Somewhere in the northeastern corner of the Uckermark, an area of outstanding natural beauty and a nature reserve, there is a little spot that might be used as the very definition of “the middle of nowhere”: Bahnhof Schönermark, Schönermark railway station (follow this link for a German wikipedia article and this link for another article on the history of the station).
From its name, one might guess that this little outpost (resident population: you probably won’t need a whole lot more than your 10 fingers to count them…) was, or even: still is, the railway station pertaining to a settlement called Schönermark.
And, in fact, there is a settlement called Schönermark – a mere 3 kilometres away from this railway station.
Yet, when the railway station was introduced, as a stop on the railway line that connects Berlin with the city of Szczecin (Stettin), it had not actually been Schönermark that had requested a stop on this line from local nobility, the von Redern family.
Instead, so it appears, it was the people of Biesenbrow, just under 2 kilometres away, from Bahnhof Schönermark, who requested access to the Berlin-Szczecin trains. When their request was granted, land for the station was provided on condition that the rail station be called Schönermark. Hence Bahnhof Schönermark
Trains are not scheduled to stop at Schönermark now.
The train station on the mainline, also in heavy use for industrial trains supplying the petrochemical industry at Schwedt, was decommissioned in 1996. And while the mainline tracks are currently being upgraded as part of an infrastructural investment programme, the station building and its adjacent structures have been crumbling.
The station building itself was sold, and some repairs were carried out, but now appears to be a ghost estate, an Investitionsruine (investment ruin), as it is called in German.
As the term ‘mainline’ implies, of course, there has been another line at Bahnhof Schönermark. It was also terminus of a regional railway line (Kreisbahn) connecting Bahnhof Schönermark with Biesenbrow and several other villages and settlements along the lines with Gramzow and Damme, used by the local workforce as well as for agricultural purposes.
The Kreisbahn approached the mainline at a right angle, and the station building, now converted into a dwelling and a sizeable garden estate, still exists.
A side track, whose embankment is still visible in the landscape, connected the Kreisbahn with the mainline. The railway tracks of the Kreisbahn were dismantled, when this part of the line, already then earmarked for decommissioning, was closed after the hard winter of 1978–9.
But, in actual fact, the fate of the Kreisbahn is a somewhat of a document of local (and global) German history.
Opened in 1906, the line was dismantled for the first time in 1945 for WW2 reparations payments to the Soviet Union. Two years later, the line was rebuilt and reopened – but not initially at the Schönermark end: a damaged bridge across the Welse river, between Schönermark and Biesenbrow, prevented a reopening prior to 1949.
The embankment of the Kreisbahn is still visible in the landscape, and it has been opened to the public as a footpath (an enjoyable walk, if and when the district administration can be bothered to cut the weeds and the high grass…).
At Gramzow, once an important stop and hub on this line, a quaint railway museum, whose enjoyability regrettably depends a bit on the mood-du-jour of the local volunteering staff, narrates and preserves a bit of the Kreisbahn’s history.
Local folks who have witnessed the life and history of Bahnhof Schönermark report that the place, when still functional, was a delightfully busy hub, even with a little pub in one of the handful of local houses (now a family dwelling). Farmhands, especially from nearby Poland, used to come and stay for the harvest season, there was much merriment, often until the wee hours.
Today it is mostly railway construction workers and contractors who come and stay, for a few days or even a few weeks, in one of the few houses, originally in use by railway workers, now converted into accommodation for rent.
One hears Polish, Russian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, sometimes Romanian, rarely German. Some barbecue in the garden. Most just call home after a long day of physical labour. A community of fate rather than a community, divided and isolated by technology more than united in their predicament, under the watchful eyes of a local tree trunk-gone-artwork.
The region offers its explorers many a sight of former grandeur and ambition fallen into neglect and disrepair.
An especially striking example of this is nearby Hohenlandin, where a Tudor-style palace continues to be affected by the ravages of time.
Bahnhof Schönermark cannot offer such dilapidating (dilapidated) grandeur. Here exposed technology wastes away.
Here, shacks and stables abound.
One ruin, however, that has resonated with me is a small(er) annexe of the former mainline station building, guarded by heavy metal sliding gates both facing the station concourse and facing the tracks.
Mainline station building annexe
Here, one gets to observe, in real time, how – as one would say in German – the tooth of time gnaws on all things (“der Zahn der Zeit nagt an allem”). The following images show various stages of decay, from the inside, the outside, and even from underneath the building (there is no door, so I had a look – very cautiously, as I am both curious and reluctant to be sent to an early grave by a heavy wooden beam falling on my head).
Bahnhof Schönermark is a small place, both insignificant in the larger scheme of things, and yet a place full of history and, at least once upon a time, full of life, at least in a fading memory of a disappearing population.
Orhan Pamuk, whose delightful history of Istanbul I read this summer, calls the sentimental, nostalgic feeling of being a witness to inevitable, unstoppable decay of a once-great place, when thinking of his native city, by the somewhat untranslatable Turkish term hüzün.
I am not a native of Bahnhof Schönermark, or even of the Uckermark. I only got to discover and explore the place and its surroundings over the last couple of years, and I got to know about it, first and foremost, from the tales of locals, combined with some basic online research.
Moreover, as a classical scholar and an epigraphist, a scholar of the ancient inscribed world, I am, of course, drawn to, and used to, disappearing (and disappeared) worlds, civilisations, cultures, settlements, ruins and people and their history (histories).
But equally as an epigraphist, I was professionally and personally sad this summer when I noticed that the northern wall of the mainline station annexe had now also collapsed.
It was on this wall that one once could still read the name of the station (all other signs have long disappeared from the station complex). And I may well have been the last person to take a picture of it.
Seeing that, in terms of this “ancient” inscription, (Bahnhof) Schönermark is no more, has certainly given me at least a bit of a taste of this hüzün.
And this is not a bad sensation.
All photos were shot by myself on film in 2023 and 2024, using both 35 mill (Zorki 1, Orizont) and medium format (Zeiss Ikonta, Kiev 88, Moskva 5) cameras.