If you’re looking for a symbol of Berlin’s 20th-century history, you could do a lot worse than the Teufelsberg. Rising out of the Grunewald forest, at the western edge of the city, this 375ft hill is made almost entirely out of the wreckage of the Second World War. Bricks mainly, but also broken lintels, smashed tiles and pock-marked stone: in the end, 26 million cubic metres of the stuff, cleared from Berlin’s streets, was dumped here over the half-finished shell of a military academy. The Nazis had been building it when, in 1945, Stalin’s tanks rolled in.
Then, the British and Americans placed a listening post on top, crowned with a handful of antennas encased in domes like great, white golf balls. Once staffed by 1,500 Cold War spies, it didn’t just monitor Communist conversations; West German journalists suspected their telephone calls were being bugged, too. No wonder they called it the Teufelsberg —teufel is German for ‘devil’.
Now, the scene is rather different. The Allies shipped out in 1991, and before anyone could agree what to do with the site, locals were cutting holes in its perimeter fence and wriggling through. Some just wanted to see what all the fuss had been about; others brought cans of spray paint.
“How could it have been otherwise?” says Berlin artist and Teufelsberg guide Richard Rabensaat, when he takes me up there one midweek morning. “It was a wonderful, adventurous place, full of secrets,” he says. “And you could paint there without fear of being stopped by the police.”
Pretty soon, the Teufelsberg became an unofficial open-air gallery of
