For much of the twentieth century, Wünsdorf was shaped by military power. South of Berlin, its forests concealed barracks, command buildings, and underground bunkers. During the Second World War, the German Army High Command operated from here; after 1945, the same landscape was taken over by the Soviet military.

Wünsdorf later became the headquarters of Soviet forces in East Germany and one of their largest garrisons outside the Soviet Union. Tens of thousands of soldiers and civilians lived within a closed military city, with its own schools, shops, cultural facilities, and transport links to Moscow.

When Russian forces withdrew in 1994, this immense system abruptly lost its purpose. Bunkers were sealed, buildings emptied, and spaces once defined by command and constant activity fell silent. What remains is a landscape layered with successive regimes of power, where abandoned structures endure after the armies that created them have disappeared.