It was midday when I got to an abandoned hospital at the outskirts of Berlin, and therefore the main street running by it was full of traffic. So instead of sneaking through the fence at the front I decided to take a detour via the forest. Little did I know that the entire complex is nowadays surrounded by concrete wall too high to jump over (not so popular artefacts in Berlin anymore, these mauers). But eventually I managed to find a collapsed part – and got in.
The story of Königin-Elisabeth-Krankenhaus is typical for any larger building at the eastern side of Hauptstadt: built during the industrial & economic boom at the beginning of 1900s, ran as a hospital for 35 years or so, taken over by Red Army after the World War II, used first as a military hospital, then as a barrack hospital, and in the end abandoned when the Soviets said goodbye to Berlin after the wall came down. Over 25 years of disuse had left its mark. One of the buildings had been razed to the ground, and modern office block had materialized in its place. But the other hospital ward was still there – though badly in need of treatment.
It was almost like someone had gutted the building, scraped its innards & tossed them away. The original architectural form was thus exposed – now under a thick surface of graffiti.
The same was true with the labyrinthine corridors reaching from one end of the building to another.
One could see that the hospital building had been a real beauty. But it was long time ago that Königin-Elisabeth-Krankenhaus served its last patient, and its beauty had decayed. It won’t probably take long for it to be bulldozed and forgotten. It’s a shame, as the building appeared to carry myriad memories from the tumultuous 20th century in its mutilated carcass.
The place was almost like a living thing, breathing its stories from the past. Windows were its eyes…
…and old, empty pipes its veins, beginning from nowhere and leading to nowhere, but still pulsating.
I felt gloriously desolated in the heart of that huge, hollow building, like someone lost in the belly of a whale. Connection to the outside world was broken, in some cases quite literally.
Lonely, forgotten feeling and the presence of wear and tear of time were mournful, but at the same time somehow elevating – and, as it was said in another disconnected box, also fun.
But loneliness wasn’t complete: from the open (or in most cases missing) windows I could hear the noise from the Deutsch-Russische Festtag going on at the Karlshorst horse racing track. It was somehow pleasant that the two great world powers that had torn each other and the building apart were partying together. Someone had staged a party also inside the hospital.
I climbed higher & higher, and the corridors branched on & on like the trees I saw from the windows.
Only phantoms of forgotten Berliners were sitting at the reception, waiting for the last customer.
Eventually I climbed down the stairs and dropped by in a warehouse or maybe an old garage.
There was nothing much left, only an empty fire extinguisher and plenty of used shadows from GDR.
The lonely zeitung thrown to the dusty concrete floor seemed almost to tell news from yesterday.
Wasteland 