Berlin hotel offers "GDR charm"

Communist chic: Berlin hotel offers the GDR experience

By Jacob Comenetz in Berlin
Published: 21 June 2007

The four clocks behind the reception desk of Berlin's new budget hotel, Ostel, show the hour in Moscow, Berlin, Havana, and Beijing. But here, time appears to have stopped some time before 1989, when communism was still entrenched in all four capitals.

The Ostel offers a renewed whiff of life in the former German Democratic Republic, welcoming travellers with original furnishings and portraits of communist leaders adorning the walls.

For as little as €9 (£6) a night, guests can have an experience right out of the hit film Good Bye Lenin!, in which a young man tries to spare his mother the shock of learning of the fall of the Berlin Wall by supplying her with the sparse comforts of life in the GDR after she awakes from a coma.

Like the film, the Ostel represents a broader phenomenon known as Ostalgie, or fascination with life in the former East Germany. Ostalgie, like "Ostel," is a play on the German word for east, ost, and it ranges from films to a new fascination with the Trabant, the tiny East German car.

In an old communist-era building just steps from the East Side Gallery, the longest remaining stretch of the Berlin Wall, the Ostel takes pains to be as authentic as possible. Furnishings, except for mattresses, bed linens, sink and lavatories, are the real thing, dug up by the founders, Daniel Helbig and Guido Sand, from flea markets, friends, family, and eBay.

Books on East German design, revered today by some for its utilitarian funkiness, lie open on a coffee table, and the authentic muted orange and brown tones of the wallpaper and rugs are strangely soothing.

The rooms each have different themes and prices. There are rooms that replicate bedrooms from typical East German apartments, from €38.

At the other end of the scale, the €9-per-bed Pioneer Camp dorm rooms feature two bunkbeds and spartan living conditions evocative of the summer camps of the Free German Youth, the party youth organisation.

Socialist Unity Party functionaries such as general secretary Erich Honecker and prime minister Horst Sindermann peer down from portraits in most rooms, giving the impression that one is under constant surveillance.

Guests at the Ostel need not fear interrogation at "border control", also known as the check-in, proclaims the website. "We had the idea of preserving a bit of GDR culture ... [but] we are not crying for the East German regime," said Mr Helbig, who grew up in East Berlin and experienced its restrictions on freedom of expression and movement first hand.

Mr Helbig and Mr Sand plan on expanding their East German hotel project with a series of eight East German-style vacation apartments near the Ostel.

Liliana Lehmann, 25, an Ostel employee whose early childhood was spent under communism in East Berlin, said the hotel was a break from the bustle of today's capitalist capital. "We try to create a community feeling," she said. "It's a contrast to today's dog-eat-dog world."

The nostalgia vibe appealed to one traveller from the east German city of Rostock, who wrote in the guest book: "Great place and many memories from back then."