In the middle
The “Spree Forest Cucumber Troupe” collects scrap on a voluntary basis in the spring. The four volunteers drive their boats through the river of the Spreewald tourist hotspot of Lübbenau-Lehde.
The Hannemann family’s boat glides quietly over the Spree in the Lübbenau district of Lehde – past spruced-up old houses on the banks of the listed village. But the cargo on board doesn’t fit into the idyll of the Spreewald. Because instead of tourists, Lukas Hannemann and Tim Richter from Lübben, Sandra Richter from Calau and Paul Rösler from Berlin transport garbage across the water.
“We can usually only do this after the winter months,” says the initiator of the “Spree Forest Cucumber Troupe,” Paul Rösler. Because then the animals did not breed yet. By nature you only have a certain time window.
From paddler to garbage collector in the Spreewald
The trained event manager actually just wanted to take photos here during a paddling tour three years ago. But instead of flowers, Rösler discovered scrap metal on the banks of the Spree. The now 41-year-old didn’t want to leave it there. That’s why he now goes voluntarily with friends to collect garbage every spring.
“Asbestos sheets are really bad, I think, and plastic,” says Sandra Richter and shows what they have found in the last two hours. “These foils that are now slowly falling apart.” Next to it they stack old aluminum loungers, a handcart and a rusty oil drum. Your destination today: a former landfill on the edge of one of the popular tourist routes.
Holidaymakers are amazed at the barge full of scrap metal
Many holidaymakers are amazed when the “Spree Forest Cucumber Troupe” passes them by in their boat. “I think it’s great,” says Annie Behrens spontaneously from a boat full of tourists just a few meters away on the water. If you collect garbage voluntarily, it is always a good thing.
Other vacationers agree with this. “So garbage has no place here,” explains Volker Fröhlich. “Everything is a nature reserve normally.”
Barge driver Rainer Wendenburg pushed his guests through the Spree with a four-meter-long wooden pole. The ferryman observes: “It has gotten significantly better – especially since there is a deposit on the bottles.”
The “Spreewädler cucumber troupe” meets up to three times a year to collect garbage.
Garbage from the former GDR
The “Spree Forest Cucumber Troop” stopped briefly on one of the rivers. “We’ll move on straight away,” calls Paul Rösler from the bank to Tim Richter on the second barge. “There was just enough lying here. Will you take the bicycle tire there?” Sandra Richter sorts the broken rubber tires on the barge. “And bottles. Bottles, bottles, bottles.”
They often find garbage that is more than 35 years old in the bushes. Paul Rösler studies the labels: “Look! Jam in GDR times!” The volunteer shows understanding for older generations: “It doesn’t bother me. It was a different awareness.” What annoys him more is that there are few people who care about it today.
toilet bowl in the mud
His motto: Tackling instead of complaining. The Berliner met the 25-year-old craftsman and water engineer Tim Richter from Lübbenau via the social media platform Instagram, the 45-year-old florist Sandra Richter in the Lübbenau canoe club and the tiler and barge ferryman Lukas Hannemann through his family when Paul Rösler was there wanted to rent boats for friends.
They now meet up to three times a year for a garbage collection tour – with obstacles. “I can’t get out of here,” the Berliner shouts to the ferryman Lukas Hannemann. “You took the root so beautifully.” The installation then works.
The next find follows on land. “A bit like Indiana Jones,” says Paul Rösler, who digs in the dirt with a spade and hands after white shards push through the earth in the undergrowth. “What lies underneath? Maybe it’s curiosity that drives you.” The volunteer has a suspicion: “Well, I would say a toilet bowl. But it could also be a sink.”
The Berliner tries to take it with humor. “This is going to be very funny. I think she’s coming now – and I personally wouldn’t touch anything here without gloves.”
The Spreewald village of Lehde is a listed building.
“That used to be normal”
Paul Rösler voluntarily kneels in the mud. “I actually do this because we have a certain responsibility – for ourselves, for the environment,” he explains. “Nature cannot defend itself. She is at our mercy.”
The other three come from the Spreewald-Lausitz district. “That used to be normal,” says Sandra Richter about her parents and grandparents. “The older ones know exactly where an illegal garbage dump is.” In Eastern times there was no waste separation in this sense. “But that wasn’t punished.”
The woman from Calau holds an old bottle with a brown liquid in her hand: “This is something where you don’t know what’s in it. And it’s just in the water in the biosphere reserve.”
Volunteers must leave trash behind
There are more surprises waiting there. “Oh, window paste!” shouts Paul Rösler as he stands more than ankle-deep in the water of the former landfill in rubber boots. A white cupboard sticks out of the water. “The door of it was an AK something and that’s actually for… acclimatization technology that was called in the GDR, I think.”
The refrigerator is stuck in the mud. Even together they can’t get him out of the morass. “It’s already sitting too deep,” says the Berliner, who proudly designed a patch with a logo for the “Spree Forest Cucumber Troupe”.
Scrap disposal in Lübbenau
“Yes, then we’ll do boarding,” says ferryman Lukas Hannemann. The boat still needs to be cleaned. “Of course he stinks of modders now.” He might soon want to drive a few guests around with it again.
But first the Lübbenauer heads to the construction yard in his hometown. “It makes it easier every time,” says Sandra Richter as the four of them drink beer together on the boat. “I find that very liberating.”
At the construction yard in Lübbenau, the “Spreewälder Gurkentruppe” is allowed to dump the garbage free of charge.
responsible defend yourself with Responsibilities
At the tourist information center in Lübbenau, the association’s deputy managing director, Daniel Schmidgunst, welcomes the action of the “Spree Forest Cucumber Troupe”: “You can only hope that an old barrel doesn’t open and something poisonous comes out.”
At the construction yard, Paul Rösler and his friends are allowed to dump the garbage for free. There, the head of the urban development department in Lübbenau/Spreewald, Sven Blümel, explains why the scrap has been lying in nature for decades: “We have a lot of mixed situations here.”
There are different responsibilities for different bodies of water. “They are also water bodies of the first order. They belong to the land, including the shore areas,” says Blümel. “We have second-order bodies of water. The city is responsible for that. But of course it can also be the case that they collect garbage from private areas where the private owner would actually be responsible.”
Paul Rösler doesn’t want to wait for that. “The goal would be to make us superfluous, yes. But…” The Berliner shakes his head and laughs because he doesn’t believe in it. He estimates that his “Spree Forest Cucumber Troop” alone will need five more years to clear the contaminated sites from just one former landfill.
But now nature there needs peace. They don’t want to collect more garbage until next spring – when the scrap emerges from between the bushes on the Spree.