In the latest theme poll – at the bottom of this previous Blog post – the theme garnering the most votes in the end was ‘DT & Shadows’. So that will be this post’s theme. Let’s kick off with an example of shadows that are an almost symmetrical “mirror image” of what’s casting the shadow, in this case a set of fire escape stairs outside a warehouse in the harbour of Riga, Latvia (which is a prime
On my recent trip to northern Germany, which was mainly for visiting friends and family, I nevertheless managed to slot in a visit (on the 1st of May – Labour Day!) to the vast memorial site at the former concentration camp of Neuengamme on the edge of Hamburg.
Far less well known than, say, Dachau or Buchenwald, Neuengamme was still one of the largest camps within the Third Reich, both by area size and by the number of inmates. About
In these increasingly darkening days (both literally as we head into winter, but also in a figurative sense), I give you a reminder of a particularly dark event on this date in earlier times.
On 9 November 1938 Nazi mobs ransacked Jewish businesses and burned down synagogues in Germany and Austria in what then became known as “Kristallnacht” (usually rendered as ‘Night of Broken Glass’ in English), but these days more commonly and more accurately called “Pogromnacht”.
At a time when Jews around the world, including in Germany, are again increasingly targeted by hate and violence, as
This is the theme that in the latest poll, as at the bottom of this post, narrowly came second, beaten by just one vote by DT & Bullet Holes, which became the previous Blog post. As I would have voted for Graffiti myself I then decided to compose and post this now without another poll. But I won’t let themed polls become forgotten again. There’ll be new ones before too long. Promise.
So now to this post’s theme of DT & Graffiti – but first I have to
Around the Easter period I travelled to northern Germany once again. Primarily this was to visit family and to see to some bureaucratic things that needed doing. But I also managed to squeeze in a touch of dark tourism here and there.
Hamburg is the city I was born in and where I grew up (mostly), went to school and studied. Since I left in the mid-1990s I’ve been back numerous times, yet there still remained things I had never managed to slot in before. One thing I had long wanted to do was going back to my former primary school in Hamburg on Kielortallee. When I
Today is 14 February, Valentine’s Day! Last year I marked this date with a post featuring a photo of a dark bas-relief by Norwegian sculptor Gustav Vigeland plus photos of a few more works by the same artist on public display in Frogner Park in Oslo, Norway.
For today I searched through my archives looking for other things that could be related to Valentine’s Day, like hearts, flowers and other symbols of love – but with a dark-tourism-relevant connection, of course. I did
9 November 1938 was a day of infamy, when throughout the Third Reich (by then including Austria) Nazi mobs attacked and humiliated Jews openly, destroyed Jewish businesses and desecrated and burned down numerous synagogues. This is now officially referred to as the November Pogrom(s), but is still commonly also known as “Kristallnacht”, typically rendered in English as “Night of Broken Glass”. The older term, and especially its longer form “Reichskristallnacht”, are now avoided as they
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
This is a date mostly associated with Independence Day in the USA. So I decided to dip into my archive and put a cluster of 4 July posts together here, plus some extras. Note, though, that US Independence is not the only historical event marked on this date – there are also other, and darker, incidents that fell on it, such as the one
In the early hours of this day 109 years ago, 15 April 1912, the RMS Titanic, the then largest ship afloat, sank off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, following a collision with an iceberg at 11.40 p.m on 14 April. A bit over two and a half hours later she went under. Over 1500 people perished, only ca. 700 survived. It was one of the first big disasters to trigger a worldwide
This theme was not decided on by a poll, but just by myself, and the link to today’s significant date should be obvious.
But let’s start at the beginning. So, what kind of stars feature in dark tourism? For one thing there’s the old communist or Soviet five-pointed red star, like these:
Flaktürme, or ‘flak towers’, in Vienna’s Augarten park. In case you don’t know, “Flak” is short for “Flugabwehrkanone”, or ‘anti-aircraft gun’, and these towers were constructed to house batteries of big guns of that type during WWII. They were each complemented by another tower for radar/aiming technology. Hence the main towers were called “Gefechstturm” (‘combat tower’), while the smaller secondary tower was called “Leitturm” (‘directing tower’ or ‘lead tower’). Thus these installations always came in pairs. On the lower floors they additionally provided much needed air-raid-shelter space for civilians. But in their main military purpose,