Willy Wonka Spreepark

On my visit to Spreepark, Berlin — the abandoned amusement park that stands stagnant in its natural but surreal decay — I couldn’t help but feel like the experience was allied with the moral and social constructs of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and The Chocolate Factory. Whilst such a fascinating place to visit with its history, beauty of decay, and evidence of nature superseding something man-made and westernised, the symbolism that was evoked there for me that day, was the race to gain it back from nature and interfere once again with the plot of land it stands on.

Note at the start of the video, a woman hastily climbs onto the still functioning Tea Cup rides and almost falls to the floor, (a well-timed capture I must admit), it’s a subtle example of the haste of all the spoilt children and their parents on Willy Wonka’s tour of the chocolate factory. Like the undisciplined Augustus Gloop who drinks from the chocolate river ultimately falling in, getting sucked up the narrow pipes, or the self-involved Veruca Salt who is chosen as a bad nut by the factory squirrels ending up in the garbage chute, or the impatient and narcissistic Violet Beauregarde, who snatches at a test chewing gum not ready for human consumption and turns into a giant blueberry, or Mike Teavee, smart but not taking care of what he wishes for — he…