The Old School
Visiting the inside of a school as an adult automatically elicits memories from the small world we had as a child and the many classmates we have lost out of sight since then. In an abandoned old school with a long history and many signs of passed times these impressions are even stronger. In September 2017, I had the chance to visit an old historic school in the Uckermark that opened its gates at the "day of the open monument". This special day is organized once a year in September in whole Germany. Among many famous sites it offers also access to some lesser-known locations that are otherwise closed to the public, as it is true for the "Joachimsthal'sche Gymnasium". It was built in 1880 and used as a boarding school until 1956. Since then it was used as a high school for the education of teachers and from 1988 for the education of kindergarteners. The lower floor containing a huge archive is stil full of now useless documents of this last era. Finally the school was closed in 1996 and it is slowly decaying since then. Luckily there's meanwhile an initiative to organize a new international European school that should open its doors in 2021 provided that the fund raisers are sufficiently successful...
