The canal is a sentence. The sea is what one no longer says after it. – Ruth Adlershof, marginal note
Before the gate lies the quay: rough granite blocks, iron bollards, and in the embankment wall rings of bronze gone green, to which no barge has been moored since 1931. Flood marks are cut into the wall, each with a year, the storm tides of two centuries. The highest stands half a metre above all the others, without a year, only with a small circle and three wavy lines. No flood in the books of the Republic has ever risen so high. On the quay the House keeps its vigil, and the Prefect Sibylle Ahrend keeps the quay. Six hundred metres downstream, where the embankment turns into the dyke, stands the old firm's boathouse: timber on a plinth of brick, tarred, a door to the water, inside a slipway and a basin whose water is black and never quite still. There lies the House's only boat, a narrow black rowing boat without a name. The Director carries the key; a second is carried by Wiebke Tiede, who lives in the boathouse and does not belong to the House. Adele Vorrath bought the boathouse w...
From the lore of Das Haus am Kanal.