Visited with Priority7 (Whom I credit for the site) and a couple of non-forum members.
Context:
A lake, a forest. Hidden and dilapidated here stands Joseph Goebbels' country estate and a few meters further on is the GDR cadet training centre of the FDJ (German Youth Movement) – That’s what we’ll be looking at today.
Most of the buildings here have been empty since 1999, 25 years ago. The entire area on the western side of the lake has been a listed building since 1996. This includes three buildings from 1939.
It is a "place of propaganda": historically contaminated, poisoned and obviously hated, a silent place of history, a place of perpetrators and twisters of words. Two dictatorships were controlled and ideologically supported here, for more than 50 years out of the public eye
History:
First, the city of Berlin gave Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels a weekend house for life in the Berlin recreation area for his birthday. Then the film company UFA built him another comfortable villa on the small forest lake. It was on a par with Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg. The forest around it was heavily guarded.
In 1946, the youth organization Free German Youth (FDJ for short) took over his villa as a training center for its junior officials.New Stalinist buildings were added. Isolated in the forest, liberation fighters and left-wing activists from the western world were also supposed to hear the teachings of Marx and Lenin. The GDR mass organization FDJ paid for everything, even the cigarettes
The Explore:
The area is outstandingly pretty. Our hire car bobbed happily along the road around the edge of the lake – it was a summers evening and loads of people were wild swimming, families were having BBQs and picnics at the waters edge. It seems almost impossible to contemplate the evilness that regularly drove this road 80 years ago.
We arrived straight from the airport. I had decided to travel dressed smartly, so looked for a place to pull up and get changed. We pulled onto the drive and was surprised to see a dirty looking man sat there on an old deckchair, with a little BBQ going. I thought he waved us through and was a friendly German out for a BBQ. However my sharper eyed collegues pointed out that that his wave was actually accusing me of participating in a less than wholesome pastime. He actually became even more agitated at our presence and the wave turned quite aerobic, so we nicknamed him “Mr Motivator”
In the early 1980s, more than a dozen interpreter booths were installed above the hall. This created one of the largest simultaneous interpreting systems in the GDR. The listeners found connections for their headphones in the armrests of the 525 folding chairs in the hall. In 1981
Today, the lecture hall has become a "chamber of horrors" for Müller. "I don't like going there anymore because the damage to the equipment is irreparable," he says. "It hurts." The parquet floors have lifted in many places due to the water dripping in and have become tripping hazards. The folding chairs are warped and ruined. Dust and crumbling plaster cover all surfaces. The technology from the interpreter booths has been dismantled or stolen.
Future:
“For 15 years, Berlin has wanted to sell a huge property on the Lake. This is where the GDR once trained its young cadets. But before that, Joseph Goebbels used the idyllic area. This makes a sale impossible, says the state.”
The site is maintained by a single (very talented) caretaker and all-round craftsman, Herr Müller. He explains that he does so much work here that nobody sees (we did, lol)
In the summer, he is mainly busy keeping the beautiful line of sight from the main building to the cafeteria, which is around 100 meters away, clear. "So much wild growth here. Nature is reclaiming everything” If he had one wish, "a lot of people would have to move in here very quickly and revitalize the area,"
I love his sentiment. However the local estate agent notes that it’s not that easy:
"We cannot sell it - because of its problematic history," says Birgit Möhring, managing director of Berliner Immobilienmanagement GmbH (BIM), responsible for the state-owned land and real estate.
The state of Berlin fears that neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist groups could secretly acquire the site and turn it into a place of pilgrimage. "Our problem is that if we sell it, we can only fix the use for a maximum of ten years," says Möhring, describing the predicament. "We cannot permanently influence who uses the property. And that is a concern for us."
Thanks for reading.
Context:
A lake, a forest. Hidden and dilapidated here stands Joseph Goebbels' country estate and a few meters further on is the GDR cadet training centre of the FDJ (German Youth Movement) – That’s what we’ll be looking at today.
Most of the buildings here have been empty since 1999, 25 years ago. The entire area on the western side of the lake has been a listed building since 1996. This includes three buildings from 1939.
It is a "place of propaganda": historically contaminated, poisoned and obviously hated, a silent place of history, a place of perpetrators and twisters of words. Two dictatorships were controlled and ideologically supported here, for more than 50 years out of the public eye
History:
First, the city of Berlin gave Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels a weekend house for life in the Berlin recreation area for his birthday. Then the film company UFA built him another comfortable villa on the small forest lake. It was on a par with Hitler's Berghof on the Obersalzberg. The forest around it was heavily guarded.
In 1946, the youth organization Free German Youth (FDJ for short) took over his villa as a training center for its junior officials.New Stalinist buildings were added. Isolated in the forest, liberation fighters and left-wing activists from the western world were also supposed to hear the teachings of Marx and Lenin. The GDR mass organization FDJ paid for everything, even the cigarettes
The Explore:
The area is outstandingly pretty. Our hire car bobbed happily along the road around the edge of the lake – it was a summers evening and loads of people were wild swimming, families were having BBQs and picnics at the waters edge. It seems almost impossible to contemplate the evilness that regularly drove this road 80 years ago.
We arrived straight from the airport. I had decided to travel dressed smartly, so looked for a place to pull up and get changed. We pulled onto the drive and was surprised to see a dirty looking man sat there on an old deckchair, with a little BBQ going. I thought he waved us through and was a friendly German out for a BBQ. However my sharper eyed collegues pointed out that that his wave was actually accusing me of participating in a less than wholesome pastime. He actually became even more agitated at our presence and the wave turned quite aerobic, so we nicknamed him “Mr Motivator”
In the early 1980s, more than a dozen interpreter booths were installed above the hall. This created one of the largest simultaneous interpreting systems in the GDR. The listeners found connections for their headphones in the armrests of the 525 folding chairs in the hall. In 1981
Today, the lecture hall has become a "chamber of horrors" for Müller. "I don't like going there anymore because the damage to the equipment is irreparable," he says. "It hurts." The parquet floors have lifted in many places due to the water dripping in and have become tripping hazards. The folding chairs are warped and ruined. Dust and crumbling plaster cover all surfaces. The technology from the interpreter booths has been dismantled or stolen.
Future:
“For 15 years, Berlin has wanted to sell a huge property on the Lake. This is where the GDR once trained its young cadets. But before that, Joseph Goebbels used the idyllic area. This makes a sale impossible, says the state.”
The site is maintained by a single (very talented) caretaker and all-round craftsman, Herr Müller. He explains that he does so much work here that nobody sees (we did, lol)
In the summer, he is mainly busy keeping the beautiful line of sight from the main building to the cafeteria, which is around 100 meters away, clear. "So much wild growth here. Nature is reclaiming everything” If he had one wish, "a lot of people would have to move in here very quickly and revitalize the area,"
I love his sentiment. However the local estate agent notes that it’s not that easy:
"We cannot sell it - because of its problematic history," says Birgit Möhring, managing director of Berliner Immobilienmanagement GmbH (BIM), responsible for the state-owned land and real estate.
The state of Berlin fears that neo-Nazis or other right-wing extremist groups could secretly acquire the site and turn it into a place of pilgrimage. "Our problem is that if we sell it, we can only fix the use for a maximum of ten years," says Möhring, describing the predicament. "We cannot permanently influence who uses the property. And that is a concern for us."
Thanks for reading.
