World's Largest Street Art Gallery

Street Art Mural Showing Teufelsberg's Former Function as an NSA Spy Station

 Posted by James.

Hot on the heals of Town Mouse's post about street art, this post is about the world's largest street art gallery, on Teufelsberg in Gruenewald.

Teufelsberg, which translates into English as "Devil's Mountain" has a checkered history. In 1915, it was ceded into the public domain with the proviso that it remain as green area in perpetuity. At that time, Berlin was a rapidly developing industrial city with lots of heavy industry, and the workers needed a place to relax on the weekends. Hitler build a university for military research, the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet, on the site in the late 1930s as part of his project to turn Berlin into a "World Capital Germania". Actually, the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet was administered as part of the Technical University of Berlin, where I'm currently teaching, but after the war, the faculty and administration of TU Berlin decided to no longer do military research. As a result, faculty can't take any money from the military, even for research projects on cryptography and security.

After the war, the buildings of the Wehrtechnischen Facultaet were blown up, and the site, which was in West Berlin served as a dump for the remains of bombed out buildings. About one third of the rubble from West Berlin was deposited on the hill, eventually making it the second highest point in Berlin. In the 1950's, the US Army hauled a radar dish up onto the mountain and discovered that the reception of East German and Russian signals was excellent. As a result, the NSA built a spy station on the mountain. The spy station consisted of listening facilities, and also a radar with 300 km radius. The listening facilities were occasionally enhanced by other environmental factors, like a Ferris wheel during the annual German-American festival in Zehlendorf. With 400,000 Russian troops in East Germany, Teufelsberg served on the front line for knowing exactly what they were up to, to prevent the Cold War from becoming a hot war.

Nonmilitary uses during the Cold War include an international ski competition in 1987 to celebrate Berlin's 750 anniversary as a city, but it was only after the Cold War that things really took off. The NSA abandoned the site in the early 1990's after the reunification of Germany. The mountain was bought by a group of investors from Cologne in the late '90's in response to a city-initiated contest about what do with the site. They planned to build luxury ($1 million euro) apartments and a restaurant there, and did some initial development. The locals, however, were of a different opinion and initiated a court case against the building, which succeeded and building was stopped. During the Dot Com bust of the early 2000's, the developer went bankrupt.  In 2008, the Maharishi Foundation had plans to build a university there, financed by David Lynch (the director of Blue Velvet), but later that year gave up the plans. Also, the Berlin techno music community moved in in the late 2000's and held parties there, until the local residents, not satisfied with an alternative use for the site either, called the police.

In 2013, the pre-WWI concord dedicating the mountain to open space surfaced, and since then the city has been trying to decide what to do with it. The investors still hold a mortgage on it, so the site is today leased and rented out to various parties, and there are daily tours. The site is also used as a setting for post-apocalyptic movies, and is the largest street art (and graffiti) gallery in the world.  On Friday, I did a tour with two friends (the 2 hour historical tour costs 15 euros per person).  At the entrance, you can see this sign, with two foxes on it welcoming you to the Teufelsberg:

The foxes accompany you throughout the site, with ironic commentary that at one point turns quite political (as most good street art tends to be). Like most of the surfaces on the site, the sign is covered with a mixture of street art and graffiti. Below, you can see the remains of the advertisement for luxury apartments (110-220 m**2). 

The guard house is similarly decorated, this time with a three dimensional head, possibly an ironic spoof on the Art Nouveau architectural decoration style in the part of Berlin that has been preserved from before WWII:

Also, down in the lower right corner, you can see a honeycomb, a comment on one of the current uses for the mountain, raising bees:

The lease holder has plans to put up to 500 hives on the mountain, today there are around 30.

The street art gallery begins in the courtyard of the site, where politicians and service people entered the building:

This picture resembles a famous painting by the Spanish painter Goya, The Third of May, 1808, which hangs in the Prado in Madrid. The painting commemorates the war against Napoleon in Spain. This indicates that the artist probably had some classical artistic training. Here's another more artistically inclined painting on the third floor of the ruined building:

A minority of the art on the site is more decorative, like this example, but most is spectacularly surrealistic, like this tiger:

or this wall in the courtyard below the tower:

In addition to bees and honey, the site also serves as a warehouse for used building material, and as a workshop for people with ideas about experimental lifestyles. When we were there, a two person team was building a bicycle-powered trailer for public art actions (which are kind of like Burning Man but not confined to a festival):

The vehicle is just narrow enough to not qualify for a license, and has an electric motor and battery in case the load is more than two people can handle. A similar vehicle has been used for transporting a piano.

We were allowed to climb up in the tower, which you can see here:

The dome in the foreground and to the right, as well as the intermediate levels of the tower, all were partially destroyed, and were used for signal intelligence. The dome at the very top, was constructed by the German Air Traffic Control agency in the mid-2000s because the radar from the Tempelhof airport in southern Berlin was experiencing interference from all the cranes in Potsdamer Platz during its reconstruction.

From the top, you have spectacular views of Berlin:

 In the distance about middle-left center of the picture, you can see the television tower at Alexander Platz over the trees of Gruenewald.

On the way out, I got this picture of a three dimensional sculpture, a decorated "art car":

With any official development of Teufelsberg blocked by the concord, the city seems inclined to simply let it slowly decay into ruin. Some have suggested that it become a monument ("Denkmalschutz", something like historic preservation in the US but with a much stronger legal component blocking any development), but so far, the city hasn't seen fit to act on this suggestion. In the meantime, Teufelsberg is a great place to view street art and, as a bonus, get a spectacular view of Berlin.