open or in some cases, have undergone surgical procedures with a Stanley knife to leave precisely cut-out letters forming a signature or message, the radome here is whole, the skin taut, the lightness of the construction complemented by the whiteness of its constitutive hexagons lending the interior a subdued, restful light. Graffiti abounds here too, though some of it has been painted over. It’s not the parody of the divine finger almost touching Adam’s or the architecturally defined cameo of a hand with the flower of death that is the most interesting aspect of this radome but its audio characteristics. It magnifies and echoes even the slightest whisper and I sit at the centre wondering what I could record. I switch on to capture short burst of radome conversation interspersed with Hooos and Haaas and Heeellooos that reverberate off the walls, but the replay result is disappointing. The feeling of being intensely inside the sound is just not there and I think that with the right technical knowledge it would be easier to create an a more authentic approximation of what I’m hearing now in the studio, reality sadly coming second to skilfully manipulated audio effects. Why is it called the Devil’s Hill, I ask? The answer I get is prosaic: it’s just named after the nearby lake – the Devil’s Lake. Why was it called Devil’s Lake? Well, that’s a bit of research for later. Even so, my interest in ruins and the historical legacy of the hill shows it to be more than a natural bump in the landscape.
Apart from its association with post-war and Cold War intelligence gathering, stories of espionage and counter- espionage and exalted graffiti —spray painted murals— Devil’s Hill is an artificial mound 120 metres high made of the debris of bombed Berlin. After the city’s post-World War II partition into East and West, there was a shortage of dump sites to deal with the remaining rubble, and the eventual solution was to choose the site of the ruin of what would have become an anchoring element in Albert Speer’s overall design for Hitler’s projected world capital, Germania, namely the Wehrtechnische Fakultät of the Technische Hochschule [Technical College Faculty of Military Defence and Armaments]. Although a serious start was made, by the end of the war it was still a partial rendering of the forbidding, four- sided, barracks-like building five stories high with a central courtyard it was intended to become. Drawings, photos and models of the never completed complex exude all the weight and emotional heft of some megalomaniac hard-edged medieval castle imagined by a bureaucrat with a tower at each corner and a glowering facade. It was this incomplete shell that provided stable foundations for the rubble of Devil’s Hill which, deep in its innards, continues to digest the educational certificates, identity cards, military medals, family photos and other personal possessions lost by some who survived and some who did not. Incidentally, Dragon’s Hill is also composed of rubble.
Tim Sharp
13 on site review 46 :: travel
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