The swimming pool at the Ihme Center

© Matthias Kothe

Seek and ye shall find

Basically, that’s always been the motto at the Ihme-Zentrum. The massive concrete structure is so winding and confusing in many places that you really need a very good sense of direction to avoid getting lost immediately in the complex, which is now dilapidated in many areas. And where exactly is—or was—the supposed swimming pool? The scavenger hunt begins the moment you enter the Ihme-Zentrum, which extends across multiple levels both upward and downward, shifting the familiar into another dimension: While the underground parking garage is located at street level and the level below, the shopping arcade is on the first floor above and is (or rather, was) accessible via escalators and bridges.

Anyone entering the Ihme Center via Spinnereistraße from the north, across from the three "Three Warm Brothers" at the Linden Combined Heat and Power Plant, finds themselves at the level of the upper parking deck of the underground garage and walks along the narrow sidewalk toward Schwarzer Bär, with a view of the Ihme, straight along an unplastered wall of white sand-lime brick —and right behind it is said to have been the swimming pool where no one ever swam. Allegedly, the ghostly bathhouse served as an archive for Hannover’s municipal utilities in the 1980s. Nothing in the eerie, dark-seeming passageway with its construction fences, bare concrete pillars, and wooden walls suggests any of this today. Really, nothing at all?

© Matthias Kothe

Not here, and not quite: If you walk from the sand-lime brick wall toward the main entrance of the Lee-Gym Martial Arts School, after a few steps you’ll find a narrow spiral staircase on the left leading upward. The final step takes you to the level above the former shopping arcade, which is now dilapidated and completely cordoned off. Amid the desolate emptiness beneath your feet and the small idyll of greenery on the upper level, you can see the former ventilation shafts of the swimming pool below that was never put into operation—recognizable by their yellow-painted ventilation grilles above the dark brown wood paneling. If you look a little closer, you’ll also notice the magnificent view from up there of the city’s rooftops. 

When a plan becomes a utopia

Another open secret of the Ihme Center—which, incidentally, was built on the sites of the Mechanical Weaving Mill (closed in 1961) and the Linden Baking Powder and Bread Factory—is that it is completely invisible: The complex, particularly in the area of Ihmeplatz, was designed in such a way that a subway tunnel for the planned D line of the Üstra light rail system in Hannover could have been built under the foundation at a later date. As is well known, this has not happened to this day, nor has the planned swimming pool been opened, and unfortunately neither has the long-overdue renovation and revitalization of the approximately 285,000-square-meter “city within a city.”