Tuesday, 23 September 2003

No Such Agency

Today was probably the last beautiful day of this year (with temperatures around 28°C today and a predicted temperature drop of about 10°C plus beginning of autumn tomorrow). So we decided to give our kite some air time since the typical autumn winds have already arrived. We had heard of a great kite flying spot on “Teufelsberg” (literally “Devil’s Mountain”), a hill piled up from the rubble left behind by the WWII Allied bombing of Berlin. For a pile of rubble it’s fucking huge. Of course today you don’t see much of the rubble anymore, it’s mostly covered by trees.

We didn’t really know where that kite flying area was so we picked some random parking lot at the foot of the hill and started to hike up the hill. We didn’t see anything but trees for a while and when we arrived at the top there was this military looking compound right ahead of us, complete with a double row of barbwired fence. It looked like some kind of relic of the Cold War (click pic to see bigger version). Unfortunately the fence prevented us from going inside and exploring the the whole thing but even hiking along the perimeter made me feel like I was in some kind of Cold War first-person shooter.

When we got back home we did some research and it turns out it was indeed a listening post called “Field Station Berlin” maintained by the NSA and a bunch of other agencies until 1990. The “Field Station Berlin Veterans Group” has some nice areal shots of the whole compound from back when it was still in use. Nowadays some real estate company is apparently remodeling the whole thing to accomodate loft-style apartments. Not many people can say they live in an NSA listening post…

Later we did find the kite flying area and it was pretty cool. We had some nice strong winds for a while. Later we sat in the sun watching people fly their remote controlled gliders in the updraft along the side of the hill. A perfect day.

  Posted by Edda at 00:41 CET