Beelitz Heilstätten: Nature's Revenge

Main Building Interior. Maddie Eckert, Beelitz Heilstätten 2015

Of all the abandoned buildings dotted around Berlin none receives quite as much attention, both digitally and in conversation, as Beelitz Heilstätten on the outskirts of Berlin. That is no doubt, because this old decrepit, falling down hospital appeals to that rather morbid side to us - here is a place where many people have died.

In fact, people were dying there for nearly 100 years from 1898 till 1994, when the hospital hosted its last patients. This rather morbid, yet understandable, fascination is also ignited further by the knowledge that Hitler and Hoenecker were once treated here - in 1916 and 1990 respectively. The ghosts of these past dictators haunt visitors with their long since silent footsteps through the leafy grounds of this once haven of healthcare.

Maddie Eckert, 2015, Beelitz Heistätten

However, travelling there on a sunny day in May as I did but last week, it was not a haunted horror house that I encountered, but in fact a place so brimming with life that it seems to be bursting out from every corner of the ruined buildings.

Beelitz started life as a sanatorium for those suffering from lung infections during a time when sooty air was about as good as it got in the city centre for many working class people. It was a military hospital during WW1, hosting patients including a rather insignificant corporal by the name of Adolf Hilter - recuperating from a bomb blast wound he sustained at the Somme.

After WW2 the hospital was turned into the largest military hospital in the Soviet Union outside of Moscow. It remained the prized military hospital in GDR Germany until its last patients were turfed into the milieu of the post unification German healthcare system in 1994. Since then it has been left to rot.

Women's Sanatorium. Maddie Eckert, 2015, Beelitz Heilstätten

Investors, as they always seem to, quickly bought the complex - its beautiful wood surroundings and proximity to the capital no doubt adding to its attractions. However, after going bust in 2001 the old hospital never had that corporate revamp that seemed so inevitable back in '94.

So 20 years on, in 2015, it seems that nature has taken the baton of change for this ruin and is shaping the buildings with a uniqueness that only nature can offer. Broken glass and graffiti plastered all over the walls pay homage to vandals of days gone by - but nature is the real victor in the descent of this building into rubble.

Trees, rooted in piles of collapsed stone and concrete, have somehow found enough organic matter to grow out of the middle of roofless rooms. They twist and jerk suddenly out of windows gathering height to reach more sunbathed stretches. The flat roof of the largest building at the back of the complex has now become a forest with a soil depth of up to a metre and countless varieties of trees and plants.

Nature's Revenge. Maddie Eckert, Beelitz Heilstätten, 2015

These are not the manicured additions to nature so often associated with human gardens, but natural reclamation of the space by the green goddess herself. Using her faithful comrades: wind, water, air and sun, nature has grown a forest on a building broken by the annals of human history.

Beelitz has a web presence describing the buildings as echoey glimpses of a rather haunted and dark past - but for me that is not enough. We must also pay homage here to the rebirth of an ecosystem sitting comfortably within 20 years atop these human configured foundations. What, then, is a faded memory for humans, is just a new beginning for an old master of this very old planet.