A note on the Trümmerbergs

It was a blustery day upon my visit to Tuefelsberg, a large hill made of rubble from the clean up after the end of WWII. Due to the wind, there were a large number of people flying kites or simply enjoying the view. It was a strange experience to be standing in relatively bucolic space physically made of the debris of war. A friend of mine mentioned that all you have to do is dig past the thin layer of top soil and hit the brick and concrete produced by the leveling of the city. If one doesn’t bring a shovel to do some real digging, this imagined space of the ruins is a strange production, an experience that requires a caption of information to produce itself. Upon seeing Seigessäule (the Tower to Victory) oft in the distance, I remembered thinking, “Oh, look! A hill in Berlin.” Actually going to this hill, to stand upon what I had previously failed to know the contents of, was a touch surreal to say the least.