all along i thought yelpers just wanna know where the best things are, so why are so many of you…read morecomplaining my reviews are too la-t-da? predictably positive about the predictably upbeat? your humble narrator has feelings, you know. otoh it's nobody's fault but mine. i simply misjudged my audience, failed to detect its need to feed on guilty pleasure that some find on the downslope, if not the backside, of things. assuming all is so, in this review i attempt to go deep. you want downward spiral, i'll be the first to admit you've come to the right place.
a favorite travel site... perhaps you know it... is dark-tourism.com. it purports to feature, rather than griswald family destinations, an assortment of more unusual places you might go to add a touch of noir to your trip. Being nothing if not noir i check this site more often than, say, tripadvisor. but after awhile even these destinations seem predictable, some actually pretty tame. I'd put Alcatraz, for example, in both these groups: yeah it's residents led dark lives but yeah so what, most were dangerous murderers. but if you're of this particular mind, such that would add alcatraz to a bay area vacation you don't need a website to find "dark": anywhere you go all human endeavor slides to the darkside sooner or later. Hoover Dam for example from one vantage is an impressive bit of engineering. but consider that of 96 workers who died building it, 8 never clocked out nor were their bodies found on days when cement was poured. therein you have the makings of... Voila!... dark.
So with that in mind consider eastern germany where i am now. my first trip here just after "the wall" was demolished was to examine certain chemical production sites the state needed to sell to private industry both to simply clear the books as well as to help finance re-building the east (not that that could ever pay for what was ultimately needed). (btw, a few suggestions useful then as well as today: traveling anywhere in eastern europe bring a large maglite. signs are hard to read at night and night always seems to come early here and GPS doesn't know every street in the world.) Anyway back to east Germany where there's more to dark than just unlit streets.
Darktourism uses its "darkometer scale" 1-10. concentration camps for example are obvious 10s. but on my first side trip during some downtime from my work I headed straight for a different kind of dark, a more Machiavellian, downright apocalyptic kind of venue. the location is near the faraway town of Peenemünde, chosen because what was to occur there needed to be so remote it could escape notice by allied aerial photogs long enough for the world's first ballistic missile to be developed.
6 million or more souls destroyed in concentration camps are tragic. but the entirety of human civilization? well face it that's as dark as it gets. I speak of the former missile development site made famous by its crowning achievement: the V2 rocket ("Vengeance weapon 2") forerunner of today's vastly more powerful icbm. as an afterthought, or forethought nomenclature-wise, the engineers also came up with the first drone attack aircraft, the V-1 aka "buzz bomb" or "doodlebug". Dark doesn't really touch this at all, given that these horrific instruments and their designers continued to improve in later years up to our current day, ever-popular ICBM missiles. (complete the tour of this particular milieu: visit los alamos, nm, home to the infamous manhattan project. darkometer 12+. (hey, take a fun sidetrip when you ski taos. los alamos has its own local parajito mtn, lame as it is)
to check on things, me being just up the road in rostock at the mo', I decided to update my experience of Peenemünde. had intervening years of sanitizing by west germans erased significant and telling aspects of the place after the previous landlords vacated the premises? of course. the place is much different today, still worth a visit, but lacking the raw brutality evident before. that the entire, massive cement complex was built by jewish slave labor was downplayed, especially the fact that most were killed when allied bombing raids aimed unfortunately for their barracks instead of the misssile complex. generally the grounds are cleaned up, roads repaved, evidence of soviet presence and continued use of the facility in cold war years to produce missile oxidizer in the "power plant" erased. (gone were the Mig 21 and 25 that had been displayed. (compared with our own, the Mig fighters showed significantly less concern for pilot survival. in this regard they were nonetheless safer than planes flown by japanese kamikaze pilots.)
Still and all, Peenemünde is worth a side trip, easily a darkometer 10 and in the grand scheme of things the darkest of the dark. less for what its science fair-like museum presents today than for the terrible significance the place represents to the world, then and now.
