Cornelia Brelowski: And…leap! From February to spring in a Berlin minute

EXT & PHOTOS: CORNELIA BRELOWSKI

We know it’s hard to imagine, but spring is not too far away now. The Berliner in spring is a strange animal, which is only to be explained by the long months of endurance that mark the city from November through February, with the worst cold spells often coming in the end. Here’s what to expect.

This winter, the holiday season was already marked by Siberian temperatures, topped by a gruelling attack on electricity supply cables that left the whole south of the city with a total of 45,000 households and over 2,000 businesses unlit and unheated for the duration of up to four days.

Cornelia Brelowski: And...leap! From February to spring in a Berlin minute

February can still be hard. Photo: Indah Harahap on Unsplash

Even with leaving dramatic power outages aside, Berlin winter is a notorious toughie, while spring, when it finally arrives, happens within weeks and can prompt a hasty change from boots to sandals. The 440,000 city trees (at the moment a new bill is pending, which will see their current number doubled to over a million by 2040) will step into foliage after the first warm week with the speed of a finger snap – and for at least a month, people will become almost giddy with all the joy happening around them.

During the long, harrowing Berlin winter months, it’s always hard to believe that this will happen at some point – but when it does, there’s no looking back. As visitors and tourists sweep back into town and the self-prescribed post-holiday diets are finally in the past, life takes on colour again and the Berliners swarm to buy pots, earth and plants in bulk to decorate windowsills, balconies and terraces alike. There’s also no stopping of Feng Shui or Marie Kondo inspired spring cleaning frenzies; and once again the streets will fill with discarded items that neighbours may or may not pick up to make their own.

What helps us pushing through: Berlinale Palast. Photo: Sandra Weller, Berlinale 2023

The Berlin City Cleaning Service (BSR) has therefore initiated regular Kiez days in alternating neighbourhoods, where residents can share their valuable leftover clothes, furniture and so on under the BSR teams’ tutelage; and safely discard the rest. Even through winter, the Kieztage have become attractive targets for residents and students, who enjoy the quirky ware on display and are free to take home anything they fancy.

There’s one magic wand which helps the Berliners through February: with the long-term prospect of streets lined with linden and cherry bloom again, street cafés filled to the brim and your takeaway coffee not freezing within minutes in your hand any more, the city already snaps back into life on 12 February – when for ten days the Berlinale film festival turns the whole town into one red carpet. Mind you, all of the above is merely an outlook on coming glories and a rallying cry to push through: as the Berlinale festivities might still end up in ice and snow, they reliably afford us the necessary pomp and circumstance to make it through to spring.