I’m no adrenaline junkie but there is something exciting about exploring abandoned sites: you’re usually trespassing; you don’t know who else might be around (there’s often evidence of vandalism, drugs and neo-Nazis); you don’t know what you’ll find; it’s dangerous so you explore at your own risk – checking floors and ceilings before entering a room and keeping away from any signs of imminent collapse.

Hospital ward, perhaps?

Of course, the real thrill comes from gaining a sense of history from the evidence around you. You slowly piece together what purpose the abandoned building once served and it’s amazing what you can discern.

We had a day off on Monday so we decided to visit Vogelsang. We jumped in the car, headed north out of Berlin and soon found ourselves driving along oak-lined country roads. It was a beautiful day and we had our bikes in the boot/trunk, various drinks and snacks and thankfully some sun cream.

First of all, credit where credit is due: we learned pretty much everything about this place from Abandoned Berlin’s Vogelsang post. The whole Abandoned Berlin site is an incredible resource and I’m hugely grateful to Der Irische Berliner. Thank you.

Very briefly, Vogelsang is a former Soviet Army nuclear missile base. In effect, it’s a small town in a forest. It housed 18,000 people (army, their families and other staff) and included schools, a cinema, a theatre, a hospital, a sports hall and various other recreational facilities. It was a very secretive place and even the East German authorities didn’t know what went on there. The missiles were aimed at key west European targets like London, Paris and Bonn.

It’s not a bomb, right?

The first thing we found was the item in the picture to the right. You never like to jump to conclusions when exploring abandoned sites. They’re interesting enough without making false claims. For this reason, I don’t want to say that this is an unexploded bomb – but it effing looked like one. Needless to say, I didn’t kick it around to check.

Of all the abandoned places I’ve been to, Vogelsang might be my favourite. It was a really hot day and it felt like we had the place to ourselves. We got a strong sense that we were walking around a little bit of the Soviet Union. And that’s as close as I can get to such a significant part of 20th century history.

Lenin monument

The best moments come when you find something identifiable. We were pleased to come across what might’ve been a creche or nursery but even more pleased to find the Soviet monument next to it. There was no mistaking that. Lenin carved in concrete – vandalised, fading and slowly crumbling away.

Even more exciting was the theatre next door. The foyer was particularly stylish with a lovely stairway. The auditorium was huge and much bigger and impressive than I expected.

Perhaps the find of the day was the cinema. We didn’t know that’s what it was at first but there was something special about the building. We nearly rode past (we didn’t have time to look everywhere) but I decided to go back and I’m pleased I did.

Cinema entrance

The largest section of the building had comprehensively collapsed but the entrance building and far end were okay. We looked around inside and wondered whether it was lodgings for higher ranking officers, or something. Then we ventured upstairs and I noticed four small square holes in the wall.

“Oh, that’s the projection room. It’s a cinema!”

We suddenly understood what we’d been looking at. The little room we’d walked past near the entrance was a box office. The concrete panels outside were probably for displaying film posters and screening times.

Cinema film poster board

The collapsed section was the actual cinema bit – where people would sit and wait for the lights to dim. The stage/screen end still stood and there were even some ragged pieces of the curtain that would draw back to reveal a screen – now long gone. I found a stage door at the back of the building and took a look inside.

Hammer and sickle

Some of the floorboards were rotten and had fallen through, but placed on the stage, was a tattered Soviet flag on an old stand. The red flag with the hammer and sickle – torn, rotten and moth eaten. I think the flag was genuine but I doubt it had been in this position since the Soviets left in 1993. Perhaps someone found it nearby recently and decided to place it somewhere more noticeable?

It was an impressive find but not in a way I can easily explain. I’m not particularly pro-USSR but there was just something incredibly evocative about finding the flag. But if you’ve read any of my previous posts, you’ll know I’m a sucker for this kind of stuff.

After finding the flag, we started to hear the sound of heavy machinery nearby. We had read that there were plans to demolish the site and we saw several large piles of twisted and broken concrete. One thing that was absent from our visit were residential buildings. There are now large bare sections of forest where these apartment blocks once stood. We were sorry we couldn’t have seen these but thankful for finding as much as we did.

If you want to see Vogelsang, be quick. I don’t know why they’re destroying the site or what plans there might be but there won’t be much left for very long. I know you can’t preserve everything and that history moves on, but I’ll be sad when it’s gone. It’s a hell of a site, an incredibly evocative place and an unforgettable day.

Update: Thanks to Jekaterina Heinzevna Dallman of Don’t Get me Started for letting me know that the ‘nursery’ has ‘Cafe’ written above the entrance. So, not a nursery/creche after all. She also discreetly pointed out that I’d got my Stalins and Lenins mixed up – how embarrassing…

Click on any of the pictures below to view as a slideshow.

For anyone interested in doing their own exploring, here’s a map of how we understand the site layout (anyone spot the spelling mistake?). The yellow dot is where we parked. As mentioned above the site is being demolished and the remaining buildings are in a state of neglect, disrepair and even collapse. Please take care and explore at your own risk. Oh, and have fun!

Click for Digital Cosmonaut’s original post.

A few weeks ago, Digital Cosmonaut posted this lovely photo of Śródmieście, Warsaw. I recognised it instantly, as I’d taken a very similar shot when I visited Warsaw in 2007. I highly recommend Digital Cosmonaut’s blog, by the way. It’s full of good stuff.

Anyway, seeing the photo gave me strength to make a confession. I’m a fontophile. I love typography and have been interested in it since I was little.

I used to love copying type styles of brands and bands. Nike, for example, was easy to doodle in the back of my school books (when I should’ve been listening to the teacher). Bands like AC/DC and Kiss were easy too. It was different for The Doors – it looks really simple, but the ‘S’ is a real mofo to copy freehand or from memory.

When I played in bands in my teens and early twenties, I was always the one who designed the band logo. And when someone told me about fabric paints, I’d carefully paint our very first (and last) band t-shirts. They were limited edition, obviously. It took me ages. These were pre-digital revolution days.

I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know they were called fonts or typefaces. I just called it ‘lettering’ and came to understand about individual characters, their shapes, the space around them and what you could do with them. I had no idea where they came from or that typography or font design was an art in itself.

When computers came along, it was a joy to be able to choose fonts. I got chance to browse hundreds of them and appreciate them even more. Having said that, I soon installed too many – the drop down font menu became far too long to be useful.

With my first digital camera (the fantastic Pentax Optio S50 – still the best camera I’ve ever owned) – I realised I was taking 300 pictures on a holiday, instead of the old two or three films. With that freedom, I started taking pictures of the things that interested me. So naturally, I photographed typography.

My visits to former Eastern Bloc countries have been the most interesting font field trips. Old signs always retain something of their origins. Eastern Bloc typography seemed to evolve slightly differently to Western countries – and is all the more interesting to me for it.

So, that’s my confession. I’m a fontophile. It’s not obsessive. I don’t have thousands stored on a hard drive. Just a few hundred. I’ve included a selection below – in no particular order. Click on any image for a slideshow.

My DDR T-Shirt poster, 2008

Almost five years ago, 60 or 70 people crammed into Fuel Café Bar in Manchester to watch My DDR T-Shirt. It was the first time the film had ever been screened in public and it was a big deal for me – for two reasons.

Firstly, it had taken me three years to make it. Apart from actual editing time, I had all kinds of technical problems and no money to fix them. I also made a few personal/life changes and there were long periods when I wondered if I’d ever finish the film. It was a massive relief to have a final edit.

Secondly, it was my last night in Manchester – well, as a fella who lived and worked there. I’d been in the same flat for around ten years and I loved it. It was home, but the day after the screening, I left Manchester to start a new job in a new town.

Making My DDR T-Shirt was often a lonely experience. Filmmaking can be that way. It’s intensely solitary – just you, the computer and your project. You can never trust whether that sequence you love is as good as you think. This is why the first screening of a project is so important. It’s absolutely nerve-shredding, but there’s no better way to test your work and gauge the response.

On that night at Fuel in 2008, the room began to fill and eventually overflow. Literally, standing room only. When the film started, one of the biggest thrills was to watch the audience. In the darkened space, faces lit by the light of the DIY screen, people were really watching my film – just like they’d watch any film in a cinema. I don’t know what I expected, but that was amazing.

Of course, many of the audience were friends – perhaps 60% or so. Because I was leaving Manchester the next day, the screening was a moment to reflect on the social network I was part of back then. There were some good friends in the audience. I haven’t kept in touch with them all, but it was great to appreciate them for a moment before I left.

Making a film and making so many friends and aquaintances felt like affirmation of things that were important to me. I was anxious about leaving those people and that life behind, but at least there was a legacy to be proud of. I felt pretty lucky.

In March this year, a friend organised another screening of My DDR T-Shirt, right here in Berlin. Although My DDR T-Shirt has screened in several countries since 2008, it was the first time it had been shown in Germany. The venue was St Gaudy Café in Prenzlaur Berg, similar to Fuel in many ways. And just like the first screening, the room was full.

St Gaudy’s My DDR T-Shirt design (web address should be .co.uk, not .com!)

Watching the film again, I had a chance to reflect on the journey I’d made since leaving Manchester. Ultimately, it was a journey that led me to Berlin.

And just like that first screening, I had chance to take a look at my friends and appreciate them. I’ve met so many people since moving here: from Berlin, elsewhere in Germany and around the world. Lots of nice people – though not all of them were at the screening (this isn’t a passive/aggressive dig at people that didn’t come to watch!).

Although I’ve lived in Berlin over two years, most of the friends had no idea I’d made a film about the GDR. Perhaps I could’ve mentioned it earlier? But I’m not very good at that self-publicising kinda stuff.

~~~

In a creative city like Berlin, cafés and venues like St Gaudy are crucial. They don’t just serve Kaffee und Kuchen, they organise all kinds of activities and events. Hats off to Berlin’s independent café culture. For people like me – who follow that stoopid instinct to make stuff – they offer a platform. Be it a cinema, a stage, a workshop, a performance space, an anything. Thank you St Gaudy Café.

A Nuclear Family film poster

Because the screening went so well, St Gaudy were happy to screen my second full length film, A Nuclear Family, a few weeks later. It was the first ever public screening and just as big a deal as that first Fuel screening in 2008.

Yet again, good friends and nice people came to watch. And again, it was nerve-shredding to present your work for the first time. Hundreds and hundreds of hours have gone in to making A Nuclear Family. The film tells a story that’s pretty rooted in northern England, but the making of it and post-production are pure Berlin. It’s been a big part of my time here. Berlin enabled me to do it and I’ve made some cool friends along the way.

It was great to share such a crucial moment with my Berlin friends. Thank you to everyone who came. You engaged with the film and most importantly, you enjoyed it. It was enormously encouraging and the Q&A/debate at the end was fascinating. It helped me believe I had a project worth showing, and that was fantastic.

I wonder where I’ll be five years after this first screening? Hopefully, I’ll be having as good a time as I am now. But just like the screening at Fuel, I’ll still be in touch with some of the people who were there. Some people slip off your radar, and you off theirs, but that’s life, right? And sometimes, like the screenings I’ve described here, you get chance to step back, take a look at your life and appreciate how lucky you are.

~~~

I’ll be arranging more screenings of A Nuclear Family. If you’re interested, get the latest information on Facebook, Google+ or A Nuclear Family. Or if you want to help organise a screening near you, let’s do it. We need lots of help so if you feel like sharing your skills, contacts and ideas, get in touch.

I may have mis-remembered it but the friend told me to find a place called (I think) Red Cafe on what was (I think) Kastanienallee. It really doesn’t sound like Kastanienallee (even in 2005) but wherever it was, I remember a street with a squatty/alternative feel – lots of crumbly buildings, graffiti and banners hanging from balconies. It looked kinda cool, I have to admit.

Inside the bar, I found my friend and took a seat. I prefer to avoid familiar beer brands when I’m somewhere new and asked what beer I should try. She held up a bottle of Sternburg Export and said, “Just buy Sternburg. It’s as good as the others but cheaper.”

That’s what I did. When the barman took the beer out of the fridge, I had a moment to notice the white on red star on the bottle-top before he whipped it off with his opener. That seemed kinda cool too and it tasted good to me.

Kirst and I with a couple of Sterni’s at the Slowlympics. Photo by Maia Beyrouti (click image for link).

Seven years on, I’m still enjoying Sternburg. You don’t see it on sale in bars anymore but it costs around 45 cents for a 500ml bottle from a supermarket (not including the 8 cent refundable pfand/deposit). So including the deposit, that’s around 42p – and for that kind of money, it’s great.

It’s not the only beer I drink and it’s certainly not the best in the world. I like trying lots of different types and there a loads in Germany. Back in the UK, I’m always happy to see a pub with a selection of real ales. If I’m going have a drink at home, I’ll often buy a few wheat beers, or perhaps a schwarzbier before happily moving on to Sternburg Exports. But sometimes, the wheat beer and schwarzbier are made by Sternburg too.

The thing is, I can’t see anything wrong with drinking Sternburg. Nothing at all. But there’s a stigma to it and I’m suspicious as to why. True – it’s the drink of choice for the city’s drunks. But drunks use the U-Bahn too and I don’t let that affect how I get around.

Classic 2012 meme of a naked Sternburg drinker.

On one fairly big summer night out, I did a Späti run (a trip to the off licence) and bought a bag full of Sternburg Export. Someone in our group mentioned that they don’t drink Sternburg. When I asked why, they came up with a pretty unconvincing answer.

“It tastes okay at first, but after a few, you start to feel really full and a bit sick.”

To me, that just sounded like how it feels to drink beer. They could’ve added “…and it makes you want to wee more often too.”

On another day out with friends, again, I bought Sternburg and a different friend said, “Sternburg? Don’t you want a beer you can actually taste?”

Sternburg bottle label from GDR era.

Say what you like about Sternburg, but nobody can call it tasteless. And believe me I’ve had more than my fair share of tasteless, pissy, fizzy beers at gigs, festivals and events. Sternburg is better than those and it has been brewed according to the Reinheitsgebot (the same German purity laws that all the more prestigious brands abide by) for 190 years. I found just one beer review site that includes Sternburg Export – it scores around 3.3 out of 5. Not amazing, but not many beers score more than four on that particular site and cost/value isn’t part of the rating.

It made me wonder about the Sternburg stigma. All due respect to anyone who doesn’t drink Sternburg for whatever reason (including the friends already referred to) but is it less about taste in terms of flavour and more about taste in terms of fashion? It’s a genuine question. Is it about the quality of the beer or the status of the product?

The Sternburg Brewery in Lützschena, 1882. Image sourced from Sternburg’s website (click image for link).

Sternburg goes back a long way. All the way back to 1278 according to the Sternburg page on Wikipedia. Sternburg properly started in 1822 when it was bought in by Maximillian Speck. A year later, Sternburg was being brewed in the cellar of a castle in Leipzig and selling 300,000 litres per year.

Information sheet for an Interflug’s iL-62. Picture sourced from http://www.interflug.biz.

After WWII and as part of the GDR, Sternburg became a state-owned brewery and exported beer to the Soviet Union and all over the Eastern Bloc. It was also served onboard East Germany’s national airline, Interflug.

After re-unification, Sternburg’s Export and Pilsner varieties were launched and Sternburg became the first East German brewery to achieve EU quality assurance standards (DIN ISO 9002, if you must know). Around this time, Sternburg adopted a no-advertising policy and became a ‘discount’ brand.

Oh, and in 2011, Sternburg became the first German beer in space. Seriously. See below.

GDR era Sternburg beermat.

The no-advertising thing is particularly interesting. Most of us feel like we’re far too sophisticated and intelligent to be too influenced by advertising. But of course, we’re not. I’m subject to it, we all are. So much of what’s considered cool is just what advertising tells us is cool. And companies spend an awful lot of money doing it – money that has to be re-couped somewhere.

So, is this the source of the Sternburg stigma? Is it that we don’t see cool people drinking Sternburg on billboards, TV or via cooler underground advertising avenues? Or is it that the people choosing other beers really do have have more discerning palates than I do?

Either way, I’m going to continue drinking Sternburg Export as my favourite Späti tipple. I’m no beer connoisseur so I’m not going to pay extra for tastes I don’t have.

But finally, I’m grateful to Sternburg for another reason: it goes hand in hand with my Berlin experience and I love it for that. Berlin may not be the be the prettiest city in the world and Sternburg isn’t the best beer, but you don’t need a fortune to enjoy either of them. So, Prost: to Sternburg and Sternburg drinkers everywhere!

—

There are lots of Soviet monuments throughout what was East Germany. And it’s understandable. According to Wikipedia, defeating the Nazis cost 23,400,000 civilian and military Soviet lives – by far the highest number of any single state.

Making ‘heroes’ out of the ‘fallen’ is what everyone does. Soviet sites like Treptower Park are no different and typically, the dead are represented as square-jawed, square-shouldered and heroic figures. But they don’t say much about the actual systems these soldiers were fighting for. If the 20th century was all about clashes of ideologies, it’s good to get a clue of what those ideas were.

Heading back to Berlin, we remembered to turn off the B96. There are two monuments there but the first to catch the eye commemorates the battle for Berlin. It lists numbers of Soviet planes, tanks and troops used in the campaign. It also shows some kind of route, perhaps the route they took to get to the German capital? It’s hard to say – it’s all in Russian.

I could find only one reference to this monument online (in German). Apparently, it marked the entrance of a Red Army barracks and tank repair facility. From a look at Google Maps, it looks like it used to be quite a large site.

Opposite the war memorial is the second a monument. After a few minutes of theorising, we realised it was a monument to something absolutely central to the Soviet Union. And central to every other Eastern Bloc state too – the planned economy.

I’m no economist. I don’t really know how planned economies worked. I should also say that I’m not condoning or criticising any of the former Eastern Bloc dictatorships. The monument just got me thinking about the idea of a planned economy – and for those who know slightly less about them than me, I thought I’d try to explain my understanding of them.

Electricity, oil, gas and coal.

As we’ve seen in recent years, stock markets can fail. The system of money/capital is far from perfect. It’s unpredictable, virtually uncontrollable and it leads to vast inequality. Perhaps above all, it’s amoral. Profit is all that matters.

Planned economies were designed to regain some control, remove uncertainty and provide employment, products and services. It didn’t matter what investors on Wall Street or at the London Stock Exchange did. There was no more boom or bust. Planned economies tried to look at available resources, at what society needed and put everyone to work to produce it.

For many communist or socialist states, planned economies took the form of Five Year Plans. The government set targets for growth – if we need more than our current milk production of 20 billion litres, let’s aim for 40 billion litres in five years. If we need more electricity, let’s build some power stations and pylons – and train enough engineers, technicians and electricians to make them work.

From food to fashion, doctors to dockworkers, toothbrushes to televisions – everything was part of the plan.

Wheat, meat, milk and sugar – the smaller icons being the lower production output of 1985, the larger icons representing the higher ‘planned’ output for 1990.

When you’re in the middle of a euro crisis; when bail out after bail out fails to impress the financial markets; when trillions of pounds, dollars and euros are being spent yet everyone is facing cuts to public services, you can see the appeal of a system that apparently gives everyone employment and certainty for at least the next five years.

In it’s simplest form, this is all that communism was supposed to do: take power from markets and shareholders and give everyone a common goal. No more 1% at the expense of the 99% – everybody owns everything. At least, that’s the idea.

In many ways, it’s strange that a different way of running an economy could cause such uproar and offense in the West – though I realise this wasn’t the only thing about the Soviet Union that upset people.

Lenin’s head, a little worse for wear.

In purely economic terms, I can see why so many people in the West oppose a system that deprives them of profit. It threatens the very fabric of our society. And for those who tell me how virtually bankrupt the Eastern Bloc states were by 1990, I’m sure you’re right. But were they any more bankrupt than Europe’s massively indebted capitalist economies today? And think of the waste. Has there ever been a more wasteful system than capitalism? Seriously, these aren’t rhetorical questions.

Being a left-leaning kinda guy, the basic idea of a planned economy doesn’t sound so scary to me – but I’m also aware of the downsides.

Deciding today what we’ll be doing in five year’s time isn’t the best recipe for innovation. Shortages were common but even if they met the targets, factories weren’t supposed to exceed quotas either. Production was often slowed down, not very competitive or even concealed – there was a lively Black Market.

Taking cars as an example, by the end of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc cars were poor in comparison to many of their western counterparts. Western cars had decades of development in a very competitive market. Love ‘em as I do, a 1989 Trabant was still essentially based on 1950/60s design and technology. As Eastern Bloc production went, you got what you were given and you usually had to wait a long time to get it.

Fashion was a particularly visible example. Don’t get me wrong, fashion and I have never been best mates. It would suit me if everybody wore boilersuits, but by the time the state had instructed factories to produce flared trousers (for example), fashion had already moved on.  There was a cynicism amongst Soviet consumers that if a shop had enough of a certain type of clothing, it was a sure sign that it was out of fashion.

I realised a long time ago that many of my hobbies and interests have been provided for by a market economy. For example, my film My DDR T-Shirt was only possible thanks to market forces making camcorders and flights to Berlin affordable. And just think how far mobile gadget technology has come in five years.

I don’t know when the monument to the planned economy was built, but it was designed to be updated with every new five year plan. All the staples are there: coal, electricity, oil, gas, meat, bread, milk, wheat, sugar, cotton and fertiliser. All with a little white panel for someone to write the period and quantities for each product.

You can still make out the period for  the last five year plan – 1985-1990. Whether they hit the targets or not, the monument looks untouched since then, apart from the occasional vandal. The whole thing stands like a time capsule to an idea that withered and faded away. Like a giant sundial that doesn’t get the sun anymore.

The Soviets made some impressive scientific and technological advances – in space travel, for example. Still, I think it’s hard to imagine a Soviet iPhone – but maybe it’s just as hard to imagine secure employment, subsidised housing and some of the other things that people appreciated about a planned economy.

I love my smartphone but I don’t trust the markets. So, what does that make me?

~~~

BBC filmmaker Adam Curtis made a fascinating documentary about the Soviet economy called The Engineer’s Plot. It includes interviews with the beaurocrats of Gosplan, the Soviet government department in charge of setting prices and production targets. It was part of his Pandora’s Box series and you can download complete episodes for free at Archive.org.

Berlin has more than its fair share of abandoned places. Most are fenced off and boarded up. You often have to trespass to get in but it’s always clear that you’re not the first. You have to go against your normal, law-abiding instincts but Beelitz-Heilstätten is a popular, if unorthodox, attraction.

It’s also a dangerous site and you need to take care. Floorboards are rotting, ceilings are collapsing. One of these days, something is going to fall on someone. For now, I’m willing to break-in – without actually breaking anything. Have no impact, leave no trace.

I feel a little odd writing about Beelitz-Heilstätten. So many people have done it already and I don’t have any new insights to offer. A quick Google of this place will help you find the same handful of stories (see links below for my sources) and some amazing photographs. On the other hand, this blog is supposed to be about my time in Berlin and this was a particularly memorable day – so, “hey,” I thought, “write it up”.

Inside Beelitz-Heilstätten

Click for Beelitz-Heilstätten photo gallery

Beelitz-Heilstätten was built in the 1890s to treat the increasing number of people suffering from tubercolosis. It became a military hospital for the imperial German Army during First World War and was taken over by the Soviets after Second World War.

Click for the Beelitz-Heilstätten photo gallery.

Adolf and Erich

Beelitz-Heilstätten has treated two German dictators – Adolf Hitler and Erich Honecker. Hitler came to Beelitz in 1916 after injuring his leg at the Battle of the Somme. Erich Honecker was treated here for cancer in 1990, shortly after standing down as leader of East Germany.

Adolf Hitler (back row, second right) at Beelitz-Heilstätten, 1916.
(click image for source article)

As I wandered around the enormous hospital complex, and there are around 60 buildings within it, I imagined a young Hitler recuperating in the leafy grounds. Perhaps limping or on crutches. I couldn’t help but wonder what the world would be like if he hadn’t survived WW1.

Beelitz-Heilstätten is spectacularly atmospheric and evocative. Your imagination doesn’t need much encouragement to go off on a tangent. You don’t have to believe in ghosts to say that somewhere is haunted. It just means there’s a strong sense of what went on in the past. By this definition, Beelitz is the most haunted place I’ve ever been to.

Erich Honecker – East German leader, 1971-1989.

There is part of me that feels sorry for Erich Honecker during his time at Beelitz. By then, it was 1990, he had liver cancer and the world had changed beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. He was the former leader of a former country. Instead of being Erich Honecker, he became ‘disgraced head of state, Erich Honecker’.

Honecker left Beeltiz and fled to Moscow in an attempt to escape prosecution. As leader, Honecker was ultimately responsible for East Germany’s border policy and he was to be put on trial for the deaths of 192 GDR citizens who died or were killed while trying to cross the border illegally. The Russians extradited him back to Germany in 1993 but he was deemed unfit for trial on grounds of ill-health. Erich Honecker died later that year in Santiago, Chile.

I’m not saying Honecker was a nice guy or that he deserved anything better in his final years – but 192 deaths? Compare that to thousands of deaths George W. Bush and Tony Blair are ultimately responsible for. And they’re free VIPs. Free to earn millions and travel the world – all under the protection of state-funded security.

Sometimes, history can be so unfair…

Erich Honecker taking a walk in the grounds of Beelitz-Heilstätten, 1990.
(click image for Der Tagespiegel source article)

~~~

Wolfgang Schmidt

Perhaps the most unpleasant and gruesome Beelitz story is that of Wolfgang Schmidt – aka The Beast of Beelitz. He was a serial killer who stalked the area and murdered six people between 1989 and 1990. He always left a calling card of an item of pink lingerie – having also used it to restrain and strangle his victims. In 1990 he attacked the wife and child of a senior Beelitz physician – crushing the child’s head on a tree before gagging the mother, raping and eventually strangling her.

Wolfgang Schmidt – ‘The Beast of Beelitz’ (click image for source article)

Thankfully, Schmidt was caught when he attacked two young female joggers. They were able to over-power him and raise the alarm. What a dreadful story.

~~~

Our visit to Beelitz-Heilstätten was one of the most fascinating things we’ve done in Berlin. It’s a real find but not really a secret anymore – if it ever was.  Perhaps there’s a future for it but it’s hard to see what that could be. Even if some billionaire entrepreneur developed it into a health spa, there aren’t enough de-toxing customers to fill Beelitz-Heilstätten. For now, the place crumbles a bit more each day and the damp seeps a little deeper into the beams, stone and brick work.

As you walk round such prestigious buildings, you realise that without people and without a use, they’re just bricks and mortar. But even as bricks and mortar, it’s hard to grasp how something so beautiful could have such little value.

Click on the image below for Beelitz photo gallery.

Beelitz-Heilstätten photo gallery.

Most of the information above came from the following websites:

http://www.jarrelook.co.uk/Urbex/Beelitz%20Heilstatten/Beelitz-Heilstatten.htm

http://www.opacity.us/site210_beelitz_heilstatten.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beelitz

http://www.forbidden-places.net/urban-exploration-Beelitz-Heilstaetten_Sanatorium#.T7ZlL1JcSSo

Here’s a nicely made, full-length documentary about Beelitz-Heilstätten (in German).

We’re trying to explore as much of Berlin as we can. We’ve covered kilometre after kilometre of pavement, parks, forests, derelict ground, rubble mountain and former death strip. We’ve found ourselves in some strange nooks and crannies – looking up, down and around and wondering what the stories behind them might be.

A few weeks ago we went for a walk around Rehberge and Tegel Airport. The walk took us to the far western end of the airport’s perimeter fence. At the end of the runway, hidden behind a patch of woodland is a big old Boeing 707.

Tegel Airport’s Boeing 707, March 2012

There are lots of old and retired planes used for airport training purposes but this one doesn’t look like any of those. There are no signs of smoke damage or any fire and rescue training facilities nearby. It’s dressed up in 1960s era Lufthansa livery, looks long-forgotten and, like so much of this city, a bit odd.

Boeing 707s date back to that golden age of airliners and passenger jet planes. If you’ve seen black and white photos of Jimi Hendrix or Bob Dylan boarding planes in the 60s, they’re probably getting on board a 707. And if you’ve ever been able to sit through an episode of Pan Am, they’re flying on a 707 too.

They’re before my time but I know 707s from only one source – Peter, Paul and Mary’s version of Early Mornin’ Rain. I think Dylan covered it too but the song was written by Gordon Lightfoot after a watching his friend fly home on a 707. He remained stuck on the ground, drunk and unable to afford the airfare.

Anyway, after a few days, I finally remembered to Google Tegel’s 707. Typically for Berlin, it has a pretty amazing story to tell.

Tegel’s 707 was involved in a famous international hijacking incident involving five planes and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). They became known as the Dawson’s Field hijackings.

Hijacked planes at Dawson’s Airfield, Jordan

Tegel’s 707 was originally made for the Israeli national airline, El Al in 1961. On 6th September 1970, it was flying as El Al flight 219 from Amsterdam when it was hijacked. Three other planes were also hijacked (TWA flight 741 from Frankfurt, Swissair flight 100 from Zurich and Pan Am Flight 93 from Amsterdam).

Our 707 was hijacked by only two terrorists: a South American revolutionary called Patrick Argüello and a woman called Leila Khaled (pictured below). They were supposed to be part of a larger team but their co-hijackers weren’t able to board the plane – so they hijacked Pan Am flight 93 instead.

Leila Khaled

The hijackers, armed with pistols and grenades, made their move and demanded access to the cockpit. When the pilot learned what was happening, he pulled nosedive, or a ‘zero G parabola’. Don’t worry, if you don’t know what this is (I didn’t), here’s what a zero G parabola looks like from inside the plane:

In the chaos that followed, a grenade failed to detonate and Argüello (pictured below) exchanged fire with an Israeli security guard on board. El Al steward, Shlomo Vider, was injured by a stray bullet. Some reports say that Argüello was killed in this exchange, others say that he was shot by the security guard after he’d been restrained, either way, he died at some point during the flight.

Patrick Argüello

Leila Khaled had removed the pin from her grenade but passengers jumped on her and prevented her from detonating it by holding her fists together – and eventually replacing the pin. With the hijack effectively over, the flight was diverted to London Heathrow where Leila Khaled was handed over to the authorities. But soon after, the PFLP hijacked a British BOAC plane and diverted it to Dawson’s Airfield in Jordan. In return for the safe release of the BOAC passengers, Khaled was handed back to the Palestinians.

Passengers of the Swissair and and two Pan Am planes were also released without harm at Dawson’s Airfield. The same can’t be said of the actual planes – they were blown up.

Bang goes the BOAC.

After the hijack

The Tegel 707 continued in service for El Al, then for another Israeli airline called Arkia. In the mid 1980s, Boeing bought it back and gave it to West Berlin in 1987 as part of the city’s 750th birthday celebrations.

Lufthansa had bought its 200th Boeing plane at around that time so, as thank you, Boeing re-painted the Tegel 707 in Lufthansa’s 1960s livery. But as West Berlin airspace was under Allied control in the 1980s, Lufthansa weren’t allowed to fly into Tegel. In fact, no German airline or even a German pilot could fly anything in West Berlin so the plane’s new colours were covered with white stickers and delivered by an American crew at night. By the morning, the stickers were pulled off and Tegel passengers were amazed to see a Lufthansa 707 sitting on the tarmac.

NB. This Allied airspace agreement even applied to West Berlin’s ADAC rescue helicopter (currently outside Berlin’s Fire Service Museum) which was only flown by an American pilot.

Eventually, issues around maintenance costs, a suitable publicly accessible site and vandalism pushed the 707 airside – safer and cheaper but out of any meaningful public view. The plane is occasionally used for evacuation training.

So, that’s the story of Tegel’s hidden 707. Strange, huh? I always feel sad to see something that isn’t being put to its intended use. This even applies to old record players or tennis rackets at a flea market. An old chair looks like it’s dying to be sat on again and to me, Tegel’s 707 looks like it’d would love to be flying people around the globe again. I’m sure there are all kinds of reasons why this will never happen.

The words of Early Mornin’ Rain came into my head when I saw Tegel’s 707. I’ll think of the 707 every time I play that song.

Out on Runway number 9, big 707 set to go.
And I’m stuck here in the grass, where the cold wind blows

…hear the mighty engines roar, see the silver wing on high.
She’s away and westward bound, far above the clouds she’ll fly…

I got loads of information from here, various other sources and the Dawson’s Field hijackings page on Wikipedia.

“…and so young families go to Dresden or Leipzig?”
“Hmmm…or Dusseldorf or Munich…”

We’re busy with freelance work at the moment so taking time off feels a little counter-intuitive. It was only a glance at our calendar (and that ticking sound in our heads) that encouraged us to sieze the day, go camping and see other parts of Germany while here.

So where did we go? Which of Germany’s natural wonders did we head to? Well, none of them, actually. We headed south from Berlin to what was an enormous industrial chunk of East Germany, now called Lausitzer Seenland.

I’d never heard of lignite before. Apparently, it’s brown coal – a softer, inferior fossil fuel to the hard black stuff we’re more familiar with in the UK. They’ve been mining brown coal in the southern part of Brandenburg for a long time but it was the East Germans that turned it into a vast project. After a coking process, it was used in homes and industry throughout the GDR.

As it was such a vital resource, this part of the world became characterised by open cast mines, colossal machinery and the tens of thousands of people required to make it all work.

One of the open-cast mines – this one still working.

Since re-unification, most of the industry has gone and thousands of people have moved out. The little piece of dialogue above is from a conversation I had with a tour guide, a very nice man who used to be an electrical engineer. I was quick to understand that people move out when the jobs dry up – we all have to go where the work is. What my guide was hinting at is that if you’re born in the former GDR, the work isn’t necessarily in the nearest city. It’s in the former FDR.

The area is dotted with sleepy-looking towns and villages. You see lots of signs for pensions/B&Bs as locals do their best to diversify. Many of these places have their own forgotten corners – empty apartment buildings, knackered municipal facilities and disused bus stops. As you drive towards a small town you eventually come to a roundabout with perhaps three or four roads leading from it. Of the exits you can take, there might be one that looks a little less driven – we found ourselves trundling down some of these.

I’ve always found dereliction to be amazingly evocative but even I accept that it’s a niche interest. A town can’t live off the meagre proceeds of dereliction and those who seek it out. So what do you do?

Well, since the turn of the century, Germany has been creating Europe’s largest man-made lake district. They’re filling the open cast mines with water and there are some ambitious plans for tourism, sport and recreation. A tiny percentage of the industrial infrastructure remains and these are being opened as iconic landmarks (like the Lauchhammer Bio Towers ), or attractions like the hugely impressive Besucherbergwerk F60 . As well as the lakes, there are new visitor centres, observation points and almost sci-fi developments of floating homes and lagoons.

Lauchhammer Bio Towers

Perhaps only 25% of Besucherbergwerk F60

Judging by the number of cyclists and roller-bladers we saw, Lausitzer Seenland might just realise these plans but for now the area is in a sort of limbo. I used to work for the tourist board for Manchester. Manchester’s industry was at its most powerful many, many decades ago and yet many people still associate it with dirt and grime. It takes time to for the stigma of industry to turn into a proud legacy.

Having said all this, we found some lovely beaches (some FKK, “Ian! Get Dressed!), pleasant walks, peaceful forests, bio-diversity (we have the mozzie bites to prove it), nice campsites, friendly people, cheap food & drink and clear, quiet roads. We had a cracking weekend.

So, I’m gonna raise a glass and hope that plans for Lausitzer Seenland work out. It would be nice if Germany’s prosperity could spread to areas of the east like this. I just hope they don’t get rid of all the old stuff so that I, and the handful of other dereliction-junkies, still have something to get all misty-eyed about.

Francis Maude was trending on twitter yesterday. I heard he made a notably sickening contribution to Radio 4′s Today Programme. I couldn’t resist. The temptation to hear a Tory embarrass himself was too great. I spent about three minutes with the hook in my mouth – clicking through Today Programme web pages in search of the clip. Then before I found anything, a sense of calm descended, I closed the web pages and got on with some work.

One of the nice things about living over here is the ignorance. I’ve learned a lot about German history but this doesn’t compare to a lifetime of living in Britain. And the more you learn about Britain, and the way power works, the more cynical you become.

Now that I don’t live there anymore, it’s wonderful to watch the news and not see David Cameron’s increasingly podgy-smooth face everyday (or George Osborne’s, or Michael Gove’s or Francis Maude’s, or Nick Clegg’s, or…etc etc). I feel I understand what the Tories are trying to do and it’s a blessing not to witness a largely compliant and complicit media spin, twist and polish it for me.

(For the record, I became equally disgusted by Labour. I’ll never, ever forgive those people, or parliament, for Iraq.)

I’m not suggesting that Germany is free of corruption, or slimy politicians. That’s exactly the point, it’s just nice not to know. The wonderful plagiarism scandal around Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg broke just as we arrived. Before being caught, his talent for projecting self-importance through corny photo-opps was classic – almost Archeresque. I couldn’t understand his spoken language but the body language was universal.

I’m learning little bits about Germany’s federal system. Not much, but I kinda like the idea of it. Especially, as Britain’s democracy is one of the most centralised in Europe. But I just don’t know enough about Germany to understand the system fully. I don’t know how seedy, venal and nepotistic it might be and that’s a welcome break.

I do know that Germany is a republic. That’s a massive boon right there. There are also encouraging places like Tempelhof Park (where, as you probably already know, four square kilometers of closed airport became Europe’s largest public park). I just can’t imagine London letting so much land, in an increasingly popular residential area, go to something as ‘frivolous’ as public space.

This city knows, perhaps better than any other, what happens when politicians lie, create false enemies and apply their ideologies. The scars are everywhere – and they’re deep. Although Berlin may not be the prettiest capital, there’s something beautiful about those scars. They strike a resonant chord for me.

Right now, Berlin feels more like home than the UK. Perhaps this is a strange thing to say for an Englishman abroad? But there’s nothing more alienating than seeing your country represented around the world by the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

So, for now, it’s great to be here – learning what I can, enjoying a different way of life and keeping a safe distance from UK plc.

For another, typically more stylish angle, on this strange feels-like-home phenomenon, check out this nice little post from überlin.

By the way, although I stopped looking for the Francis Maude on Radio 4 clip, twitter handed it to me on a plate while I lay awake this morning. You can listen to it here:

I’ve been surprised by the lasting power of Cold War propaganda and the fixed ideas that people bring to viewing a film. People have pre-conceptions and look for confirmation of these in whatever they see. A ‘good film’ is often one that simply offers the most reassuring confirmation.

If there’s one clear message in My DDR T-Shirt, it’s that it wasn’t all bad in the east and it’s not all good in the west. It has surprised me how some people have failed to get that, all because it’s contrary to their pre-conceptions.

We’ve had a steady stream of visitors since moving to Berlin. We took one visitor for a walk down Karl Marx Allee. S/he was clearly impressed by the scale of (perhaps) East Berlin’s biggest architectural statement.

“I was expecting the East to be all anonymous blocks, faceless buildings and oppressed, downtrodden people.”

His/her tongue was in cheek but it makes an interesting point. It is amazing how successful Cold War propoganda was. Or maybe it still is? For many, east of the Iron Curtain means oppression and dictatorship, west of it means freedom and democracy. Their thinking is as simple, two-dimensional and polarised as that.

You find this mentality not just in visitors, but you find it in places you’d think would know better. The Lonely Planet, for example, is littered with this thinking. Yep, the bible for free-thinking travellers is full of it.

Take Krakow. When describing Nova Huta, it’s all bleak apartments for oppressed workers and the suggestion that this is all that can be expected of communism. In Warsaw, the Palace of Arts & Culture is an unwelcome presence loathed by most Poles as a symbol of Soviet power. The things the Lonely Planet doesn’t like, it attributes to oppressive regimes. But both Krakow and Warsaw also have wonderfully restored old towns. In the devastation of WW2, many of these areas were completely destroyed. The Lonely Planet seems to like these parts of town – the craftsmanship, the attention to detail – but never mentions that it was the same communist regimes that were responsible for rebuilding them.

Take a quick look at slideshow below:

Returning to my Karl Marx Allee visitor, perhaps I should’ve taken him/her to see this area? When s/he set eyes on this city of tower blocks, all the the pre-conceptions of the communist East would’ve run riot: the eradication of the individual, the destruction of self-determination, the degradation of humanity – the whole failed experiment.

Just out of mischief, I would do my best to lead the visitor a down this line of thought. Cold War propaganda was so powerful, I don’t think it would take much encouragement for its latent power to work. It’s hard-wired into the imaginations of post-war generations. It would just kick in, unchallenged. West: good. East: bad.

Of course, I’d wait for the best moment to tell my visitor that the place we’ve been looking at is Märkische Viertel and Cite Foch. And that we weren’t in the former East. We’re in the West – what was once the French Sector.

I don’t get a lot of satisfaction from imagining situations that enable me to make a point. The opposite, actually. You just never think of these things at the time, though, do you?

Of course, if you want to see high-rise in former East Berlin, you can’t do better you could go to Marzahn-Hellersdorf. But you can find similar post war estates all over the world. The biggest housing estate in Europe is  the Aylesbury Estate in London.