Me, my brother and his little son spend New Years Night on Devil’s Mountain! A thousand Berliners had the same idea but it was space enough for us all and we shared matches and enjoyed the ice cold night and the atmosphere up there. And the view over the city.
Auntie Wikipedia knows it all: Teufelsberg (German for Devil’s Mountain) is a hill in Berlin, in former West-Berlin. It rises about 80 meters above the surrounding.
It is an artificial hill with a curious history: it was built by the Allies after the Second World War from the rubble of Berlin during the following twenty years as the city was rebuilt.
One estimate for the amount of rubble is about 12 million cubic meters, or about 400,000 buildings. It is higher than the highest natural hill (the Kreuzberg) in the Berlin area.
The curiousness begins with what is buried underneath the hill: a Nazi military-technical college designed by Albert Speer. The Allies tried using explosives to demolish the school, but it was so sturdy that covering it with debris turned out to be easier.
This is my brother writing 2009 with a torch!
