I said to my girlfriend, before we entered the abandoned Iraqi Embassy,
"Just walk into the place as if you own it"
I then quickly follower up with another piece of useful advise,
"act natural, so as not to stand out and draw attention to yourself"
I took the lead, as we strolled up the path towards the entrance of the building, and then I promptly slipped on some mud and fell flat on my ass.
My girlfriend stood there and just looked down on me, as I lay in the mud looking back up at her.
She paused for a second before saying,
"I'll take the lead on this one...."
It’s a weird scene upon entering the former Embassy of Iraq, with broken glass, smashed doors, charred ceilings, and lots of mouldy paper strewn across every floor....
The Iraqi's have left the building.
The Iraqi Embassy was planned and designed in 1974 by a German-Iraqi Architect Group (headed by Horst Bauer).
The building itself was constructed mainly of standardized prefabricated elements (the oh so famous plattenbauten) which were produced by the Berlin based factory Kombinat Ingenieurhochbau Berlin. The buildings surrounding the Iraqi Embassy were designed in a similar fashion and made up the so-called diplomatic district of Pankow as they served as the embassies of France, Italy, Australia and as the residence of the Polish Ambassador to the GDR. They make up a fantastically ugly quintet of 1970s architecture. Interestingly enough, Iraq was the first non-socialist government that recognized the GDR in 1969 under international law.
After the start of the First Gulf War in 1991, the German Government expelled the Iraqi Embassy staff from the country (under no pressure of their Nato counterparts) – leaving the building empty until this day. Of course the Diplomats have since returned, setting up camp in Bonn, then in Zehlendorf and finally moving into a new building in Dahlem in 2010 – but it seems like they are doing everything in their power to avoid the negative karma of the East German Embassy.
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