Architectural Wounds: Teufelsberg

Abstract

The decaying structure of the National Security Agency (NSA) Field Station Berlin recalls voiceless conflicts, political posturing, and grandiose magic. The structure stands atop Teufelsberg, a man-made “Devil’s Mountain.” Teufelsberg itself stands atop an Albert Speer-designed military academy. The NSA Field Station was silenced by the untimely arrival of notional peace. This site no longer indoctrinates young men with ideological manifestos, nor does it whisper airwave secrets for Allied Intelligence. The geodesic radomes are dormant, the Mountain itself a mere ghostly depiction of a spymaster’s lair – of now absurdist attempts at societal order, escapes and cycles perpetuated. This haunting architectural remnant is at once a resilient monument and an odd gestural specter.

Keywords:

• Teufelsberg
• Albert Speer
• Berlin
• radome
• Anthony Vidler

Notes

¹ Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich [1970] (London: Phoenix, 1995), 62.

² Directive dictated by Adolf Hitler, June 25, 1940; facsimile in Hans J. Reichhardt and Wolfgang Schäche, Von Berlin nach Germania (Exhibition Catalogue) (Berlin: Landesarchiv Berlin, 1984), 32.

³ Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 98.

⁴ Ibid., 96–7.

⁵ E. S. Shaffer, Comparative Criticism: Volume 23, Humanist Traditions in the Twentieth Century: An Annual Journal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129–30.

⁶ Ibid., 93.

⁷ Bernd Stöver, Berlin: A Short History (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013), 40.

⁸ This refers to a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network established in 1971 on behalf of the UK and the US to monitor diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc Allies during the Cold War.

⁹ George Orwell, Nineteen-Eighty-Four [1949] (Toronto: Penguin, 2015), 37.

¹⁰ “NSA Field Station Teufelsberg – a late post mortem” (2012),http://dasalte.ccc.de/teufelsberg/ (accessed on accessed October 17, 2014).

¹¹ Allied Law asserted governmental authority over all German Reich territory West of the Oder–Neisse line following the 1945 Berlin Declaration.

¹² Nadja Sayej, “Take a Tour of Teufelsberg, Berlin’s Abandoned NSA Listening Station,” (November 5, 2013), http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/take-a-tour-of-teufelsberg-berlins-abandoned-nsa-listening-station (accessed October 14, 2014).

¹³ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida [1980] (London: Vintage, 1993), 94. Original emphasis.

¹⁴ Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). Reference is primarily to the chapter “Architecture Dismembered,” 69–82.

¹⁵ Ibid. 79.