Birkenkopf (Monte Scherbelino)

About this place

Birkenkopf rises five hundred and eleven metres above sea level on the western rim of inner Stuttgart, the highest point inside the city. About forty of those metres are not natural. Between 1953 and 1957 the city hauled roughly one and a half million cubic metres of bombed masonry up here and tipped it onto the summit. Fifty-three air raids had erased a large share of Stuttgart, the debris had to go somewhere, and it became a mountain. The rubble was never levelled or covered over. At the top the cut stone still lies loose and readable piece by piece: window surrounds, carved cornices, door lintels, blocks of sandstone that still carry the chisel marks of the mason who dressed them before the war. A plain cross stands among them beside a plaque saying that this hill was raised from the ruins of the city as a memorial to the dead and a warning to the living. Trees have grown up the flanks over the decades, but the crown of the summit was deliberately left as bare stone. Getting up is not a stroll: twenty to thirty minutes of steady climbing from the nearest stop, and the final stretch is loose rubble rather than paved path, so shoes with grip are a necessity and not a luxury. The reward is the widest free view in Stuttgart, the whole basin beneath you, the television tower on its southern ridge, and on clear days the line of the Swabian Alb. It is open at any hour and costs nothing, and it is busiest on Sunday afternoons and at sunset. There is no cafe here, no kiosk, and no shelter from rain.