Abandoned Kansai

The Kümmelbacher Hof, an estate with a long history and most recently a nursing home called pro seniore Residenz Neckarblick, was my favorite location back home in Germany. When I explored the massive building complex with my sister Sabine back in 2012 it was already a rather dangerous location – a geocaching friend of mine told me that the abandoned building was overrun by cachers, especially at night, and that neighbors were calling the police on a regular basis whenever they spotted people. Sabine and I were lucky, the Kümmelbacher Hof was not – after being visited by one logged group of cachers per day (!) in average (plus an unknown amount of visitors not logging their caches) and a somewhat serious case of arson on February 17th 2013, the building was finally cleaned out and bricked up in late 2013.
R.I.P., Kümmelbacher Hof!

More than 200 years ago, around 1800 AD, the Kümmelbacher Hof was founded as an agricultural and silvicultural estate in the outskirts of Neckargmünd near Heidelberg – a small town Mark Twain must have passed through while traveling Europe, which he described in his book “A Tramp Abroad”. In 1879 a brewery was founded on the premises and in the early 1920s the mansion there was expanded to a spa hotel… and closed in 1961, with the complex for sale. Three years later, in 1964, the department store group Kaufhof AG bought the Kümmelbacher Hof and turned it into a skill center for executive staff members. In the 1970s, the brewery had been closed too, further reconstruction work was executed – and the Kaufhof AG decided to train staff in Cologne, so the buildings were rented to the vocational promotion center of the Confederation of German Trade Unions (Berufsförderungswerk des Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes), which offered an education to become a geriatric nurse. Soon after that, the Berufsförderungswerk (bfw) rented the former spa area to Pro Seniore, Germany’s biggest private operator of nursing and retirement homes. The pro seniore Residenz Neckarblick operated till 2005, when Pro Seniore owner Hartmut Ostermann as accused of tax evasion, but not convicted – he closed the Residenz Neckarblick immediately and with that pulled the financial carpet from unter the Berufsförderungswerk, which moved to Heidelberg in 2006. In March 2010 a geocacher named “Zaunkönig” posted a cache called “The Shining” at the estate, attracting thousands of fellow geocachers to the abandoned building – a second cache called “The Cache Hunt Project” was added in February 2011… Two years later, on February 17th 2013, a fire caused by arson destroyed parts of the Kümmelbacher Hof. As a result, Pro Seniore emptied the building, bricked up the windows / doors, cleared the savaged park and hired security.

When Sabine and I explored the area in July of 2012, we were as careful as one can be, taking our time to explore the vast area including both the bfw building as well as the Kümmelbacher Hof itself; this article though focuses on the former nursing home, the bfw skill center deserves its own in a couple of weeks / months…
Before we entered the Kümmelbacher Hof, Sabine and I spent about an hour outside, getting a feeling for the huge complex and the surrounding park area – and of course we stumbled across some cache item that deeply disturbed Sabine as she didn’t know about the cache and was worried that a child was abducted there! Luckily I could dispel her concerns, but there were signs of vandalism and we were aware that the police could show up at any moment, called by annoyed local residents, so we tried to feel comfortable with the area before actually entering the main building – through an open window next to the main entrance.
The former nursing home consisted of various wings on three floors plus a leisure area that lead to the medical and administration offices. Most rooms were almost empty, but some were stuffed with mattresses, medical beds or other equipment. Some parts looked like a typical hospital, others felt more like a pension. One of my favorite areas was a former bar with amazing post-war flair, probably renovated in the 1950s or 1960s after Kaufhof took over. The former “Cafè Panorama” had already lost most of its grandiose atmosphere, yet it surprised with a weekly menu from 1999 and the most disgusting placemat possible: comic drawings of two old pigs partying, labelled “Party Sau”; meaning party animal or rather party pig. Also rather unusual was a room with a handwritten “Fäkalienraum” sign, feces room; I assume that’s where all the bedpans and other medical equipment was cleaned.
Without the best part of the building was the lowest floor with the medical room and the director’s office, despite the fact that it reeked of mold. The medical room, or rather medicine room, was pitchblack and against my hope none of the photos turned out to be even decent, but the room was highly interesting as it contained boxes of medicine and medical supplies, like artificial urine (!) and gauze – most likely a problem for Pro Seniore if some controlling authority would have found out as I can’t imagine that it’s legal to stash that stuff and then disappear. The director’s office on the opposite end of a loooooong and gloomy hallway was stuffed with tons of folders, containing all kinds of patient information and financial data about both the clinic and the inpatients! We also found construction plans, handwritten presentation notes with headlines like “strategies for solving problems” and employee memos about things like closing the clinic’s tennis court (that’s how we found out about it – and we checked it out on the way home, though not much was left of it). Urbex heaven, it was like looking 10, 20, 30 years into the past.
Even back in 2012 the Kümmelbacher Hof had quite a bit of a graffiti problem. You can see the extent in the videos, but I don’t want to offer those vandals an encouraging platform, so I won’t post any specific graffitis as stills, especially since most of them were really bad anyway. Well, except for one. And coincidentally there is one thing I hate more than graffiti on abandoned buildings… which is the hypocritical way modern Japan deals with its role in World War 2. Before you call me Walter Sobchak – the graffiti I saw in one of the rooms resembled Shy Guy (of Super Mario fame) spraying “Unit 731” at a wall! I’m sorry, but that’s exactly my kind of humor, especially since the reference is even more obscure in Germany, where probably only a few hundred people have ever heard of Unit 731. Just in case you are with the majority who isn’t familiar with this disgrace for all humanity: Unit 731 was a top secret biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that killed several thousand people in human experiments (including vivisections without anesthesia) and up to half a million Chinese in field experiments. If you have a strong stomach, *read about Unit 731 on Wikipedia*.

Overall the Nursing Home Residenz Neckarblick was an amazing location, definitely my favorite one in Germany, easily Top 20 overall so far. The area was vast, the building complex was huge and there was so much to see, to explore, to discover. When we drove up to the Kümmelbacher Hof I expected to stay maybe an hour or two, in the end we spent almost six hours on the premises. When we left, Sabine and I both hoped that Pro Seniore would re-open the Residenz Neckarblick one day, so when I found out earlier this month that it suffered from arson and was bricked up, I honestly felt sorry that the urbex world lost such a great location!
For a somewhat similar institution in Japan, check out my articles about the *Abandoned Tuberculosis Hospital For Children*.

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