I first passed through Berlin in the middle of the night. I was on a sleeper train taking me from Amsterdam to Warsaw. It was about 2am when our train slowly crawled through the dark remnants of Hitler's capital. I said, I must return one-day and see it for myself. 6 years later that chance came as I ventured off to see my long lost friend Leonard. What do you want to do in Berlin? He asked. Take to one of your abandoned spaces I said. Leonard had become an avid urban explorer but he declined. Life is too short to visit the same place twice, there is too much to see.
"Some people I know have been talking about an abandoned ballroom once frequented by Nazi officials, it's apparently heavily guarded but there are maps, tips on how to get in. We could go there?
My answer was an emphatic yes!
We took a train to the fringes of Berlin. We tried our best to look German. All we could really do was be silent, perhaps then nobody would clock 3 tourists wandering about an area that only had one highly-illegal attraction. We finally spotted the crumbled complex in the distance, surrounded by barb wire fencing and what were obviously Germanic warning and security sign posts, we happily ignored them and continued to move around in an air of innocence. Security? What security. It was clear there was no actual guards, some dilapidated CCTV cameras hung from the gutters but it was fairly obvious they were fake.
Getting inside was tricky and a little bit dangerous, but we ignored the imposing threats and shuffled along a ledge 15ft up and through a broken window. The inside of the ballroom was dark. Very little light made it through the one window that wasn't boarded up and any small opening or gap didn't provide much for the human eye. However, I knew I could re-open this frozen heartless past with some loooooong exposures.
Would the paint survive, would we see those dark reds and mustard yellows of the 1920/30/40s. We would find out in about 10 minutes. I set the camera up, used my phone light to make sure the leveller was level. Set the aperture to F16, infinity focus and an exposure of 8 mins. We sat and smoked a joint while the camera did it's thing, then boom, the camera became our eyes.
The walls were yellow, still rolled up were dark red curtains and the plaster work on the roof was magnificent. We were high but suddenly the realisation of this place, what it was, who dined here, danced here, plotted here. The worst of the worst. It was a harrowing realisation of how not so distant the past is and how horrible the world could be, yet we were fascinated.
I hope you enjoyed this post. A quick google and you'll find this place, please be careful, we stupidly risked our lives going there.
Love, Cotton.