Deep in the German countryside lies a place where time seems to have stood still since 1990. Where once the raw material for millions of jars of jam was produced, ruins now stand guard over mountains of unused cardboard buckets and mysterious chemicals.
This is the strange story of VEB Ogema – a factory caught between socialist industrial power, shattered dreams of the West, and a legend that comes alive at night in its empty halls.
On the outskirts of the town of Egeln, the ruins of a large industrial complex rise from a young forest. Egeln lies in the Börde, a region in eastern Germany known for its extremely fertile black earth soils and its long tradition of agriculture and food processing. From here, the communist-ruled part of Germany, the GDR, was supplied with raw materials for jam – today, it's haunted.
The fine, odorless powder lies in open sacks on the floor, half-covered with leaves, but still brilliantly white, as if it had just come out of the extractor. On the windowsill stand bottles with the warning label "Highly concentrated citric acid – corrosive," still tightly sealed after more than 30 years, awaiting their use.
Cardboard jam buckets
Matching cardboard jam buckets, like those used in East Germany for large containers of sweets, are stacked in piles, brand new. But the roof over what was once a storage room of the VEB Ogema consists only of individual slats and large holes. The abbreviation "VEB" stands for "Volkseigener Betrieb" – the state-owned legal form for industrial companies in the planned economy of the communist era.
Waiting in Vain
The last remnants of the production of the former staple supplier for East German kitchens wait in vain for collection. The sprawling buildings of the former chemical factory have been abandoned for decades. The steel pipe gate is rusted, the gatehouse with its iron weighbridge has collapsed.
Apart from amateur photographers and fans of the exotic charm of continued decay, hardly anyone ventures onto the 85,000 square meters on the northern edge of Egeln, which until 1990 employed almost 100 people. Through a complex chemical process, they extracted pectin from pressed apples and beets – the main products of the fertile Börde region.
From here, chemistry brought not only "bread, work, and beauty" to the communist-ruled part of Germany, as the propaganda of the time proclaimed, but also the basic ingredient for tens of thousands of households. Ogema in Egeln – which translates roughly as "fruit, vegetables, jam" – was responsible for the gelling agent that transformed fruit from their own harvest into a solid mass.
Not a recession-proof business
A recession-proof business, at least until the end of German division in 1990. After reunification, the Pomos Pectin Works from the West German state of Hesse took over the factory site and the imposing brick buildings.
The change from a state-owned enterprise to a private investor from the West was typical for the period after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A beverage distribution business was added to the juice production, a legacy of which is still evident today in a mountain of colorful beverage crates. Ogema's rail connection, however, was shut down, and the tracks were dismantled.
It was over
Then it was over. The Pomos Works went into liquidation. The Ogema property in Egeln-Nord became a lost place, one of those fascinating abandoned locations where one can witness how nature reclaims land that humankind seemed to have taken from it forever. The former state-owned enterprise was slated to become anything but. Then all sorts of things would happen to it. Plans dashed.
One investor wanted to build a horse slaughterhouse, another a solar power plant. A retirement home and a logistics center were also under discussion. The abandoned factory made headlines when a group of men ended up in court for illegally operating a car dismantling facility in the ruins. Now, silence has returned behind the rusty fence.
The chemical plant lives off its own legend: According to the tale, a former employee haunts the building as a ghost, searching for a chain he supposedly dropped into one of the pectin jars. He is said to roam primarily at night, and sometimes his clinking of jars can be heard as he searches.