TU Berlin's Hidden Histories?

The university archives are your best bet, but they're not the only game in town. The Berliner Unterwelten group runs tours of underground bunkers and tunnels all over the city, and some of their guides are retired engineers or historians who've worked on TU Berlin's actual infrastructure projects. They know where the old heating tunnels and wartime shelter systems are, and they're not shy about sharing stories over a beer after a tour. For the secret society angle, try the Landesarchiv Berlin on Eichborndamm. They've got student fraternity records from the 19th century that are way weirder than anything on campus today, stuff about dueling clubs and initiation rituals that got quietly buried.

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you could try the studentenstiftung or the fachschaften for your department, they sometimes have old alumni connections who love to gossip about the weird stuff that went down in the 70s and 80s. also the altbau buildings near the straße des 17. juni have these weird little courtyards and cellars that used to be labs for questionable experiments, the admin hates people poking around there but the caretakers don't care

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Dunno about secret societies, but the TU's own website has a section on building histories that barely anyone reads. Might find something in the old institute journals for geology or physics, those guys got up to weird stuff.

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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the house facades those are often protected as Baudenkmal so nobody's allowed to correct them even if the spelling is outdated.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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