time. Where else in Berlin do 130 sheep live? As is the case in the Herzberge Landscape Park? I also met Karl Liebknecht. Not really, but his memorial stone. And there are an astonishing number of bodies of water, including the Oranke and Obersee lakes, Malchower See, Fennpfluhl and the Papenpfuhl basin. Then I was curious to see what can be found on the Margaretenhöhe in the far north of Lichtenberg: the highest thing here is not a mountain peak, but the wind turbines and electricity pylons that stand on the edge of a garden colony. There are places in Lichtenberg, such as the Wuhlheide forest estate, that look like a museum village. And there is the trotting track in Karlshorst, whose patina tells of its great age, but there are still trotters and horse droppings and a regular antiques market with expensive rarities.
I have always documented my strolls in Lichtenberg with my running app and this has resulted in a funny zigzag pattern and a truly interesting, amazing collection of photos. I’m still 190 meters short of completing the 80 walking kilometers in Lichtenberg. Or 20.19 km to make it 100 Lichtenberg kilometers. I’ll have to think carefully about where many gaps are left in the zigzag pattern. But I’m sure I’ll walk and photograph them. Viewers of my pictures will often wonder where I’ve been.
