Interview with 'Abandoned Berlin'

The craziest thing about the vision, Ciarán tells me, is that there wasn’t one.

He’s talking about Abandoned Berlin, the phenomenally successful website he created: a documentation project that has spawned two books and a documentary, and catalogues more than 50 (you guessed it!) abandoned sites around Berlin.

On a walk through Planterwald, 14 years before and not long after his move to Berlin, Ciarán saw his first ‘eintritt verboten’ sign on the well-known Spreepark. The sign stuck in his head, seemed to call to him, but ‘whoever I asked about it, I got the same response: it’s an abandoned amusement park but no one has ever gone in there’.

Eventually the call of the sign grew too loud: he jumped the fence, entered the park, and the adventure began.

He says it was a ‘crazy experience, a magical experience’ - and any visitors to Spreepark’s Abandoned Berlin post can tell you that its country-fleeing, drug-smuggling backstory lives up to these wild expectations.

Armed with photos of a lost world, Ciarán wrote and published a tongue-and-cheek guide to where to find the park, how to get in, and what to bring on a small blog he had running at the time. And there it was: the entry that was to become Abandoned Berlin. He checked out some more locations, migrated the information to a new website and watched in amazement as the project gathered popularity and pace.

From its very beginning, the website has always emphasised that ‘every floorboard that creaks, every curtain that flutters or paint that flakes has a tale begging to be told’. Some sites seem even to actively engage with their own history. The comment section under the post for Teufelsberg - the abandoned cold war spy station out in Grunewald - has lately been peppered with remarks not just from curious tourists but from veterans who worked there in its shady heyday.

This new activity is a reaction to Ciaráns inclusion of the testimonial of a Teufelsberg veteran in the post itself; a recent addition after the man reached out to share his story and describe what it was like to actually work there. A particularly rewarding turn of events, Ciarán points out, when you consider how surprised he was to find any reaction to his posts at all.

He doesn’t miss the nuance, and neither should we, that ‘a lot of that stuff about Teufelsberg is still classified now, even though it’s been abandoned for so long’ - telling of the reluctance of the archive office to hand over some photos and the necessity to clear them for publication.

As well as telling the lost stories of forgotten buildings, Ciarán’s website retains an element of the very first post - a guide on how to get there, what to bring, and which part of broken wall is best to clamber through. Posts are portals, containing not only vivid descriptions of the abandoned locations but clear information on how to see them for yourself.

But this is no call to vandals, nor claim to move property from private to public. Rather, this is an encouragement to visit, engage with and remember sites before they crumble. A recent misunderstanding over a villa out in West Berlin that transpired to belong to a woman’s long-dead grandfather emphasised this point. The villa was ‘bombed in 1943, destroyed’, and Ciarán applied his usual detective work to gather the story of who lived there. Once published, he received an ‘outraged email’ from the woman in question, furious at the publication of a private address online. While he quickly removed the address, Ciarán stuck to his guns about the need to share the story - and his new correspondent quickly understood his motives. She then started to share photos and more details of her grandfather’s life, and together they were able to pull together a detailed, accurate and fascinating history.

In fact, the continuing conversation kept alive by Ciarán’s writing and reader’s engagement defies the idea that history and present are separate at all. Learning more about these places, uncovering their past and relating to it in your present makes you think that ‘the story (n)ever really ended’, that the history is ‘still going on’.

Abandoned exploration changes our perspective on things, too. Humans take things for granted, Ciarán says, we assume things will be there forever - ‘we would look at things differently if we realised how fragile they were’. Going back in time to visit these places while they were still open, he adds, but knowing they would be abandoned - that would be magical.

And would he go back and visit any of them, if given the chance? No question about it - ‘pretty much all of them!’.