Dusseldorf-Unterbach
Cross over from the rest of Dusseldorf into Unterbach during Carnival and the chants change. In the city proper, revelers shout Helau like they do across the Rhineland. In Unterbach they shout I-A - the German way of writing a donkey's bray. The borough has its own carnival board, its own pair of princes, and a live donkey leading the parade. The mascot stands cast in bronze near the shopping center at Breidenplatz, mid-jump over a small stream called the Eselsbach, or Donkey Brook. Behind the joke is a working memory: the sand that built much of low-lying Dusseldorf was once hauled on the backs of donkeys, west along the road still called Sandtragerweg - the sand-carriers' way - from the gravel pits at the edge of town. When the saying Unterbach's donkeys are coming reached the city, it never referred only to the animals.
A Water Castle in the Woods
Haus Unterbach gave the neighborhood its name and its medieval bones. The water castle was probably built in the Carolingian era, perhaps around 900 AD when Hungarian raiders burned nearby Gerresheim almost to the ground and locals retreated behind walls and a moat. The knights van Unterbeke are recorded as the seat's holders in 1169. Around 1300 the castle reached its substantial form: walls up to 1.2 meters thick, four towers with walls up to two meters thick, surrounded by a broad water ditch. Three towers still stand - a gate tower, a court tower, and a round tower - reaching about ten meters high and up to nine meters across. Parts of the gate tower's drawbridge mechanism are still visible. The gardens were designed by Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe, the landscape architect responsible for Dusseldorf's Hofgarten and the world-famous Konigsallee. A quiet manor in the woods, designed by the same hand that shaped the city's most fashionable boulevard.
The Lake Made by Excavators
At Unterbach's center is a lake the locals call the Baggerloch - the excavator hole. The Unterbacher See is 87 hectares of water and up to 13.4 meters deep, with four islands designated as bird sanctuaries and no surface inlet at all. Groundwater feeds it. Crews dug it between 1926 and 1973, removing gravel and sand for construction. During World War II, the German air force built a fake airfield on the still-dry portion to lure Allied bombers away from real targets - one of those mid-twentieth-century deceptions that no longer reads obvious from the air. Today, the lake is one of greater Dusseldorf's primary recreation areas. Two beaches occupy the north and south ends - the southern one includes a nude beach. Sailing boats and rowboats share the surface, students from Dusseldorf and Erkrath use the rowing port, and an observation deck with restaurant and a minigolf course occupy the north bank.
Where the Hills Begin
Unterbach sits at the southeast edge of Dusseldorf, where the first hills of the Bergisches Land - the duchy's old hill country - rise out of the flat Rhine plain. Most of Dusseldorf is built on alluvial mud and sand. Here the land lifts, climbing from the lakeshore at the foot of the Korresberg to about 100 meters elevation at the edge of neighboring Erkrath. At 9.09 square km it's the fifth-largest of Dusseldorf's fifty quarters, but with only about 7,800 inhabitants and a forest belt separating it from the rest of the city, it feels distinctly its own place. A high standard of living, a low population density, and an identity that residents protect. Until 1975 Unterbach was part of Erkrath. The boundary reorganization that year split the historic village in two: part remained in Erkrath as Unterfeldhaus, while the larger portion moved to Dusseldorf. Haus Unterbach itself, the namesake castle, ended up on the wrong side of the new line. It still stands in Erkrath today, looking back across an invisible municipal border at the neighborhood it founded.
Donkeys and Trampolines
Two things distinguish Unterbach in the regional imagination: the donkey and the trampoline. The trampoline came in 1968, when the sports association TV Unterbach 1905 produced a German pupil champion and the team took third place in the national pupil crew championship the same year. Through the 1970s and 1980s they won the German championship five times - in 1978, 1979, 1980, 1982, and 1984 - plus a string of additional national and European titles, a vice-world champion, and the bulk of the German national team. The donkey, by contrast, is older. The Carnival association takes the animal as its symbol because of those sand caravans, but the loyalty has hardened into local identity. Unterbach Carnival happens at its own scale: independent procession, independent court, the only quarter in Dusseldorf with this degree of carnival autonomy. The villages around have absorbed it into their celebrations too. New citizens can be tied to the donkey on arrival - a kind of welcoming ritual that, like the I-A bray, locates you here and nowhere else.
From the Air
Unterbach occupies the southeast corner of Dusseldorf at 51.20 degrees north, 6.90 degrees east. The Unterbacher See is the dominant visual feature - an 87-hectare elongated lake oriented roughly east-west, with four small bird-sanctuary islands and the surrounding Eller forest. From low altitude on approach you can pick out the lake's two beaches at the north and south ends, the campground on the south shore, and the curve of the Bergisches Land hills rising to the east. Dusseldorf Airport (ICAO EDDL) is 14 km northwest.