There really were Arkenberge before any of this. The name belonged to a chain of small hills of Pleistocene origin — glacial leftovers, the same ice that flattened the rest of the north German plain. A survey map of 1911 puts the highest of them at 70.3 metres. Over the following decades most of that material went into the backs of lorries and was carted off; the surrounding country lies between 53 and 57 metres, and what survives of the original ridge tops out at 64.8.

In the 1950s the Berlin Outer Ring railway was cut straight through the area, taking another bite. By then a small settlement called Arkenberge had grown up nearby, established in the 1930s and named after hills that were already mostly gone. It is a strange sequence: the place is named for a hill, the hill is removed, and then a much bigger one is built next door out of debris.

In 1984 a construction-waste tip was opened on 36 hectares east of the settlement, and for fourteen years it took whatever the building trade threw away. Dumping ended in 1998. From 1999 the operation changed character: more construction waste came in, but now for recycling and for profiling — sculpting the mound into a designed landform, capped and recultivated rather than simply piled.

The plan drawn up for that phase is unusually specific. It called for a hill with two viewing plateaux, separated visually by a saddle so that the summit would read as two peaks rather than one lump. In a landscape as level as the Barnim plateau, a 120-metre artificial hill with two lookouts would give you a horizon that includes most of Berlin. The shaping was carried out. The lookouts have never opened.

The record it took is worth understanding, because the two hills are made of different centuries. The Teufelsberg out in Grunewald reaches 120.1 metres and is built from the ruins of Berlin itself — roughly 26 million cubic metres of wartime debris carted west between 1950 and 1972, poured over an unfinished Nazi military-technical college that the Allies had tried and failed to blow up. It is a hill made from a destroyed city.

The Arkenberge is a hill made from a rebuilt one: offcuts, demolition spoil, the churn of ordinary construction in the 1980s and 1990s. Six-tenths of a metre separates them. Both stand well above Berlin's highest natural ground, the Großer Müggelberg out east above the Müggelsee, which manages only 114.7 metres — a reminder that in this city, geology has been comprehensively outbuilt.

Plans to turn the Arkenberge and its surroundings into a recreation area firmed up around 2000. In 2015, on the strength of the new survey and the finished landform, it was announced that the hill would open to the public as a park in 2019.

That year came and went. So did the next several. As of spring 2026 the summit is still not open, and the inscribed erratic marking the highest point in Berlin sits on a hilltop the public is not allowed to reach. Berliners who want a view from a rubble hill have to make do with the Teufelsberg, sixty centimetres shorter and on the wrong side of the city. The highest ground in Berlin remains, for now, a fenced rumour on the northern skyline.