A walking excursion to one of Berlin’s most mysterious landmarks…

Considering it’s a city with lots of neighbourhoods named after hills (Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Schöneberg and so on), Berlin is a challengingly flat place. You can walk for miles and miles without rising so much as an inch above the median above-sea-level altitude. Nor would the more notable inclines in the city’s topography—the gradual north-easterly rise along Prenzlauer Allee, for instance—trouble an eighty-a-day fashionista in six-inch Manolo heels. The Kreuzberg itself, meanwhile, rises to the dizzy, Himalayan heights of 66 metres.

From a walker’s point of view, Berlin’s absence of steep ascents, high ground, vantage points and succeeding declines might suggest the reason why the postwar authorities built Teufelsberg, an artificial hill to the west of the city, right in the thick of the Grunewald. But it wasn’t, of course. In the reconstruction period after World War Two, Teufelsberg was constructed from pulverised rubble created by the Allied bombing raids and the Red Army offensive—12 million cubic metres of brick-dust, equivalent to 400,000 apartments, according to one popular internet encyclopaedia.

There are a range of myths attached to the 115-metre-high Teufelsberg and the strikingly macabre, disused listening station at its summit. David Lynch, it is said, once tried to buy the complex; underneath the rubble lies one of Albert Speer’s projects—a Nazi military college, apparently. Whatever the truth, with a mythology and name like that (it means Devil’s Mountain), visiting or simply looking upon Teufelsberg is enough to conjure those powerful and uniquely Berlinisch resonances of secrecy, eavesdropping and threat, division and trauma. Even in blazing hot sunshine.

One sweltering day recently, I strolled into the Grunewald, from the Pichelsberg S-bahn station south east, up and then down Teufelsberg, returning to the rail network at Grunewald S-Bahn. Wandering through the woods, the immense central tower of the station, topped off with its antenna dome, formed a beckoning but fugitive presence—visible briefly though the boughs in fractured sunlight, but only to disappear again. Eventually we located a steep, well-worn path leading to the summit.

At last, a hill: as we climbed, soreness grew in the calves and Achilles tendons, accompanied by that familiar stressful rise in the heart rate which, when huffing away in the heat, causes the mind to fill with swear words as pace after pace seems to bring the end no nearer. Eventually we summitted, only to discover three layers of iron fencework preventing entry. We circumvented the complex furtively, before finding a gap in the ring.

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