With Fumiko. I met up with Fumi at Backstube & Café vonLuck which is a pleasant little coffee shop round the corner from Grunewald station. Coffee drunk, we headed back under the station underpasss to where a track called the Neuer Scholdhornweg beads off from a car park at the edge of the woods. After a mile or two this led to another track called the Teufelseechaussee where we took a right to come to another car park. From here a track wound up to a view point on the side of the Teafelberg. The top of the Teufelsberg itself, with its old American listening station left behind from the Cold War, is not publicly accessible. It is Berlin’s highest hill, man made from the rubble of ruined West Berlin after World War II. From here we walked down to the Teufelsee. We met a very naked man off for a dip.
Then we headed through the woods aiming to emerge at the side of the Havel just to the north of the little peninsula of Schildhorn. There are loads of paths and tracks around here few if any of them signposted but keeping an eye on our direction we ended up in the right place. Here we turned south and followed the water’s edge until we were just below the Grunewald Tower where we climbed up the hill to have a look at it. The 55m tower was built in the last years of the nineteenth century to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Kaiser Wilhelm I. In 1916 the frail and elderly Queen Consort of Romania, Elizabeth of Wied, took two and a half hours climbing to the top, dying the following day. From the adjacent car park a track is signposted as leading back to the Teufelsee via the Pechsee. We followed it there and soon picked up the Neuer Schildhornweg back to the Café vonLuck for a quick drink before the train home.
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