Above water | Bathing and swimming – through time and water

Protests are taking place near the former river bathing establishment on Museum Island against the bathing ban in the center of Berlin that has existed for 100 years. Photo: imago/Virginia Garfunkel Fog moves into the meadows, the birds have long since left. The outdoor pool is resting in the rustle of leaves, summer has passed. This autumn I will make it easier for myself to say goodbye to Magdeburg, the Elbe and the lakes on the Spree and Havel with some fine reading.

A great non-fiction book tells the story of “diving and drifting”, subtitle: The history of bathing and swimming. The Berlin author Bernd Brunner takes us through time and water. Almost 200 richly illustrated pages show prehistoric rock carvings with swimmers, Assyrians with diving tubes made of animal skin, the most bizarre swimming costumes and devices. Paddling dogs, swimming horses, bathing snow monkeys and back-swimming bugs are mentioned. And the person who always has to learn to swim and is often afraid of it. “So far, drowning has been fashionable because swimming is not fashionable,” the Thuringian educator GutsMuths is quoted as saying. Incidentally, the swimming rod is said to go back to the founder of the oldest German swimming school.

Anne Hahn is an author of novels and non-fiction books and swims the waters of the world for “nd”.

When swimming in rivers and lakes became popular in the 19th century, people approached the sea shores with caution. The fearful bathers were pushed in and often rescued out again by so-called dippers in English seaside resorts. In the Baltic Sea, narrow swimming sloops were used to splash around until lifeguards were deployed to make it possible to swim in the open sea.

The first bathing establishment opened in Frankfurt am Main as early as 1774, and three decades later the Berlin river bathing establishment on Museum Island opened. The “Lollo” opened in Freiburg in 1841 is considered to be the first outdoor swimming pool in Germany.

In Vienna, the military first had to learn to swim, while Empress Sissi swam in the sea three times a day when she was there and had an anchor stuck on her shoulder. A double-sided colored lithograph shows the first women's swimming school in Vienna. Protected from view, tightly laced women stroll on walkways around a pool of water, where others in casual pajamas are frolicking. Today you can still go swimming in the “Bagno La Lanterna” beach in Trieste, which opened in 1903, separated by gender - the women's pool is better attended and is particularly popular with strict Muslim women, the author tells us.

We learn about the oldest swimming club in Germany: the Charlottenburger Nixen, about techniques and competitions, swimwear and moral police. Images of pools like the Piscinas de Marés in Portugal awaken a desire to travel, photographs amuse, even a police officer in California measuring the leg length of a swimsuit in 1964. The writer Joan Didion mused about California in the 1970s: "For many of us in the West, a pool is actually not a symbol of prosperity, but a symbol of order, of control over the uncontrollable."

In Berlin we have almost 30 public outdoor swimming pools and around 40 indoor swimming pools. On October 30th, 16 of them will open for the first Long Night of Swimming. I'll swim lengths under the stars in the Prinzenbad and quickly escape to the sauna.

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