Teufelsberg

Yeah.

So, um, it's a ruin now, and I think a bit of a, a nighttime party spot, but you know the, um, the radar station thing up on Teufelsberg?

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I've, I've been doing quite a bit of work with Teufelsberg, uh, lately, and they, they've got these really strict rules about what they can and can't do-

Right

And I was basically unclothed and with this, this stranger, and we sort of looked at each other, and I, I, it was such a kind of [chuckles] remarkable moment where she was kind of looking at us engaged in our sort of strange [chuckles] arcade mating, mating rituals, and we were sort of looking at her going about her business and just, just really kind of thinking about all of the kind of beings, human and otherwise, who share this space and kind of coexist there.

Um, I think kind of another interesting thing about that site which ultimately prompted the writing of the book is that on the sort of eastern edge of the lake is this large hill called Teufelsberg, and it's actually made up of the firebombed ruins of post-war Berlin.

So after the war, when the city was rubble, a number of, uh, lar- largely number of women actually were tasked with piling up basically the destroyed apartment buildings and banks and stores of Berlin brick by brick into these lorries that were then carted out and piled in this giant mound in the Grunewald beside this lake that was then sodded over and forested over.

And the i- the image of men cruising in the shadow of this great rubble mound of firebombed Berlin was really, it really lodged in my brain and became, I think, kind of the, yeah, the impetus for the novel.