Sand

On a hot June day a month before we came to Berlin, we were standing around a playground in Cambridge, Massachusetts, telling a Swedish mom and her American husband where we were about to move. As we watched our respective children play under the feeble drippings of a sprinkler, the couple told us about visiting a Spielplatz in Hamburg with such powerful water features that they'd had to run for cover. Every so often, they said, a bell would ring, signaling that the water was "on," prompting young children to run up hillocks from which they could operate water cannons with streams strong enough to knock other kids to the ground. After a few minutes, the bell would sound again, the water would be turned off, and dry parents would emerge from behind the bushes. Their soaked children would return to the swings and slides. 

Talk like this, about the remarkableness of German playgrounds, seems common among urban parents all over the US and Europe, to whom Germany stands for all that is progressive, daring, and lavishly publicly funded in playground design. Earlier this year the Italian publisher Corraini Edizioni published The Impossible Berlin Playground Guide, whose title refers to the impossibility of visiting all 1,850 Spielplätze in Berlin: "the numbers are simply too large and the renovations and changing of equipment are far too frequent." Indeed, since we moved here, we've already seen the play structures at one corner of Kollwitzplatz, which looked sturdy enough (if, like many, graffiti-covered), be dug up and replaced by a new, expensive-looking setup in fresh wood and brilliant greens. Like New York to the diner, Berlin represents a mad dream of novelty and inexhaustibility to the playground-goer.

Though we haven't yet found any water cannons, we have been to maybe fifty playgrounds in Berlin, which is easy to do, as playgrounds have filled in many of the cracks and empty spaces left by Berlin's history. This citywide initiative, designed to lure young families after the fall of the Wall, has been almost too successful, making neighborhoods like ours, in upper Prenzlauer Berg, heavenly for young families and deeply annoying for everyone else. My haircutter, Silke, who's not interested in having kids, said she's moving to younger Neukölln to get away from "Pregnant Berg" with its strollers, its Saturday klatches of entitled parents dominating every park. 

But actually, all of Berlin is crawling with playgrounds. In the pre-Kita month in which my wife was working and I looked after J. every day, we ventured all over the city. Whatever papa-centric excursion I planned (a museum, a coffee shop, a distant neighborhood to check out), I could always be sure that we would find a nearby playground, or three, to break up the day. Even in quiet, affluent places like Chamissoplatz in the Bergmannkiez, playgrounds form the very centerpiece of some of the city's loveliest squares.

After a while, you start to go to the same few Spielplätze, to know their denizens and unique features almost like rooms in your own house. One playground on Rhinowerstrasse, with its fine shade and plantings, is perfect for kids J.'s age, with everything built small: tiny slide, tiny wall of rope webbing to climb, flight of small steps leading to a peek-a-boo window, a swing that two toddlers can sit in. Behind Gethsemanekirche is a slightly busted playground that we like nonetheless for its quiet setting, just as J. likes it for its rubbery in-ground trampoline and webby contraption that spins and spins. We stay away, however, from hulking Humannplatz, with its desolate air of anonymity, its thieving children who think nothing of taking your shovel, your pail, and not returning it.

The weirdest surprise about playgrounds here is that every one of them has sand as its ground and basis, apart from a stray few that use wood chips. Sandy ground was an exception in the playgrounds of my American childhood—and of our son's babyhood in Cambridge—which were paved with bouncy rubberized surfaces, wood chips, sometimes just dirt, but rarely sand. Though sand has its drawbacks—messy when wet, invasive of one's shoes, toes, eventually bed sheets and whole life—it looks good, creates a wonderfully soft surface to fall on, and in warmer months is obviously most pleasant to walk on barefoot. More than that, it appeals to the German engineering tendency by being in itself, as at the beach, a material for invention. At Helmholtzplatz, perhaps the epicenter of Prenzlauer Berg kid-dom, a hand pump sends water coursing down rocks into a sand pit, where armies of industrious children create forts and elaborate irrigation systems, like little Romans or Assyrians. 

Our days now end in a great shaking out of sand from our shoes, our stroller, our bags. At bath time, J. is often surrounded by a slurry of sand that has pervaded his pants over the course of multiple playground visits. When you live in Berlin as a parent, your life is a sandy one. Yet my wife reflects that in earlier years when she lived in Berlin, she never noticed the sand at all.