East of Berlin, in the middle of the forest, hidden among red trunks trees, you can find the FH150. This is the codename for MfS-Ferienheim Buchheide, better known as the Stasi Hotel, a recreational facility conceived as a luxury retreat for meritorious employees of the State Security Service of East Germany (the real name in German is, good luck, Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, abbreviated as MfS, but the Service was commonly known as Stasi).
But the Stasi Hotel was never finished. It should have had 180 bedrooms, a spa, a swimming pool, a bar and even a bowling but..guess what? After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the political changes that followed, the project was abandoned (it was supposed to be finished only one year later, in 1990). It was then bought by a Swiss consortium that didn’t do anything about it. So it now lies abandoned in the middle of the woods..to my delight.
It was a cold winter day when I explored it. The sky was grey and patches of snow were covering the ground. Inside, it felt like it was raining, as the snow on the roof was melting and drizzling from every hole of the building.
Three are the things I fell in love with:
The iron rusty structure in the middle of the building - which I honestly don’t know what was for.
The pink room.
“The Shining” graffiti
