The following week, I travelled to Teufelsberg US Spy Station, another (mostly) abandoned location offering paid entry.
Known at the time as "The Hill" to American soldiers, the listening station was built by the US National Security Agency in West Berlin during the Cold War. In order to best intercept Soviet messages, it had to be at the highest possible altitude - no easy feat in a city as flat as Berlin. And so it was constructed upon one of the city’s few artificial hills. Teufelsberg, which translates to “Devil’s Mountain”, is made up of 75 million metres cubed of debris from World War II, at the site of an unfinished Nazi military and technical college. The Spy Station was active from 1962 until the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was then bought by investors with intentions to build private apartments and hotels. For a few years, director David Lynch had plans to use the site for a meditation retreat. These never materialised and the building remained completely abandoned until 2016, when it was officially opened to visitors for the price of 8€ (now 15€…). In March 2024, it was announced that Teufelsberg would be further developed, with plans to open up a cafe and a conference centre.
As with any redevelopment project, there's a bittersweetness to these developments. On the one hand, I appreciate the desire to preserve the site, which might have otherwise further deteriorated. Abandoned buildings are perfect locations to transform into events sites, as it imbues them with a certain edge and can bring new life to derelict areas. Berlin is certainly known for this phenomenon, such as the nightclubs Berghain, situated inside an old thermal plant, and Tresor, formerly a bank vault, as well as RAW Gelände, a former train repair station which now hosts flea markets, beer gardens, a medieval-themed Christmas market, a climbing wall and a skatepark... just to name a few.
At the same time, abandoned buildings undeniably lose much of their "magic" once they are redeveloped and become, well, unabandoned. This got me thinking about other reasons I value these locations and keep coming back to them - and what I felt was lacking at Teufelsberg, as well as Tempelhof. When I visited, Teufelsberg wasn't yet an events venue per se, as the primary function of the development plans that were in place was to preserve the site and allow for sanctioned street art. But in its passage from an underground point of interest to a paid-entry attraction, you could nonetheless sense that something of its charm had been lost.
I admittedly enjoy the sense of thrill that comes with the knowledge that urban exploration is illegal. Though authorities almost always turn a blind eye to it, the awe of abandoned buildings is undoubtedly intertwined with the knowledge that you could, in theory, get caught. As I creep through broken fences and check for security cameras, I feel a great sense of wonder, like an explorer discovering a lost temple within a dangerous jungle. This is coupled with a fascination with the anarchic subcultures that develop around abandoned buildings, through the proliferation of graffiti, raves and jungle music. This teetering on the edge of the law adds to the magnetism of abandoned buildings, by allowing for an aestheticised experience of danger - or in other words, the sublime.
The sublime is a term developed in 18th century aesthetic philosophy. It refers to how fear and overwhelmingness, under the right conditions, can lead to powerful “negative pleasure” and awe. Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke defines it as an aesthetic encounter with “the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling”, the fear of death. For Burke, since our instinct for “self-preservation” is all-encompassing, when faced with the sublime “the mind is so entirely filled with its object that it cannot entertain any other”. (Burke, 1757).
This ties back to the sublime experience of decay in urban exploration. The decay of abandoned buildings is certainly a major part of what draws in visitors to these sites. Slowly eroded by nature, they incite a meditation on the transience of life.
A few decades after Burke, Immanuel Kant expands upon his notion of the sublime. Most notably, he makes a distinction between two forms of sublimity: the dynamic and the mathematical sublime.
The dynamic sublime refers to the feeling of great awe towards an object of insurmountable strength, which nevertheless poses relatively little danger to the subject.
Urban exploration is dynamically sublime in the precarious experience of navigating abandoned sites which, even when taking precautions, are still relatively dangerous. Simultaneously, perhaps on a more intellectual level, it is also dynamically sublime in the way it reveals nature's slow and brutal erosion of man-made infrastructure, calling to mind our own mortality.
The mathematical sublime refers instead to the feeling of awe towards an object of unfathomable size.
The experience of ruins presents a doubling of the mathematical sublime - on one level, towards humanity when compared to the individual; on another, towards the universe when compared to humanity. Humanity, symbolised by these ruins, feels monumental when compared to the lifespan of the subject, as it endurance in spite of the brutal passage of seasons - a totem of human progress, our longing for immortality and the destructive mark we bring upon the environment. Yet compared to the scope of the universe, the erosion of abandoned buildings also reminds us that humanity is but a blip. In this light, this decay anticipates the nature of humanity's eventual downfall - not that of epic poems, cathartic and awe-inspiring, but, at least from a western perspective, one that is exponential, prolonged and wrapped up in the mundanity of our daily lives.
All this is to say, as much as I enjoyed being able to safely and legally visit Teufelsberg, the sense of awe I experienced at the site and strived to express in my painting - towards its fascinating history, the massiveness of its radomes (the big orbs) and architecture, as well as its location, shrouded in the woods, on Berlin's highest peak, was somewhat mitigated by its sanctioning and privatisation. This isn't to say that I am necessarily against the redevelopment of abandoned spaces, as many of my favourite spots in Berlin and in Scotland went through this very transformation themselves. But this experience did make me rethink what I valued about abandoned buildings and where I wanted to go next.
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