TU Berlin's Secret Societies?

fwiw the whole "secret societies" thing here is mostly just alumni nostalgia dressed up as mystery. but if you want weird, check out the alte Bibliothek at night during exam season. there's a group that does these "silent discos" in the stacks, except the music is just old lecture recordings on loop. sounds dumb but they take it super seriously, like you have to pass a handshake test that involves a compass and a ruler before they let you in. no idea how they started, prob some prank from the 80s that never died.

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that cousin probably wasn't lying, but it's less "skull and bones" and more "drunk engineers with a shared delusion". there's a thing that resurfaces every couple years called "Die Bruderschaft der Sieben Winkel" supposedly tied to the old math building, but nobody can ever name a member, just a guy who knew a guy. more tangible is the tradition at the Physik department where the senior PhDs make new masters students "defend" their thesis topic in a mock debate at the Kneipe Zur Nolle, loser buys a full keg for the table. that's not secret, but it gets weird when they start quoting old experiments at each other.

if you really want a taste of the weird, get yourself invited to the Sommerfest at the Institut für Luft- und Raumfahrt. they have a "landing challenge" where you have to pilot a paper plane from the top floor of the building into a beer mug, and if you miss, you chug a Maß. by midnight half the professors are involved and it turns into this absurd engineering cult thing. honestly the closest you'll get to ritual without joining a studentenverbindung, which you should avoid anyway since those are a whole different kind of weird with the fencing scars and the "Lebensbund" nonsense.

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You'll get a lot of tall tales, but one thing I've seen with my own eyes is the "Kneipenrallye" the older Fachschaften run every few semesters. It's not secret exactly, but it's invitation only and it's basically a pub crawl where each stop has a task tied to some obscure piece of TU history, like reciting the names of every rector from the 60s or identifying a machine part blindfolded. The initiation bit is that newcomers have to lead the group to the next bar using only a compass and a list of cryptic clues, and if you get lost, the whole round buys the table a shot of "Faxe" which is this awful strong beer they keep in the back of the Kneipe at the corner of Straße des 17. Juni.

The real gatekeeper isn't a password or a robe, it's just knowing someone who's been through it once. My advice is to find the oldest looking person in your institute's common room who still wears a lab coat with patches, they're usually the one who organizes it. Ask them about the "Kanal" incident from the 90s, but do it quietly and after they've had at least one beer, otherwise they'll just smile and change the subject to turbine efficiency.

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Worth noting that Berlin street names have official umlaut and ß rules that trip people up, so a sign showing "Strasse" versus "Straße" is not actually a spelling error, just an older transcription. Same with "ue" versus "ü" (e.g. "Kantstrasse" vs "Kantstraße"), both are considered valid renderings and you'll see the ß version on the blue Schilder and the ss version on older plaques or in databases that predate Unicode. If the difference you're seeing is between those two forms, there's nothing to fix and both are technically correct.

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if the signs u mean are the old enamel ones on the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated. the binding version is whatever is in the Berliner Strassenverzeichnis plus the entry in the Liegenschaftskataster, so if u tell me the street i can point u to the right Bezirksamt Mitte or Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf page. tbh the merged district thing is real but the facade signs are a separate story, theyre basically museum pieces at this point

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honestly thats super common in Charlottenburg, the district offices were merged from older Bezirke and nobody ever fixed all the Schilder. if its a real street you can check the official strassenverzeichnis on berlin.de, that list is what the Burgeramt actually goes by. which street is it? some of the Kaiserdamm / Kantstrasse signs are notorious for this.

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