Qualla: Arkenberge

Arkenberge: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Global Fish, CC BY-SA 3.0. Berlin's summit is made of Berlin. Out past Blankenfelde on the northern edge of Pankow, where the city runs out of streets and into fields, a green mound rises out of flat farmland to 120.7 metres above sea level. Nothing about it is natural. Every metre above about 57 is builders' rubble, tipped there by lorry between 1984 and 1998 and then shaped into a hill on purpose. In January 2015 a survey confirmed what the operators had suspected: the Arkenberge had overtaken the Teufelsberg and become the highest ground in the state of Berlin. A glacial erratic was hauled to the top with an inscription saying so.

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Image: Global Fish | CC BY-SA 3.0

Arkenberge: The Hill That Was Dug Away

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. 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...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Arkenberge: Thirty-Six Hectares of Rubble

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Global Fish, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 f...

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Image: Global Fish | CC BY-SA 3.0

Arkenberge: Taller Than the Devil's Mountain

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kvikk, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 19...

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Image: Kvikk | CC BY-SA 4.0

Arkenberge: The Park That Never Opened

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dreizung, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ne...

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Image: Dreizung | CC BY-SA 4.0