‘Urban explorers’ time-travel through Berlin’s lost places

With its deserted bunkers, abandoned barracks and ghostly hospital ruins, Berlin is a magnet for urban explorers who seek out abandoned places and time-travel through the German capital’s Cold War past.

“It’s amazing, I’ve never seen so many people,” said ‘Urbex’ veteran Ciaran Fahey during a visit to an overgrown and graffiti-covered former children’s hospital in what was once communist East Berlin.

Two dozen thrill-seeking visitors – Germans, Russians, Latvians – were gingerly stepping over shattered glass, bricks and piles of rubble in the dilapidated, partially burnt and slightly haunting complex.

Abandoned in 1991, it is nicknamed the “zombie hospital” after one of the hundreds of murals on its cob-webbed corridors and dank former patient wards, which are now occasionally used by partying youths and homeless people.

Like other “lost places,” it is potentially dangerous and officially off limits, meaning visitors trespass as they enter through a hole in the chain link fence while they keep a nervous eye out for authorities.

Berlin city official Eva Henkel said police take a dim view of such urban adventures, that visitors enter illegally and at their own risk.

“If you have any brains at all, you don’t go in there,” she said.

To Urbexers, this is as entic- ing as a holiday brochure, and the hospital is firmly on their Berlin sightseeing map.

Fahey, an Irish-born longtime Berlin resident, knows such lost places better than most, having lovingly photographed and described them in his blog and photo book, both called Abandoned Berlin.

The trend took off after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall opened up a vast hinterland, replete with former Nazi bunkers, Soviet army barracks, shuttered red-brick factories and even an old fun-fair with rides and replica dinosaurs.

As the East German economy collapsed and the country reunified, these places were left to the ravages of weather and time.

Over a quarter-century on, as a property boom has remade the face of the city, the Urbex fashion has caught fire, with ever more explorers searching out ever fewer abandoned places.

The movement is global, with hotspots from Melbourne to Detroit, and sometimes dubbed “roof-and-tunnel hacking.” A Google search for “urbex” nets more than 7 million hits.

“Interest has exploded in recent years, it is becoming more and more popular,” Fahey explained.

The movement’s unspoken code is: take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints.