Teufelsberg: A Metaphor for Something
Last Tuesday we went to Teufelsberg, which means Devil’s Mountain, located in the district of Wilmersdorf, north of the Grunewald forest. Teufelsberg is not only a hill, but also a giant metaphor, although like many other Berlin landmarks, it’s not clear what it is meant to illustrate. The 80 metre high hill, found in the former British sector, towers over its flat Brandenburg surroundings. It’s the highest hill in Berlin, higher than the one found in Kreuzberg and other -berg ending Berlin districts. If anything it illustrates the lack of altitude in the capital. What’s remarkable about Teulfelsberg however, is not its height, but its composition. It’s made up entirely of the debris and rubble of Berlin, gradually gaining inches over the 20 years after the war as the Allies rebuilt the West.
The site was originally the home of the Wehrtechnishe Fakultät, a military technical college designed by Albert Spree, Hitler’s architect and all around fascist aesthetic consultant. Construction ground to a halt with the war’s eruption and only the shell of the compound was completed. After the end of the conflict, there were plans to knock it down, but it withstood any demolition attempts. In the end the Allies were forced to literally bury it under the weight of historical memory. 12 million cubic metres of it, the equivalent of 400,000 buildings. But this is not what attracts so many visitors to Teufelsberg - it’s sadly not the only debris mound in the world created by armed conflict. It is however the only one that also hosted a listening station owned by the US National Security Agency (NSA) during the Cold War. In other words, it was a spy lair perched on top of a million cubic metres of war wreckage underneath which a nazi military technology academy lurked. See what I mean by giant metaphor? It gets better though. With the fall of the Wall, the station was quickly dismantled and all the spy equipment swiftly removed. The building and the radar remained though and stood abandoned until they were acquired by a group of investors, presumably high on post-unification optimism who planned to turn the site into flats. This plan was later abandoned, probably after the investors discovered Berliners’ refusal to live in anything but an Altbau.
Once again deserted, the place fell prey to vandals, arsonists and urban desolation fetishists. New Berliners marked their territory, covering it in graffiti and leaving a trail of beer bottles and broken glass. The glass is of the anti-bullet variety, but apart from that, it looks uncannily like my local U-Bahn station. It even has a broken lift! I have no idea what to make of the Teufelsberg metaphor, it has way too many layers. Its current sorry state is however a source of anxiety for a group of individuals who seem to be under the illusion that the spy station is somehow single-handedly responsible for stopping Berlin turning into a smouldering atomic crater and ruining everybody’s barbecue plans. I for one rejoice over the fact that it is no longer in use and that Berlin is, at least in this respect, a pleasantly uneventful city. Disconcertingly phallic in appearance, a vandalised Teufelsberg is perhaps a fitting reminder of the sticky situations to which unchecked levels of testosterone can lead us.
