Teufelsberg, the stones speak
"In the eyes of the world, we are the Trümmerweiber, the daughters of ruins and filth".
A Woman in Berlin, Diary April 20-June 22, 1945
The Teufelsberg wooded hill, over 100 m high, was built from the 25 million pieces of rubble left over from the destruction of Berlin by Allied bombing at the end of the Second World War. The site's tormented history begins with Nazi projects and ends with the construction of an American listening station during the Cold War, which was dismantled in 1995. It makes this landscape not a monument, but a memorial with a complex status. Because the Teufelsberg project was the brainchild of the architect Raynold Ligner, who dreamed of a restorative nature for a people destroyed by the Nazis, and because each step takes us back to the history of the Trummerfrauen (women of the ruins), whose forced labour was invisibilized by history, this project combines photographic and textual archive documents with contemporary shots.
INGA, 18 YEARS OLD
"On the Pflugstrasse construction site, I narrowly escaped death. Women like us, wearing wooden shoes or simple ski socks, were cutting away sections of wall that had been pierced, manually, just with pickaxes. Parts of the wall had fallen onto an old cellar roof, and all of a sudden a similar roof underneath me ruptured. I fell in a whirlpool of ruins to the depths, with only my head sticking out. Suddenly I saw all the images of my life flash before my eyes and I fainted. I don't know how someone rescued me from my stone prison. Miraculously, there was a doctor, who found a few bruises and scratches. Clearing up at Grünewald was easier. The British military brought a truck to our group. The work was incomparably less arduous, and in the end, each of us received two pieces of white bread and a small cube of margarine in addition to our wages." ( Excerpts from the Trümmerfrauen's memoirs)