In Grunewald, overlooking much of west Berlin, stands a steep green hill called Teufelsberg. This means “devil’s mount”, and while the ominous associations lift for a moment on learning the name was after the nearby Teufelssee (“devil’s lake”), they return full force on learning that the hill is not natural, but artificial, built from the ruins of a dead Berlin. Between round-the-clock aerial bombing from the RAF and USAAF, and the Red Army taking the city a street at a time with rifle, hand-grenade and 203mm siege howitzer, Berlin was more rubble than city in 1945; and when the Cold War began in earnest, the blockaded West Berlin had no way of shipping its remains beyond city limits. Thus: a giant hill made of piled-up destroyed buildings, with an indestructible Nazi training college underneath it, and an odd observatory-looking NATO listening post on top.

I hadn’t even intended to go to Teufelsberg, but the Technikmuseum and the Gatow airbase were both closed on Mondays for whatever weird Berlin reason, so Plan C it was. Navigating was more difficult than it should have been; Google Maps’ listed paths are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike reality. Realising this and adopting the traditional hill-climbing method of “up”, I accidentally stormed up the smaller Drachenberg instead, and after spending a while catching my breath on the windy open plateau there, had to come halfway down again in the blazing sun. Still, it was a lovely walk; trees have been planted on Teufelsberg, the leafmould and wild grass have covered the detritus of the war. It feels like any other wooded hill, but where the path wears away to the bones of the land beneath, it’s not rock that is exposed, but brick, concrete and rebar.

 

Ascending the much more heavily wooded Teufelsberg, for real this time, I couldn’t work out what the actual status of the listening post was. A website offering tours said it had shut down and I couldn’t find its successor; Wikipedia gave a very muddy and uninspiring account; and coming to a fence at the top, whose many, many repairs showed evidence of a constant, vicious running battle between fence-maintainers and people with wire cutters, made me no more optimistic. But persevering along the path I found a gate, where several extremely scruffy-looking people with beanbags and a small child asked me for money. As it turned out, the complex has been overrun with hippie-ish squatters who charge entrance based on no authority whatsoever. They said €7, €5 for students (and had a clipboard to make it seem all legit). I said I was a student and showed them my young person’s railcard. They were in no real position to argue.

The squatters have padlocked most of the buildings up (the fucking hypocrites), but what remains is an intriguing post-Cold-War sprawl of lovingly-if-messily maintained gardens, recycling stations and hoards of furniture arranged with Germanic pedanticism, all in the shadows of huge dead NSA structures sprayed with really quite impressive murals in all sorts of lurid colours and degrees of fatuous countercultural nonsense. I don’t know the engineering behind the listening station, and all the significant kit is long gone, but what remains is a series of tall buildings capped with puffball globes made of fibreglass hexagons. The highest and largest building has two lesser globes on the roof of a squat office building, and a single greater one between them, on a tiered column lined with shredded tarpaulins.

Said main building is easily accessible and is basically a graffiti gallery; all very run down, but not stinking of piss, which is a mercy. The roof has been lined with a fence made of wooden forklift pallets, there are separate bins for different recyclables and you just know they empty them every day; very German squatters. There’s no electricity, though, and health & safety is generally thoroughly Ukrainian; to get to the highest point, inside the top dome, you need to climb about fifteen flights of stairs in pitch blackness (thank heaven for the LED function on modern smartphones. The dome itself has almost no views, just a port in it, but the echoes are incredible, and I spent a good fifteen minutes up there whacking pieces of detritus into each other and stamping my feet to see how it would sound.

Leaving, I discovered the fridge of drinks by the clipboard hippies was on an “honour system”, so I donated a euro for a rainbow-labelled COLA-MIX in order to a) rehydrate b) maintain my self-destructive habit of buying oddly named sweet drinks in foreign parts. It wasn’t that bad, in truth. Going downhill was even more of an odyssey than coming up, as I once again put my trust in Google Maps and was once again betrayed. Trying desperately to follow my phone’s directions along paths which weren’t there, I ended up on mountain bike tracks which testified to the daring, not to say total suicidal lunacy, of local mountain bike riders, and ended up at the right place by luck as much as judgment. Overall, I had the time of my life, but it’s probably a good thing I didn’t have anyone else with me; between the steep hills, mild peril and totally improvised navigation, I suspect most companions would have got quite annoyed with it all. But I’ve always found that the best way to have an adventure is to point yourself in the vague direction of something interesting and follow your nose.

Berlin & Northern Germany, 2016
Prora – Peenemünde – Teufelsberg

 

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(Click on the images for higher-res versions!)

North of Berlin, the autobahn ran through dense (but orderly) forest and then opened out into broad fields under the grey morning sky. Wind turbines have sprouted across Mecklenburg-Vorpommern like daffodils in spring, their blades striped orange. Occasional showers came down, brief but intense, but by the time we reached the island of Rügen the day was bright and the sky blue. Over the bridge by Stralsund, with its striking Marienkirche and picture-perfect Hanseatic seafront, was Rügen itself, with an unexpected number of of car dealerships and railway lines, and on its east coast, Prora.

Prora is a holiday camp of cyclopean proportions, envisioned as a key point for the Nazis’ “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength through Joy) organisation -a mass tourism initiative intended to overcome class divisions by uniting the German Volk in affordable but healthy holidays, with lots of outdoorsy pursuits, hiking, sea cruises etc etc. (It appears that Hitler learned of the Butlins camps being built in the UK in the mid-late 1930s and, more or less, turned to Albert Speer and said “outdo them.”) The result was a resort built for 20,000 people, continuous blocks of flats punctuated by piers overlooking a huge crescent-shaped beach on the east coast of Rügen. Its completion interrupted by the war, it was used in a vague way by East Germany and mostly abandoned, with large parts in ruins. Part of block V contains the largest youth hostel in Germany; we were in Room 101 (gulp), which as Block VI is now rubble stands as the northernmost surviving part of Prora.

(The pier structures joining them up were never completed, so the most Prora has ever been is eight separate gigantic blocks of flats; the southernmost and the two northernmost are ruins now, and the remaining five are now numbered, south-north, I-V. With me so far? Good. Here’s a map, the surviving blocks are red on the right.) That block, of which the youth hostel occupies less than a third, is well over half a kilometre long.

The hostel felt rather in keeping with the original KdF intentions – clean, austere, healthy, affordable but with no emphasis on class, with the implication that this was merely for hiking, swimming naked, etc etc etc. * Initially, though, our hopes of exploring Pripyat-like abandoned ruins deflated; the place was much busier, much more orderly and much better fenced off than expected. Sets of Nazi-built bungalows were in regular use, now basically just suburbia; stern, efficient German fencing covered the rest of Block V, and most of what we could see of Block IV had already been redeveopled into some surprisingly nice flats. The foundation of the pier structure between V and IV was just an inaccessible foundation which I barked my knee trying to climb, and the railway-and-technology museum, by the time we reached it, was only open for another half hour and wanted €10 for its single room of cars and trains (although it was a big room, and they did look like quite good cars and trains.) We returned to the hostel for an early dinner, bockwurst and kartoffelsalat – a typically German cheap meal, the sausage nondescript flavourless meat, the potatoes lost in a sea of mayonnaise, but it filled us up and didn’t cost much.

We set out again, looking to make the best of it. The pier foundation by our room, between block V and the now-gone block VI, was at least accessible if nothing more than a cartouche of sea-wall overlooking the beach; a statue of two very naked bronze German holidaymakers (the woman with massive shoulders and tits-as-an-afterthought, the man horse-faced and standing, silver spray paint on her nipples and his cock) watch over the actual, considerably less sculpted (in every sense) holidaymakers on the beach. We strolled down the white sands, full of little shells and leftover sandcastles – you can see nothing of the resort from the beach, the foliage has grown up quite a bit since Hitler’s time.

At the very centre of Prora’s crescent, between blocks III and IV, stands the pier structure which was meant to take Baltic cruise ships; the superstructure and the jetties were never finished, all that’s left is a graffiti-stained redbrick wall, and inland the site of the Festhall is a tangled wilderness of little pine trees and fragrant pink roses. But, pressing on, we found a proper half-built structure with that tasty crumbling STALKER feel; a look through a shattered window found some sort of abandoned bowling alley, a wriggle under the fence and negotiating with a shattered wall got me in (it was, indeed an abandoned bowling alley). That was a bit better.

Moving inland along the building revealed the only one of the pier structures actually completed, a long curved Nazi-deco building which contained a fish restaurant and something which advertised itself as a nightclub but looked extremely closed. Beyond it, in Block III, were several now-closed museums, one trying much too hard with its signage to attract us in, the other barely trying at all, and an empty adventure playground/agility course, where healthy young Germans can move from tree to tree along zipwires and suspended platforms, in a death-defying fashion. Moving further along down the coast, we found Block II, half-converted into flats with nice glass balconies. I’d seen some cranes, far, far to the south, from the Block V pier and assumed they were in the town of Binz, south of Prora. They were actually working on Block I – and Block I isn’t even the southernmost part. “Bloody hell, but this place is huge,” I thought, for neither the first nor the last time that day. Even the abandoned ones were quite emphatically fenced off, and mostly building sites; still, we’d seen enough that the trip didn’t feel wasted, and headed back home.

But at last, coming back, we lucked out: the southern end of Block IV, in the process of redevelopment: gutted but accessible, and we wasted no time in going in, climbing to the top floor and wandering around the huge dusty concrete emptiness, enjoying the crumbling construction and the views of the brilliant blue Baltic. There were holes in many of the staircases, it was all thoroughly enjoyable, and we came back to our room late in the long dusk to drink tea and look out over the sea.

 

* What? It’s not a bad idea just because the Nazis liked it. Hitler was a vegetarian, remember, and I don’t usually accuse my veggie friends of Nazi sympathies.

Berlin & Northern Germany, 2016
Prora – Peenemünde – Teufelsberg