The parks of a city reflect their surroundings, not so much in how they look but in who can be found wandering their pathways or lounging on their green spaces. In Berlin, many of the parks were created with the expansion of the city – ‘People’s Parks’ intended as a patch of nature, a communal garden, for those who lived in cramped tenement blocks and worked the red-brick factories of the industrial age. With their trees, lawns and gravel paths, the parks of Friedrichshain, Wedding, Mitte and even the grand old Tiergarten in the heart of the city, have always shared much in common, but since the beginning they got their local character from their local characters.

In 1923 the writer Joseph Roth visited the Schiller Park in Wedding for an article published in the Berliner Börsen-Courier. It was autumn, and he reflected on the falling leaves and the poetry in the sound of their rustling, that symbolised a spirit of ‘mournfulness and a sense of transience’ that fitted the time of the year. Or at least, it did in the Tiergarten, preserve of the promenading well-to-do of Charlottenburg. In the Schiller Park, things were different:

‘…the locals from the working-class district of Wedding gather up the leaves every evening, and dry them, and use them for winter fuel. Rustling is strictly a luxury, as if poetry without central heating were a luxury.’ (from What I Saw, translated by Michael Hofmann, Granta)

On a Saturday morning in spring I run from my flat in Gesundbrunnen (once part of Wedding) through the backstreets of my neighbourhood until the Schiller Park opens out in front of me. There are no leaves on the ground of course, and even if there were, most of Wedding’s apartments now have central heating. But in the people on the benches and playing football on the open space, the neighbourhood is still reflected, as it was when Roth was here. This scene is Wedding. The park is rooted in its community.

The football pitches are both makeshift and yet impressively organised, with thin ropes and plastic training cones to mark the sidelines. Each team has a different coloured bib, and there is a referee, identifiable as the only person on the pitch without a day-glo vest and by the whistle hanging around his neck. There is a small crowd off the the side watching on at the halfway line, and I stop with them for a moment as I catch my breath. Encouragement is shouted in a number of different languages. A young child plays in the piles of discarded jackets and tracksuit tops of the players. I chat with a man doing keepy-uppies, waiting for his substitute appearance. We speak in English. He was born on another continent. He lives around the corner. He asks me where I am from. I tell him I was born on an island that seems to wish it was another continent. And that I also live around the corner. He laughs.

I am tempted to stay in the Schiller Park, to watch the rest of the game and wait for the time that the beers are opened from the crates that mark the halfway line. The sun is warm and music plays, a rhythm from portable speakers that mingles in the spring air with the sound of shouts, the referee’s whistle and the thud of a hoofed clearance out from the back. Elsewhere in the park, morning drinkers occupy the benches that line the path around the edge. I re-join the stream of joggers circling the park. Away from the football pitches, a family have arrived to set up for a picnic, laying out blankets between the coolboxes. It is the first warm Saturday of the year and you can feel the happiness in the air. The Schiller Park is still the neighbourhood’s backyard. It was a mild winter, but a winter nevertheless, and we all survived it. Now it’s time to play.

Words & Picture: Paul Scraton