Faszination des Verlassenen
Jasmin Seidel
As some of you will know, I have always been fascinated by what nowadays are officially called Lost Places.
One of my presents for Christmas 2021 had been "Lost Places in der Region Stuttgart" (Lost Places in the Stuttgart area), which I have reviewed here.
This year in October, I was browsing the stalls at a trade show in Offenburg while O.K. and the village band were performing, and came across this book. I took a business card of the author, whose photos were for sale as large prints at the stall, and then mentioned this book when asked what I wanted for Christmas.
When I arrived at O.K.'s on Christmas Day, we exchanged gifts, and this book was among mine. Over the next couple of days, I had time to read it, and here it is - my last review for 2023, while the other "Lost Places" book was my first review in 2022.
Jasmin Seidel's website is here; her pictures are worth looking at. She was born and raised in a small town roughly 60 km from where O.K. lives, and knows the Black Forest very well. 13 places in the region are introduced each with a bit about their history, followed by photos.
The places range from an abandoned chocolate factory to hotels to a nursery to hospitals to an old farm, in various states of decay. Some are still carefully guarded and seem ready to return to life with little effort, while others have been subjected to so much vandalism they are left almost beyond recognition.
As with the book about the Stuttgart area, some places are well known, while the exact location of others is kept secret so as not to encourage more destruction.
Like the author of the Stuttgart book, Jasmin Seidel has the same attitude towards Lost Places and adheres to the same simple rules: Take nothing but photos, leave nothing but foot prints. Whenever possible, she asks for permission by the current owners or custodians of a place; if no contact can be made, or a place is in such a state that every step inside could be your last, she only takes pictures from the outside.
Her way of researching every place thoroughly appeals to me, as do her photos. I have certainly not browsed this book for the last time.
An abandoned chocolate factory brings many images to mind ...
ReplyDeleteAs a child I liked Five Boys, the chocolate bars from Nestles, with the face
of each boy embossed on every square.
Milk chocolate with roasted almonds was another favourite.
YouTube has films of abandoned houses and hotels, many in Canada.
I wonder if there is an abandoned confectionary plant anywhere ?
Frohes neues Jahr, Meike.
May God bless you and all those you hold dear in 2024, and your readers too.
I raise a glass of Hungarian Tokay in your honour !
Hello Jack, just the other day I thought I‘d not seen you commenting in a while on any of the blogs I visit.
DeleteI don‘t think I know the Five Boys chocolate you mention, although I have grown up near a Nestlé factory myself (mainly producing malt/hickory „coffee“).
Thank you for your good wishes! May 2024 be kind to you and your loved ones, too.
Tokay? Have not had that in decades, I think. Tonight I have my Mum and sister over for a meal including Yorkshire Puds, and we‘ll have Syrah both in the game goulash and in our glasses.
Five Boys was a Fry's product.
DeleteFry's was one of the Quaker chocolate families, the others
being Cadbury and Rowntree.
You can see the Five Boys iconography online.
My confusion with Nestle is easily explained.
I liked Nestle milk chocolate which reminds me of Lindt today.
Slavenka Drakulic remembers how children in Stalinist
states saved their chocolate wrappers from the West,
Communist chocolate being so terrible.
See her memoir, *How We Survived Communism and
Even Laughed*.
As the old joke went, even the Germans could not make
Communism work.
Like Karl Barth I am still a social democrat.
We may be seeing the end of neoliberal economics,
I hope so, but globalisation has left us all in a mess.
And Britain outside the EC is a sad broken place.
Chocolate has a place in Sandra Newman's novel *Julia*
a sequel to George Orwell's *1984* which I am halfway
through.
A sad story of an alternative neo-Stalinist England.
I have always wondered why the other Party elite did
not just shoot Stalin and Beria early on.
Lindt chocolate, especially Lindor, has become much more widespread over the past few years than it used to be. There was just one Lindor when I was a kid, now it comes in dozens of flavours. To be given Lindt chocolate used to be something special, now it has become almost an everyday thing.
DeleteHappy New Year to you and OK and your family, Meike! Hope it is filled with good health and fun adventures!
ReplyDeleteThank you, Ellen, and the same to you amd yours!
Delete