Last month the duck and I went to the movies (for the first time this year… whoopsies)! As the room went dark and the curtains opened, we were thrown into the world of Cleo – and for the next hour or so we accompanied her on a mysterious adventure on the trail of the brothers Sass and the exploits from their infamous 1929 bank robbery, that are believed to be buried in Berlin’s Grunewald forest.
*SPOILERS AHEAD* In the movie Cleo ends up looking for the treasure on Teufelsberg, ‘the Devil’s mountain’, that, as the film’s narrator explains, used to be an unfinished Nazi university building, that then, after World War II, was turned into a rubble hill. And during the Cold War it was chosen to become the site of an NSA listening station.
These days, if you leave some of your money at the entrance, you can explore the area that now features lots of urban art paired with a healthy portion of adrenaline, as you just might end up in an unmarked water basin, or flat on the ground, with a fallen brick on your head. Well, we were asked to sign a waiver at the entrance, just in case. We also had to promise that we would leave our camera friend in our bag (because there’s no way we’re paying an extra 10 Euros just to take higher quality photos… of our impending death) and, thus, resorted to using our terrible phone camera – that has an impractical tendency to overexpose pretty much anything.
After all that fearful exploring the duck and I now proudly present to you some of the usable photos we took during our Teufelsberg adventure:
You might ask yourselves why we didn’t just grab our real camera the moment we had vanished from the sight of the guy at the ticket counter. Well, the duck and I pride ourselves on being honorable citizens of Berlin, and we’re just waaay too scared of being caught doing something that we shouldn’t. Maybe we should work on our audacity, though. I heard that can bring you places! Let’s spend the rest of the month pondering on this, shall we, duck?
Did you know about the history of Teufelsberg? And are you less of a chicken when it comes to breaking the rules? What places are on your Berlin itinerary?
The duck and I will go back to pecking oats now… bok bok b’gawk!
The Duck in... side 