A path along Braunschweig’s Oker, water spirits, and stories of the city.
In 1883, Braunschweig’s first city archivist, Ludwig Hänselmann, published a regional tale in his collection Unterm Löwenstein. It tells the story of the Nicker, a water spirit said to drag children who play too close to the water into the depths of the river. In his version of the legend, Hänselmann connects the creature’s origin story with the founding of Braunschweig, set among the floodplain forests of the North German Lowlands. As Braunschweig developed around the castle of Dankwarderode into a flourishing trading hub located between the Hellweg and the Oker, the water spirit became increasingly vengeful. The ridge where the spirit had first appeared “lay desolate for a long time and became a place of horror.”1
The floodplain forests where the story of the water spirit begins still exist on the northern edge of Braunschweig today. As part of the Oker’s legally designated floodplain, they have been able to survive, since almost all forms of land use in the area are prohibited, with the exception of grazing. From these floodplain forests, a path leads south to the site where, until the Second World War, a road named Nickerkulk recalled the ridge from Hänselmann’s legend. The approximately 15-kilometre path from the northern edge of the city to one of its central parks passes through a landscape in which the historical development of Braunschweig over the past centuries can be traced. Floodplain forests bearing traces of prehistoric civilisations, grazing pastures belonging to old farmsteads, early sewage farms established with the city’s first sewer system, a coal-fired power station, historic weirs, and finally the river itself diverted into an artificial bypass channel. Following in the footsteps of the water spirit along the Oker, the path traces the history of a city that has shaped the river it grew around, just as profoundly as the river has shaped the city.
The project draws on the tradition of walking as a form of exploration, a practice associated at least since Thoreau’s Walking with philosophical reflection on the interconnections between environment and society. It combines this approach to nature writing with a visual investigation of the river through the photographic documentation of envirotechnical traces in the landscape, alongside conventional historical archival research into the relationship between urban development and environmental change along the river. The project explores how the river that originally made the founding of the city at this particular site possible has, over the centuries, been transformed as an envirotechnical system and, vice versa, influenced the developing urban system; to what extent the people of Braunschweig constitute a fluvial society, perhaps without even being aware of it; and, ultimately, what it means for our understanding of humans and the environment when the human and the non-human are so deeply entangled.
- Ludwig Hänselmann, Unterm Löwensteine. Alte Geschichten aus einer ungeschriebenen aber wahrhaftigen Chronika, Wolfenbüttel 1883, S. 23. ↩︎