Berlin is also Germany’s capital of morbid beauty. Away from the tourist miles of Hackescher Markt, Alexanderplatz and Kurfürstendamm, there are places where no tourist strays.
The abandoned Badeparadies Blub in the south of the Neukölln district, the long-abandoned locomotive shed in Pankow and the Rüdersdorf animal feed factory just outside the city gates in Brandenburg have one thing in common: they are forgotten places that have been left to decay for years, if not decades are.
Arno Specht visited these ghost places, climbed through the empty halls, through dark rooms and over rusty stairs, even if signs warned against entering. “It was mostly the historical upheaval of 1989/90 that robbed the buildings of their importance,” he writes in the foreword of his book entitled “haunted places“, which was published by Jaron Verlag.
Quiet oases of a growing metropolis
The work has long since become a classic of the now popular genre of “Lost Places” literature. In the new edition of his book, which is limited to Berlin and the immediate vicinity, Specht brings together 14 orphaned places.
These include the US listening post on Teufelsberg, the Ballhaus Riviera in Grünau and the military airfields in Jüterborg and Sperenberg, which were used until the mid-1990s. At that time, the last transport planes took off with Russian troops.
In his book, Specht deliberately avoids precise location information. “On the one hand, visiting many of the forgotten places is not without risk – decades of decay do not make a building any more stable. And on the other hand, these places also live from the peace and solitude,” he writes. “They are quiet oases in a growing metropolis that will probably soon no longer have room for them.”
Also click the photo gallery:
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– This is how bizarre the Soviet ghost houses look today
– When a synagogue becomes a fitness center – in search of Jewish life in Eastern Europe