Dark Tourism BLOG
This page is intended to provide a more flexible and also more interactive element to dark-tourism.com, which is otherwise more static (more like an encyclopedia). The idea came about after the DT page I used to curate on Facebook was suddenly shut down by the company (full story here). So I’m continuing here – with regular blog posts, either featuring particular dark-tourism destinations or marking specific days in dark history and sometimes reacting to current affairs that are in some way relevant to this site’s topic.
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Personal and National Celebrations
So here it is, the big day, the date when my book (photo of the title page above) is finally launched globally. In Germany it had already been available for a few weeks. But now that it’s out internationally it’s cause for celebration!
It so happens that this date is also Austria’s “Nationalfeiertag”, literally ‘National Celebration Day’. I could say: that’s nice, so the whole nation is celebrating with me. But
The 100th Blog Post!
Another reason to celebrate. With this one there are now exactly one hundred posts on this blog!
Now, how to mark this? When it was the 1st anniversary, exactly one year after I started the blog, I selected 12 photos (one for every month) for this post marking that watershed and asked for votes as to readers’ single most favourite. This also turned into the most popular post of them all so far, going by interaction, i.e. primarily by the number of comments.
So what are my favourite photos since then?
Dark Tourism & Nuclear Power Plants
And here comes the fourth and final theme from our most recent poll. In my archives I don’t actually have photos of that many nuclear power plants (NPPs), but included are some of the historically most significant ones – and the darkest! Because of the security issues revolving around the nuclear industry, often photos are only possible from a distance, more or less zoomed in, but I also have some closer up and even a couple of interior
Dark Tourism & Reflections
And here comes the third of the four themes of our most recent poll (which didn’t have a winner, hence all four are fielded). So now for reflections – and I mean that literally, mostly, though a little bit of reflecting in the figurative sense will also feature. But this is primarily a visual blog post.
I like photographing reflections! I’m always on the lookout for reflections wherever I travel. Hence I have loads of such photos that accumulated over the years. So the
Dark Tourism & Furniture
And here comes the second of the themed posts (after last week’s “DT & hands”) that featured in our most recent poll, which didn’t have a clear result. So for this time I’ve picked furniture.
The photo below was taken at the DDR-Museum (‘GDR museum’) in Berlin and shows a reconstruction of the furnishings of a typical East German 1970s/early 80s living room – note in particular the
31 Years of German Reunification
Today is the 31st anniversary of the official reunification of Germany on 3 October 1990. I already marked this last year on the 30th anniversary with a special post that recycled four posts from my purged Facebook DT page taken from my archived version. Today I won’t repeat that. Instead I’ll give you a few photos from different corners of Germany that illustrate the diversity of the country and its dark-tourism portfolio.
I’ll begin with