Staying as we were in the district of Neukölln to the South-East of the city, accommodating many of those affected by the ten year squeeze on Kreuzberg, it’s impossible not to be struck by the expanse of the former city airport Tempelhof that spreads itself out and buffers up on the edges of that quarter. A vital source of food and equipment during the Berlin blockade years of 1948 and 1949, when Soviet forces cut off all channels of supplies to West Berlin, the site has been closed to air traffic since 2008. Now designated parkland, the runways have been taken on by roller-skaters, kite-boarders, dog walkers and cyclists; community gardens have sprung up, and the terminal building itself has been partially utilised as a venue for music, art and fashion. We walked the runway on the night we arrived, against the ten-metre painted arrows and under relentless rain, feeling mischievous and very, very small. The vast building, and foregrounding it, the vast airfield makes it plainly apparent how minute a body seems when measured on an industrial scale. After half an hour we seemingly hadn’t got any closer. It was one of the biggest bulit structures of the 20th Century, nearly a mile long, and with space to land a plane (Hitler’s plane) on its roof. Apparently its ‘lower five levels’, (the mind boggles) have been flooded because they were laid with booby-traps, and even today three remain underwater.
