Time travel: Lost place in the woods

It is fascinating to visit places that were once built and used by humans but then fell victim to decay and oblivion. A walk in the woods was  an adventure in history, a hike through the forest becomes a journey in time. These places tell of times gone by, of other customs and lost empires - like this old holiday home in eastern Germany.

In the old days, when the Deutsche Mark was still hard and Germany was divided, socialism in this place in the Harz showed how great it wanted to be. At that time, high up on a mountain in the low mountain range, the socialist workers' power built their workers a vacation palace according to the taste of the time: made of half-timbered and concrete, with a children's playground made of tubular steel and a lookout tower, from which the ruling class gazed almost to the west could leave.

When the West itself came over, the demand for vacations in the Harz fell dramatically. The holiday paradise of the VEB Seilwerke Rothenburg became an abandoned ruin, the former so pretty restaurant became a dark hole full of rotted leaves. In between there was also a corpse that later turned out to be that of a well-known Hulk-Hogan double from the village of Gernrode very close by.

As a hiking destination, the mountain with the ruins, called the Viktorshöhe, is indispensable, especially in times of pandemic. Like Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, which can no longer be admired, what is no longer visible, what has disappeared and what is slowly disappearing magically attracts visitors. The Treuhand had once resisted all privatization requests until everything was "thundered, smashed, rampaged," as the Friedrichsbrunn mayor later said. Today even the concrete walls have holes. The raw power of capitalism triumphs over the care of the socialist system, which extended to leisure.

The rest is idyll. The wind rushes through the ruins, sunbeams shine in the shards of broken window panes. Moldy curtains blow in the wind and awkward graffiti by the Dortmund youth glow happily from the walls.

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