Kevin Braddock and Paul Sullivan take on the Berlin’s (completely invented) Three Peaks Challenge…
Successive waves of trauma, division and reconstruction have given Berlin’s outward character a dimension of the arbitrary that’s absent in cities with seemingly ‘finished’ centres like Paris, London and New York. Such was the thrust of a topic embarked upon during a ‘slow walk’ with the artist Stephen Walter not so long ago to the Borsigwerke near Tegel Airport.
Walter, who is in the process of drawing an impressionistic map of Berlin, pointed out that it’s precisely the incongruities in Berlin’s topography that define its awkward, occasionally brutal mystique: the vast plains of nothingness abutting the corporate steel-and-glass stalagmites at Postdamer Platz, or the Chinese takeaway just round the corner from the site of Hitler’s bunker.
Tidiness and coherence can calcify a city’s atmosphere: Bath in England springs to mind. No, cities don’t need to be finished, nor—if you’re inclined to the psychogeographic cast of mind—require a specific destination when exploring. Rather than the arriving, it’s the walking, looking and imagining on an incoherent stroll through an arbitrary landscape that’s the point.
Perhaps the diametrical opposite of an arbitrary stroll is the mountaineering challenge, popular among British adventure masochists, called the Three Peaks, which involves launching yourself bodily up Snowdon, Scafell Pike and Ben Nevis within a twenty-four hour time frame. Scarcely a past-time for flâneurs or loafers, it could indeed be the ideal way to remove all enjoyment from three fantastic days out: a kind of forced march (speed-travel?) with all the enjoyment and charm of, say, a 2-Para training yomp.
Nevertheless, noting the city’s triumvirate of Bergs (i.e. hills or mountains) on a map of Berlin one day, it was difficult to stem the rising tide of an idea: a semi-arbitrary walk connecting Kreuzberg, Prenzlauer Berg and Schöneberg—a Three Peaks challenge in Berlin, the most extravagantly flat capital in all Europe? It was just too ridiculous to resist.
Aiding the cause was the fact that we were approaching the nothingy time between Christmas and New Year, so one chilly day, the outlook subzero and the city daubed shades of white by the snow, we exited from Yorckstraße U-bahn and began the gentle ascent along Katzlerstraße towards the first non-objective.
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