Iraq

Iraq’s ‘ghost embassy’ in East Berlin

The former and now abandoned Iraqi embassy to communist East Germany, deserted by its staff after the reunification of Germany, has turned into a dilapidated ‘ghost embassy’ of the long vanished Saddam Hussein era.

The site built in pre-fabricated socialist style in Pankow is now diplomatic no-man’s land. Most of what the Iraq embassy staff left behind in a hurry in 1991 is still there nowadays: worn out sofas, ravaged filing cabinets, rusty telex machines, heaps of embassy files, and even pictures of Saddam Hussein.

The abandoned Iraqi embassy is in many ways a symbol of the story of Berlin and a symbol of the upheaval of world history since the fall of communism.