What Are The Pink Pipes In Berlin?

“In the very wide and mostly sandy surroundings of Berlin, which are so poor in attractive regions…”
Friedrich Nicolai, writer and bookseller of the Berlin Enlightenment

There is an old saying among Berliners, a piece of dry folk wisdom often delivered with a shrug: “Berlin ist aus dem Sumpf gebaut” – Berlin is built out of a swamp.

Another, more pointed version declares that the city’s true founder was not some great margrave or king, but the humble eel. These are not mere poetic exaggerations.

They are the foundational truth of the German capital, a truth that echoes in the city’s very name, which is thought to derive from the old West Slavic word “berl,” meaning swamp or marsh.

For centuries, this was a battle fought largely out of sight.

The city’s founders drove thousands of oak and pine piles deep into the sodden earth to support their first modest stone buildings. The grand architects of Prussia’s golden age devised ingenious foundations to raise their neoclassical monuments on what was essentially a massive sandbar soaked in water.

For generations, the enemy was wet, silent, and subterranean.

Then, after the Wall fell in 1989, the enemy came into the open. As the reunited city plunged into a fever of reconstruction, digging new U-Bahn lines, new government buildings, and new corporate headquarters, the ancient swamp reasserted its claim. To build down, developers first had to fight down.

First a few, then dozens, now a seemingly permanent, sprawling network of them: the bright pink pipes. They became the visible, almost cheerful, manifestation of the city’s oldest and most relentless engineering challenge.

They are the city’s second river, an overground, industrial artery doing the work that the Spree river alone cannot.

“The ground of Berlin is nothing but sand; not a stone, not a pebble is to be found in it.”
Esteban de Borgoña, Spanish Ambassador, 17th Century