Devil’s Mountain

Far beneath it all lies a network of concrete hallways that spreads like fingers through the earth. Light can’t make it down there anymore and the structure would have collapsed a long time ago if it hadn’t been cursed with an invincible skeleton. So when bombing didn’t work, they buried it alive.

This was the college that Albert Speer designed for Nazi military technology and what they piled on its grave were the remains of 400,000 German homes. The Allies carted the rubble in 80 truckloads a day until the pile was the highest point in Berlin. It’s called Teufelsberg or Devil’s Mountain.

Kiefer’s words, “Over your city grass will grow,” come to mind. A hardscrabble carpet of green has managed to take hold above the stone. And on top of this, during the Cold War in what was then the British Sector of West Berlin, the Americans erected an intelligence center. Three bulbous metal towers loom on its summit. Three great eyes with satellite retinas were trained unblinkingly on the East. They’ve been abandoned since two years after the wall fell. Today their ruined shells peel like birch bark.

And this evening, on the very top of this many-layered place, a boy stands with a kite that stretches far up into the darkening sky.

I am here with my roommate. Helles beer (which means bright in German but still feels appropriate) in hand, we climb to the top for a view of the city. Around us everything that can be lifted is hoisted into the sky. Toy gliders, kites, remote controlled airplanes. A man reclines alongside his fuchsia paraglider and sews on another neon yellow triangle. I look out over Berlin, spotting the Fernsehturm (TV tower) that I wrote about when I first arrived and am able to spin the rest of the city out from there. The wind takes up the smell of hash that the teenagers use to gain altitude. High. The people have chosen to elevate this dark place and not look down.

It should be said that David Lynch tried to buy the land in order to build a Happiness College.

Sure, he could be here. Trapped with the rest of the damaged things in the underground pit. Dante’s Devil would fit the bill. Once in God’s favor, he tried to overtake the Lord and was thrown out of Heaven. The impact he made as he fell through the earth created 9 circles of Hell and stuck him in the deepest one. Dante’s Satan is a giant beast, trapped for eternity in a layer of ice that the slow beating of his wings continually refreezes. The others in his realm are frozen immobile, their bodies contorted as grotesque ice sculptures. The debris that was expelled from the earth when he crashed formed the mountain of Purgatory – as high as Hell is deep. A pile of rubble made from the consequence of great sin. Something to climb to get perspective.