How Munich’s inner-city surfers saved their beloved river wave

Growing up in Munich in the late 1980s, Quirin Rohleder had never heard of the Eisbach wave. His dad used to ship him off to sports camps during the long summer holidays, and at 12 he was getting into windsurfing.

But then a friend took him to a leafy spot on the river, where concrete blocks had been placed underwater to slow the current down. But in doing so, it created a wave surfers could ride almost as if they were in the ocean.

“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he says. ​“I lived really close to the Eisbach, but I didn’t know of the wave’s existence. When I saw it, that was it for me – I stopped windsurfing, tennis, and all the other sports – all I wanted to do was surf that wave.”

He started off bodyboarding, using a board he’d fashioned himself from house insulation sheets nabbed from construction sites. ​“Bodyboarding the wave was actually pretty easy,” he says. ​“You jump in and that’s it.” When he started standing up on it, the older surfers told him it was time to start surfing, and soon after, one of them sold him his first surfboard.

Back then it was technically illegal to surf the Eisbach wave, which sits in the Englischer Garten (“English Garden”), Munich’s green sprawling city park. The wave was the preserve of the agency that runs the Englischer Garten – a kind of Royal Parks equivalent – and they didn’t allow surfing as they didn’t want to be responsible if anything happened to anyone. But surfers showed up all the same.

“They put up a sign saying it was forbidden, but we’d go there anyway,” says Quirin. ​“The police would drive past and shake their heads, but mostly they’d ignore us.”

On occasion, the odd officer would take it seriously and chase Quirin and his friends down the river, but they had a spot on a little island where they could hide. Bolting from the police with your surfboard as a young teenager was quite a rush, says Quirin, but it was annoying as well. ​“We always thought: ​‘Don’t you have something better to do than chase some kids down the river?’”

At one point, the police confiscated his board and his dad paid a fine at the station to get it released. ​“My dad was born in 1943 in Berlin – his whole childhood was growing up in post-war Germany – so I had a very different upbringing to him,” says Quirin. ​“The idea of just being out there having fun and surfing this river, it was weird for him, and he didn’t think it was very cool, but he still went and picked my board up for me.”

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Quirin grew obsessed with surfing, figuring out how to get hold of US surf magazines as there were no European equivalents at the time. And he progressed quickly, pulling all manner of tricks on the wave, from backside 360s to air reverses, which were not really a thing in surfing at the time, though such manoeuvres dominate the competitive side of the sport today.

He pioneered the river wave scene until – like many German surfers who cut their teeth on the Eisbach – he yearned to surf real waves in the ocean, living in France for many years before returning to Munich, where he now lives with his young family.

It became legal to surf the Eisbach wave in 2012, and by then the wave was often packed with hundreds of people. It had become one of Munich’s main attractions, with tourists lining the historic gargoyle-adorned stone bridge above to see the surfers in action.

“The city realised there was no point in keeping it illegal,” says Quirin. ​“Young people were coming to Munich from all over the world for beer, BMW, and the wave – it became a cultural hotspot. Every bike tour would go past it, families would always want to stop there…” The city paid a symbolic euro to the parks agency and bought the wave so they could take responsibility for it.

Unlike in the ocean, surfers don’t travel forwards on this river wave, they stay in roughly the same spot line, so they can ride the river wave for as long as they want in theory, or until they fall off. But there will usually be surfers waiting their turn and if you surf too long, say 30 or 40 seconds, they’ll start hitting their boards or clapping to say that’s enough.

Quirin usually surfs the river wave twice a week, and people often ask why he’s still riding it after all this time. ​“It depends on your perspective. If you don’t want it to get boring it won’t,” he says. ​“I use different boards and there are still manoeuvres I can work on or do better. In its basic form, you’re putting a wetsuit on in the city, cycling to the wave, and then hopping in the water. It’s more or less the same feeling as jumping in the ocean.”

There have been lots of accidents at the Eisbach wave over the years, says Quirin, mostly cuts and bruises, or occasionally something heavier if someone hits the bottom, but until this year, no one had died surfing there in the 50 years of the wave’s existence.

“People die every year at the river but it’s usually drunk people drowning or jumping off bridges,” he says. ​“No one had ever died surfing.”

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In April, a woman tragically drowned while surfing with her partner at night when her leash became stuck. It led to the authorities closing the wave to investigate, while core surfers asked themselves how it could have happened. 20 years ago, another surfer had become stuck when their leash got tangled on the bottom, and Quirin jumped in and grabbed the surfer to stop him from staying under. Luckily the surfer’s leash snapped, and they were able to get him out.

But Quirin notes the wave’s relative safety compared to other natural sporting settings. ​“Hundreds of people surf the wave every single day and night, as they bring lights,” he says. ​“Over 50 years, you could say it’s a pretty safe thing to do compared to how many people die in the mountains in winter, not even in avalanches, just on the piste. 

“Even in summer, people go for a walk in the mountains and slip and die, it happens all the time,” he continues. ​“People drown in lakes when there is hot weather. What happened was tragic, and I can’t fathom how her partner and family must be feeling, but the press response also felt insane in terms of how much attention it received.”

News outlets from all over the world covered the incident, and Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of Germany’s biggest newspapers, which is based in Munich, ran a story suggesting the wave shouldn’t be reopened after the surfer’s death. Many of the paper’s reporters regularly surfed the wave though, and a follow up piece took the opposite take and called for the wave to be reopened.

The investigation ended without clarity on what actually happened in April, not helped by the fact the surfers were surfing at night.

In June, after much lobbying from local surfers, the city agreed to reopen the wave under the conditions that more signage warning of its dangers was present, as well as rescue equipment including a knife to cut leashes and a long metal stick that a surfer could hold onto. Surfers are now only permitted to surf there with quick-release leashes.

Along with the Eisbach wave, there is a smaller and far mellower river wave, which is popular with kids in Munich. This wave has a surf club attached to it, and they helped advocate for the reopening of the Eisbach wave after the accident, says Quirin, a move which he believes proved crucial in the eventual outcome; the Eisbach locals have since formed their own surf club.

“My takeaway from this situation is that surfers need to organise locally and have as many members as possible, as that translates into power when you’re talking to city officials,” he says. ​“There are thousands of surfers in Munich – we did a petition that gained over 5,000 signatures.”

“People who live in Munich know the wave; you’ll always see someone walking around with a surfboard on a summer’s day. But the politicians had no real clue what it really was, in terms of how many people surfed it regularly and how important it was to such a big group of locals and this situation has reminded them of how important the surfers are as a community.”

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Quirin says the city’s mayor had been off work having surgery on his shoulder when the wave was closed, and the legal inquiry was taking place. ​“When he came back the first thing he did was open up the wave again,” he says, and he even apologised as some of the underwater architecture had been removed during the investigation, which affected how the wave performed.

“Munich is a big and very wealthy city, and it’s extraordinary to me that a mayor is taking to social media to apologise to a group of surfers and saying that he’s going to fix the problem,” he says.

For Quirin, it felt like a big shift from his teenage years as a surf outlaw. ​“When the river wave was closed a lot of people were getting really angry, but I remember when I was young, we’d have to wait for months for it to work sometimes especially in springtime when the water level was high (subsequent construction has made the wave surfable all year around).”

“Nowadays people are used to it working 24/7, they need it in their lives.”

Sam Haddad is a freelance writer who writes the newsletter Climate & Board Sports.

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