I visited Hamburg for the first time over the weekend. Located at the junction of the Alster and Elbe Rivers, Hamburg is Germany’s main port city and the second busiest port in Europe (after Rotterdam). Water is everywhere – the city has twice as many bridges as Venice and Amsterdam combined. Although it’s not directly on the ocean, you can feel and smell the water in the air. And with all the fish restaurants, boats and waterfront promenades, you’d think you were somewhere on the Atlantic.
It wasn’t until I spent a few hours in Hamburg that I realized something about my time in Berlin: this year will be the first time I have lived anywhere not on the ocean. Whether in New York, Boston or Los Angeles (briefly), I’ve always lived literally within about eight miles of the ocean. Next year, when I move to San Francisco, I will resume that pattern. But Berlin is, despite ample lakes throughout the metropolitan area, the River Spree and a number of canals, essentially landlocked. It lies 150 miles from the closest open body of water, the Ostsee (Baltic Sea).
The fact that Hamburg is on the water, and Berlin isn’t, goes a long way toward explaining why the cities are so different. In fact, Hamburg reminded me less of Berlin than of other waterfront cities, above all Copenhagen, which lies only 200 miles to the northeast, but also of places as diverse as Barcelona, Istanbul, Venice, New York and even Boston. With the presence of so much water – whether along the Elbe in Hamburg or along the Hudson in lower Manhattan – comes a certain damp feel in the air, a certain smell in the breeze, and a distinctly cosmopolitan feeling that seems to connect all waterside cities (and especially all port cities) with one another. It’s a feeling of tolerance and openness to the world that comes with the trading culture – hundreds of years of living with traders and goods passing through from every corner of the world.
There are also more tangible implications of being by the water. Waterfront cities like Hamburg tend to be healthier places, with long promenades suitable for jogging, cycling or just walking and thinking. They also tend to have more striking, innovative architecture, with the water providing a contrast, and/or a mirror of sorts, to the buildings constructed along its edge.
But most important, I think, being by the water can provide a kind of healthy perspective, by reminding us that we, our lives, our cities and even our nations, are smaller than the oceans that lie between us. Standing by the water, looking out at an expanse of blue and seeing ships coming from and going to faraway lands, limits of all kinds – including the limits of national borders – seem to fade away. We are reminded, in the face of the expansive sea, not only of the possibilities that may await us on the other side, but also of how small we are in the face of the forces of nature. Back inland in Berlin on Saturday night, riding the subway home, I felt a bit claustrophobic and closed down to be landlocked again, and missed the fresh seaside air.
