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Beyond the Map
The skeletal remains of the Atomic Bomb Dome stand as a solemn reminder of Hiroshima’s past, silhouetted against the sky. Preserved as a UNESCO World Heritage site, this historic structure serves as a powerful symbol of peace and resilience. Photographer: Zion C.
Walking through the shadows of history – inside the landscape of Dark Tourism
Part One
Dr Peter Hohenhaus in conversation with Geoffrey Williams
Briefly …
Dr Peter Hohenhaus has spent nearly two decades at the forefront of dark tourism, documenting the places where history’s shadow falls heaviest. He champions respectful engagement with sites shaped by tragedy, urging travellers to prepare thoughtfully, tread gently, and recognise the complex humanity held within these landscapes. In the first of a two-part conversation with Geoffrey Williams, Peter explores his motivations, his most affecting encounters, and the role dark tourism can play in remembrance and understanding.
Content warning: this feature contains words and images that may be sensitive, distressing, or confronting to some readers. Your discretion is recommended.
Dr Peter Hohenhaus’s fascination with “dark tourism” began long before he encountered the term. Growing up in northern Germany, his childhood weekends were spent exploring places most families would have overlooked, such as disused peat bogs with rusting machinery, quiet corners of Hamburg’s harbour, abandoned houses near the old Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) border, even the eerie, potholed stretches of the then-disused Hamburg–Berlin motorway.
Peter’s early encounters with the Berlin Wall, Cold War ‘ghost stations’, and the ambient fear that shadowed the Reagan-era nuclear standoff left deep impressions, shaped a curiosity that leaned toward the unusual, the forgotten, and the unsettling, rather than beaches and standard holiday delights.
As Peter moved into adolescence and adulthood, that instinct only sharpened. He sought out old docklands, post-industrial landscapes and the overlooked edges of cities, and later, with his partner, he began visiting Holocaust memorial sites and other locations steeped in historical trauma. Together they travelled to places many would consider extreme – Chernobyl, North Korea, Nagorno-Karabakh, missile silos, abandoned airbases, sites of nuclear testing, volcanic zones, and some of the world’s most significant memorials to conflict and catastrophe. The appeal was never morbid curiosity but a desire to understand, to stand where history had left its deepest scars, and to confront the complex emotions such places evoke.
When Peter first encountered the term “dark tourism”, it was less an introduction than a recognition – a name for something he had already been doing for years. While others often recoil at the word “dark”, he associated it with the Gothic music culture he had long embraced, where darkness is aesthetic rather than taboo. Instead of resistance, he felt enthusiasm – a framework, finally, that acknowledged the value of travelling to places shaped by tragedy. Since then, Peter has devoted much of his travel life to exploring such sites, advocating for a broader, more nuanced understanding of dark tourism, and championing the idea that facing history’s shadowed chapters is not only meaningful but necessary.
You’ve described your fascination with places where history has left its mark on the built and natural environment. Has your curiosity evolved from empathy, imagination, or a desire to document what others either overlook or don’t fully understand or appreciate?
The latter mainly. I’ve always been curious about off-the-beaten-track and dark places, but in 2008 when I started my website, it was specifically for the purpose of documenting and promoting such sites that are often not found in the standard guidebooks or only covered very superficially. Likewise on the Internet, as back then there was hardly any useful advice for actual travellers interested in dark tourism – so I wanted to close a gap. Moreover, I wanted to provide better appreciation and understanding of these places. That is primarily the aim of my website.
Was there a specific journey or site that marked the point when dark tourism became your passion?
Not so easy to say. If I had to pick one journey, then it would probably be my first trip to Chernobyl in 2006, which definitely left a mark (as did my return visits in 2015 and 2018). However, it wasn’t until a good few months after that first Chernobyl trip that I actually encountered the term ‘dark tourism’ for the first time in an article in ‘The Guardian’ that was based on an interview with one of the pioneers of academic dark-tourism research.
This piqued my curiosity and I started searching the Internet for more. I found that examples of dark-tourism destinations frequently given were places that I had already been to, including Chernobyl (also North Korea and Robben Island), and it was then that I became aware of the fact that apparently, I had already long been a dark tourist – I just hadn’t known it yet. That is quite common, and I guess that a majority of travellers who undertake what has to be classed as ‘dark tourism’ do so without having ever even heard of the concept, which originated in academia.
Once I had the idea for my website, dark tourism really became my passion and has remained so for the past 18 years. In early 2008 I went on my first self-built, targeted dark-tourism trip to Poland to visit sites connected with WWII and the Holocaust, in particular Auschwitz, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Belzec. And I have been on countless self-organised dark-tourism trips around the world since then.
The abandoned amusement park in Pripyat in northern Ukraine, located within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Photographer: Stephan van de Schootbrugge.
Masks at Middle School N3, Pripyat, within the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Ukraine. Photographer: Mick De Paola.
What has visiting dark tourism destinations taught you about human nature?
Primarily that no matter how much you want to believe in the goodness of people, there is always a potential for evil lurking in human nature, and it never goes away. The common expression “never again” is a nice and noble illusion, when in reality it should rather read “again and again” … just look around at the state of the world today. On the other hand, when dealing with dark tourism you also encounter stories of admirable resilience and courage (in cases of resistance against repression and state terror), and that’s a more encouraging aspect.
Dark tourism can leave travellers emotionally raw. Is there a destination that genuinely shook you, not through shock value, but through its quietness or humanity?
Some destinations have certainly shaken me – definitely through shock in Murambi, the rawest of the Rwandan genocide memorials, but seeing the sheer size of Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time also made quite an impact on me. Quietness was a key factor when I first visited the concentration camp memorial of Majdanek near Lublin in eastern Poland. My visit coincided with a wintry spell, so there was deep snow which made being there even eerier. Firstly, fresh snow can literally muffle sound so it was unusually quiet, secondly it kept other visitors away so that I had most of the vast site all to myself for much of my time there, and thirdly, the snow turned the site almost into a monochrome appearance, like in historical black-and-white photographs.
A mass grave at the Rwandan genocide memorial site at Murambi, Rwanda. Image © Domaine public/CNLG.
As for humanity, here size matters the other way round, in that for me it’s often the little things that have the greatest impact on me. One example was a battered soft-toy teddy bear on display at the Ravensbrück concentration camp memorial. And the story behind it was this: when in 1944 a new transport arrived, including many children, one maybe five-year-old boy dropped this teddy bear and bent down to pick it back up, whereupon an SS guard smashed the boy’s skull in with his rifle and kicked the toy away. A woman inmate had observed the scene from a hiding place and when the new arrivals and the SS had all gone, she rescued the teddy bear and kept it hidden for the rest of her time in Ravensbrück and even took it along with her on the death march when the camp was ‘evacuated’. She kept it after the war too, and after her death her daughter donated the teddy to the Ravensbrück memorial and told its story. Reading this story at the display was heartbreaking.
The prisoner labour station at Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial Site, Germany. Ravensbrück was a concentration camp exclusively for women from 1939 to 1945. Photographer: Norbert Radtke.
Another example I can think of was an enlargement of American photojournalist Joe Donnell’s photo on display at the end of the main exhibition at the Atomic Bomb Museum in Nagasaki, Japan. The photo had been taken in the early aftermath of the atomic bombing and showed a boy, maybe ten years old, standing with a kind of papoose on his back from which a baby’s head was lolling as if asleep. But it was the boy’s dead little brother and he was delivering the infant to a crematory. He was biting his lower lip so hard that it bled. After the baby had been placed on the pyre the boy simply walked away silently. The image of this boy and the baby and the accompanying story shook me up so much that I needed a sit-down in the museum foyer before I could move on.
How do you personally recover or decompress after visiting a site that’s heavy with loss?
When I’m on my field trips I often have quite tight itineraries; I’d visit a site, take a lot of photos to document the visit and then move on to the next site, so there isn’t really time for decompressing or even pondering. At the end of such a dark-tourism-heavy day I then make sure that I let it all just rest, and do something to counterbalance the dark, like going to a nice restaurant for dinner and try not to think so much about the day’s dark experiences.
“At the end of such a dark-tourism-heavy day I then make sure that I let it all just rest, and do something to counterbalance the dark, like going to a nice restaurant for dinner and try not to think so much about the day’s dark experiences.”
When I’m back home and at my desk evaluating all my material and memories and writing up the chapters for my website, then I fully revisit the dark stories involved. And when I need a counterbalance again while dealing with these stories, I can always take a break to decompress. I’ve had cases when I really struggled with the write-up because the places and their stories were so emotionally taxing. Murambi and Treblinka, for instance, took me much longer than other chapters for that reason.
However, I also have to admit that after having visited so many hundreds of dark sites I’ve hardened a bit and no longer get so easily shocked or disturbed, because it’s become so ‘routine’ for me. (Somebody recently likened it to a pathologist getting used to working with corpses. I had never thought of it that way, but that’s actually not such a bad comparison.)
In that sense I am not really representative as a dark tourist anymore. For me it’s a mission and I try to be as efficient as I can in expanding my website. That’s of course very different from a ‘normal’ dark tourism visit by people who don’t engage in dark tourism as often and intensely as I do. They will need more recovery and decompression time and have to find their own ways of doing that best.
The memorial at Treblinka II, Poland, with 17,000 quarry stones symbolising gravestones. The inscriptions identify the places from where Holocaust trains departed, carrying at least 5,000 victims each, and the names of selected ghettos from across occupied Poland. Photographer: Adrian Grycuk.
You emphasise respectful engagement over sensationalism. Have you ever reached a site and decided not to photograph or write about it, and why?
I can’t really think of such a case. Even if I find a dark site is not very well designed/managed and possibly even sensationalist and disrespectful (fortunately that doesn’t happen often), I still feel obliged to document it. I may then criticise it in my website’s relevant chapter, and possibly omit a photo gallery, but I’d still rather have it covered than ignored.
Is it possible for dark tourism to contribute to healing or reconciliation, or do you see it mainly as remembrance?
It is mainly remembrance and educational gain, but sometimes you do get locals expressing gratitude to tourists for visiting and then telling their stories back home. So that could be seen as a healing contribution. I’ve had that when I visited Prekaz in Kosovo (something like the national shrine to the country’s struggle for independence). More recently I’ve also heard it from a fellow traveller who went to Ukraine in 2024 to visit Bucha and Irpin, sites of Russian war crimes. He managed to find a guide, was introduced to relatives of victims, and was apparently made to feel welcome and was thanked for coming. (I would not do something like this myself, as I don’t want to promote travel to active war zones.)
Occasionally, reconciliation is built into particular dark-tourism activities, such as the political walking tours of West Belfast led by members of the two opposing sectarian groups that used to fight each other for decades during “The Troubles” (Republicans/Catholics versus Unionists/Protestants). Now they jointly tell visitors their stories.
The ‘peace line’ or ‘peace wall’ along Cupar Way in Belfast, Northern Ireland, was built to separate nationalist and unionist neighbourhoods. Image © Duke Human Rights Center.
When tragedy is recent, as in sites linked to war or disaster, how long should travellers wait before their curiosity becomes appropriate? How do travellers work within the context of ‘too soon’?
I’m afraid there is no single straightforward answer to this question. It has to be considered on a case-by-case basis and opinions may vary (see above for the case of Bucha and Irpin, which I would have seen as too soon to visit, but others don’t agree). A good gauge is whether there is any local commodification (memorials and exhibitions), then it’s probably OK to go.
I remember that when Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo started recovering after the long siege during the ex-Yugoslav wars in the 1990s, the first attempts at commodifying the recent tragic history for visitors who began travelling there again still met with criticism, and neighbourhoods were divided over the issue. By the time I first visited in 2009, most of the criticism had subsided, though it wasn’t yet gone altogether. A few war-related sites and tours were already fairly well established in the local tourism industry.
When I returned to Sarajevo in April 2025 it had become clear that dark sites were well entrenched and dark tourism was generally embraced like in few other places I could name (Belfast would be another one). About half a dozen additional war- and genocide-themed museums had opened in the interim and there were plenty of dark-themed guided tour offers. It’s now a place where, for once, dark tourism is not niche but part of the tourism mainstream.
Sarajevo Roses are distinctive red, floral-shaped scars in the city's pavement, marking sites where mortar shells killed three or more people during the 1990s Siege of Sarajevo. They symbolise the lives lost, transforming violent impacts into poignant memorials filled with red resin, reminding survivors and visitors of the brutal conflict and honouring the fallen. Photographer: Joana Lacerda.
At the other end of the scale, sometimes even over half a century can pass and tourists are still not openly welcomed. A case in point is Aberfan in south Wales, where in the 1960s, a landslide of coal waste from the local mine destroyed the local primary school and largely wiped out a generation of children. There is a memorial park incorporating the footprint of the destroyed school and a cemetery for the child victims, but there’s no tourist infrastructure at all (no exhibition, cafés, souvenir shops, no nothing). These memorials are seen as for locals. Visiting such a place as an outsider therefore requires respectful behaviour, not drawing attention to oneself and being discreet when taking photos.
Oh, and no selfies! But that’s a rule I’d advise people to observe at sites of tragedy in general. We saw what outrage it caused when unthinking visitors started taking selfies outside the freshly burned-out shell of the Grenfell Tower high-rise apartment block in London shortly after the deadly fire in 2017. The locals and relatives of the victims were not happy with such selfie-takers. Had I been in London around the time, I admit I would have been tempted to take a look at the charred tower block with my own eyes, but I would have made sure to only take a couple of photos discreetly from a distance and most definitely no selfies.
The burnt out remains of the 24-storey Grenfell Tower block in West London, which burnt down in the early hours of 14 June 2017 claiming the lives of around 100 people and making many more homeless. The fire, which was believed to have been caused by a faulty plug on a refrigerator, rapidly spread throughout the building due to the highly combustible nature of the exterior cladding of the tower block. The event was one of the worst losses of life caused by a domestic fire in the UK in living memory and was a national tragedy. Photographer: Alex Donohue.
For solo travellers, the emotional weight of these places can feel magnified. What mental preparation or boundaries would you suggest before visiting?
A lot of dark tourism is actually undertaken in the form of solo travel, and I’ve also done it solo. My general advice is don’t stumble into dark sites unprepared. Do your homework in advance, know what you’re letting yourself in for, and then judge whether or not you can handle it. Really dark tourism is not for everybody. I know people who have a keen interest in and a wide knowledge of the Holocaust but would never visit a concentration camp memorial. So in your preparation ask yourself whether you’ll be emotionally strong enough or if it would shake you up so much that you’d suffer, and if so, then maybe make that your boundary and don’t go. Of course, you need to gain some experience in order to make such judgements, so maybe don’t start with the very darkest.
The ‘darkometer’ ratings for each destination on my website (called ‘dark ratings’ in my book ‘Atlas of Dark Destinations’ on a scale of 1 to 10), are intended to be a rough gauge for this. They do not weigh up tragedies against each other (that misunderstanding has happened), but they are an indication as to how much of the darkness involved is really palpable for tourists today. A memorial monument, even if it commemorates a massive crime (such as the massacres at Babi Yar), will not be as ‘heavy’ an experience as visiting a concentration camp like Auschwitz or Majdanek where there’s a lot of what’s been called ‘place authenticity’. Hence my chapter on Babi Yar is rated 6 while the chapters on Auschwitz and Majdanek are both 10s.
Incidentally, I don’t actually have that many sites with a 10 rating. The most often allocated rating is 3 or 4. The 10-rated, really heavy sites are not all that representative of dark tourism at large, even though they are often adduced as prototypical prime examples. So if you think you may not be ready for the heaviest of dark sites, a 10 or 9 rating can serve as a warning, while a rating of 3 would mean you probably won’t be overwhelmed by the place in question.
Dr Peter Hohenhaus has spent nearly two decades at the forefront of dark tourism, documenting the places where history’s shadow falls heaviest. In the second of a two-part conversation with Geoffrey Williams, Peter shares his insights into personal and psychological safety, balancing introspection and respect for local narratives, and the future for dark tourism destinations.
Content warning: this feature contains words and images that may be sensitive, distressing, or confronting to some readers. Your discretion is recommended.
About the author
Born in Hamburg in northern Germany, Peter grew up with a modest but peaceful childhood that blended city life with frequent weekend adventures to the woods, the coast, the harbour and even the odd peat bog, experiences that quietly nurtured his curiosity about the world. Family travel was simple and budget-friendly, with summers in Denmark and the unforgettable excitement of a childhood trip to Paris that felt like travelling to the far end of the earth. At school he gravitated toward languages, humanities and the arts, while team sports remained his least favourite arena. Music became an early passion, first through the school orchestra, then through rock bands, synthesizers, and increasingly experimental projects. As university studies intensified, music took a back seat and academia stepped forward. After completing an MA and PhD at Hamburg University, Peter spent years lecturing across Britain and continental Europe forging a career shaped by the same curiosity and restlessness sparked during those early family excursions.
You can connect with Peter via his website here, and explore his extraordinary book ‘Atlas of Dark Destinations’ in more detail here.
To purchase your copy of Peter’s book, please follow the most appropriate link for your region.
For our readers in the UK, visit the Laurence King Publishing Ltd website here.
For the rest of the world, you can use the US branch of Laurence King website here,
and you can also order it from Amazon via their website here.
Geoffrey Williams is The Solo Traveller Group’s Founder and Publishing Curator.