The Frei universität was founded in 1948, in a West Berlin at the time without a university, the Humboldt being located in the Soviet zone. Today it is the largest university in Berlin with a huge campus in Dahlem. The FU Anatomical Institute began its first school year in 1949. He moved to Mitte in 2005, leaving this building from the 1930s abandoned, a strange wreck in the middle of a flashy university district.
I admit that natural sciences have never been my strong suit and I hate anything that looks like blood. The visit of this place terrified me in advance and, passing by before an appointment in the corner, I abandoned the idea of its exploration alone. The access didn't seem easy, the building was in the middle of a residential area and I had very little time before my appointment. Moreover, a car had just left the premises and I was afraid that the building would be watched. So it was with my friend F. that we went back there one Saturday morning very early. When we got up at dawn, we wanted to have our tranquillity and walk around the institute before the neighbours woke up.
We arrived in front of the gate and F. immediately found a way in, just passing through an existing hole. The front door was a few metres away, wide open. We entered a vast hall. There was an alcove on the right. F. remained for a long time to machine-gun her with his camera.
I will venture into the right wing. They were small, largely vandalized and grafted laboratories. I came back on my feet to join F and convince him to visit the basement directly, where I suspected that we would find the dissection rooms and the fridge where the bodies had been stored. Indeed, everything that we could have hoped for was there. Once again, F. spent some time photographing, captivated by the atmosphere. I walked away to the large room where the drawers with corpses used to be. Most of them had disappeared but there were still a few that I wouldn't have for nothing to the open world for fear of making a macabre discovery. I slid by an open door that let the sun shine through. Proximity to outdoor life was reassuring, especially when we heard at regular intervals suspicious noises in the building. Certainly water that was dripping down some kind of gutter, or the steps of ghosts. It's hard to tell!
We finally returned to the surface, on the ground floor. The building was organized around a large inner garden. So all you had to do was go straight ahead and you still didn't end up having walked around the building and back to the starting point: large naked rooms with blackboards covered in graffiti, many rooms that look like laboratories, forgotten telephones of all colours, a chemical smell floating in the air....
We were beginning to get used to the atmosphere and were now looking for the main amphitheatre of the institute. It was behind a door of some kind that we discovered it. We all go back to our academic years. The seats with flaps are the same as those of the amphitheatre where I spent so many hours sitting, sometimes interested, sometimes asleep. But the decoration of this amphi is much more colourful and it has not been dusty for a long time. There's still a binder and a phone on the professor's desk.
We continue our visit through the faculty, looking for a classroom that is still in good enough condition to imagine it was one. It is finally in a basement that we discover one, endowed with a blackboard still immaculate graffiti level, but some have left messages there. We would like to do the same and go in search of a chalk. Unfortunately we can't find any, we should have been better prepared for this exploration! It is also in this basement that there are beautiful circular sinks, unattended in such a place. We were in the garden and had seen stairs coming down. If F. hadn't ventured there, we would surely have neglected the exploration of this underground.
We continue to turn in the building, pass by some beautiful wooden shelves and artworks. Then back to square one in the lobby. Neither seen nor known we go out in the open air, under the midday sun that brings us back to life, helped by a late breakfast in a nice café in Dahlem.
