Animals in the city: for people and common swifts

D.he dinosaurs lie on the ground as if damaged after a long fight, the colorful wildcat has not spit out a roller coaster for a long time, and the swans have stood still for ages. Abandoned, you think when you see Berlin’s Spreepark. What was once the only amusement park in the GDR became the scene of a cinematic crime story after the fall of the Wall, when the insolvent operator first fled to Peru and was then arrested when he tried to smuggle cocaine in the “Flying Carpet” trucking business. But the decaying attractions not only contain the stories of old days; Since the carousels were switched off twenty years ago, new life has long since settled here. It is a biotope that shows who is coming when man has left.

From the reed roofs of the old candy booths that once greeted the guests in the park, tiny black stem-hole bees hum from the Mediterranean area and were discovered here in the Plänterwald for the first time in Germany. The wildcat has long been surrounded by trees, and the concrete pools of the old water park are littered with dwarf duckweed in summer, and candelabra algae grow under the swan boats. In between, the sounds of an installation by the artist Marcus Maeder can be heard again and again: sounds of water flowing through trees or earthworms burrowing through the earth – sounds of life that is actually everywhere.