Every morning, Ecki and I start work with a breakfast conference. We discuss the day ahead on the construction site over our sandwiches and black coffee that’s so strong the spoon almost stands up on its own in it. As foreman, I know what’s on the agenda and Ecki, our crane driver, needs to know what we’re doing before he climbs into his tower. Up there, he has a fantastic view over everything, but he’s also a bit out of touch, even though we do have radio contact with each other.

“I love the silence up there,” Ecki once admitted to me, “and when the birds come and sit on the boom and look over to me, all’s well with the world as far as I’m concerned,” he enthused. “Come up and see for yourself sometime,” my favourite crane driver suggested. What can I say? I let myself be persuaded to climb up to the top of his Liebherr tower crane. It really is an impressive machine, the Liebherr 224 EC-H 12: maximum height 86.7 metres; boom 65 metres long. So, I climbed up the site workers’ climbing frame, that’s genuine manual work. And foot work, too, because there’s no lift inside the crane.

Once at the top, I was pretty much out of breath. Ecki was whistling casually to himself and started raving about how he can position material in exactly the right spot within the entire range of the boom. “In fact, I could go on that TV challenge show “Wetten, daß...?” with it – throw a cent in a piggy bank with the crane or something like that.” I can’t remember exactly what he said now because the height and the way the crane was swaying in the wind were making me a bit queasy. So I decided to set off back down to the ground again. “I can lift as much as 12,000 kilos with this crane,” Ecki called down after me. And the weight I felt lifted from my chest the moment I was back on solid ground again was at least that heavy.

Wersja drukowana berlin-airport.de (Copyright Berliner Flughäfen)