April 25, 2004
April 17, 2004
Springtime on Teufelsberg
I have not posted for a while here, because of too much work and exciting things happening at the same time. As always at this time of the year, many things are going on in parallel, and making the most of it sometimes requires to pay less attention to other things, like updating the blog.
Besides working too much I spent some time visiting and understanding the old NSA Field Station Berlin Teufelsberg, one of the premier listening posts of the cold war. After having seen many similar east german and ex-soviet installations, this was a very welcome chance to see the other side. The sheer scale and technical sophistication of the Teufelsberg installation is breathtaking, if you know how to read the traces left behind and what to look for. Guessing the usage patterns and types of installations is a very interesting intellectual game, like reengineering on building scale.
Unfortunately this is a bit of a race against time, as vandalizing hordes of intellectually challenged youth are engaged in mindless destruction as a pastime there. So while I have documented a lot of the more interesting installations and traces, a lot has already been devastated. I hopefully will find the time to combine my findings with those of other like minded people and create a consistent documentation in the next weeks.