Whereas Siemensbahn gave me a feeling of claustrophobic tightness, this next location took my breath away in its awe-inspiring scale.
Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf is situated near an idyllic riverside town, fifty minutes East of city centre. After walking through the town, we crossed an old wooden railway bridge looking over a glistening river, before journeying into the marshy woods.
Surrounded by a lush forest, Rüdersdorf typifies how the journey one must undertake to access these abandoned locations add so much to their aesthetic magnetism. Wandering through the wilds, there's a sense of going under - a stripping of society, familiarity and self - before gaining access to the chthonian underbelly of human civilisation. This journey adds to that sense of "travelling through time", as well as giving these locations a feeling of uncanny familiarity, in contrast to the foreign symbolism of the forest. Littered with the occasional pile of industrial debris, these traces from the past signalled that we were on the right path.
Through the clearing, I was struck by the sheer scale of the chemical factory complex. Composed of over a dozen buildings, Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf is truly massive. I had previously experienced abandoned locations that were sprawling, such as Elstal Olympic Village, and buildings that were massive, such as St Peter's Seminary, Cardross. But none combined the sheer gigantism and expanse that stood in front of me.
Chemiewerk Rüdersdorf opened as a cement factory in 1899, operated by C. O. Wegener. In 1939, it was taken over by Preußag, who produced bauxite, which was used to create aluminium for the war effort. Operations ceased after the war, and in May 1945, the factory was temporarily used by the Red Army as a prisoner of war camp, part of which was reserved for high ranking Nazis, concentration camp commanders and personnel. The camp held over 30,000 prisoners, who dismantled the factory to be shipped back to the Soviet Union as war reparations.
In 1958 the publicly-owned VEB Glühphosphatwerk Rüdersdorf repurposed the empty factory to produce animal feed, specifically magnesium phosphate. In 1972, two more kilns were constructed and later that decade, it was taken over by VEB Kombinat Agrochemie to produce various other agrochemical compounds. The factory ceased operations in 1999, due the economic crisis that followed German unification, and has since remained abandoned.
Since its closure, the abandoned factory has been utilised as a backdrop in notable Hollywood films and other pieces of media. It appears in Enemy at the Gates (2001), The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part I (2014), The Monuments Men (2014). It also features in the music video for Rammstein's Amerika (2004) and in the Netflix series Dark (2017).
I can understand why these ruins have drawn in so many Hollywood productions. Wandering about the factory complex, you imagine it extending into the distance, as though surrounded by the ruins of the apocalypse. Some of the buildings have collapsed, directly confronting you with the precarity of the site.
There is a LOT to explore (it's the only place I explored more than once), so I will try to recount my experience with (relative) brevity. After crawling through one of the many holes in the surrounding fence, we precociously enter one of the smaller buildings. We spot a few other groups nonchalantly exploring the grounds. We bump into security guards, who simply greet us and go along their way, allowing us to let our guard down.
After exploring the multi-levelled first building, which appears to have once been offices and dormitories, we quickly make our way to the central hall. Extending to titanesque heights, it is far more open compared to the first building, creating a powerful sense of vertigo. Mounds of debris form dunes, reminding me of Tarkovsky's Zone of Alienation in Stalker. And though there’s something extremely uncanny about these abandoned streets, you find a great sense of freedom among the fallen rubble. Underneath the building, a large tunnel system extends into pitch darkness. Among these depths, we find a room piled with cans of beer - the concealed hangover from a previous rave.
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