An ideal communist resort

Hotel offers 'East German chic'

East German authenticity does not extend to the bed linen
The Berlin Wall may be long gone but communist East Germany lives on in the form of lovingly maintained Trabant cars and now an old-fashioned hotel.
"Ostel" takes its guests back to some time before 1989 - an era of ugly brown and orange wallpaper, spartan furnishings and Politburo portraits.

The hotel, which opened in Berlin in May, offers guests a choice of rooms in the style of the old eastern bloc.

The "Stasi Suite" is more expensive than the budget "Pioneer Camp".

The hotel is a former East German Plattenbauwohnung - the kind of mass-produced concrete apartment building that came to symbolise life in the communist bloc.


The hotel's exterior is also a reminder of the Soviet bloc
In the reception four clocks are another throwback to the "socialist" camp, showing the time in Moscow, Berlin, Havana and Beijing.

The hotel was the brainchild of two former East German circus performers, Daniel Helbig and Guido Sand.

Their concept of retro chic continues a wave of "Ostalgie" - a sense of nostalgia for some aspects of life in former East Germany, expressed in the cult status of Trabant cars and the hit film Goodbye Lenin.

The hotel founders managed to rescue communist-era furnishings from private homes and the dusty store rooms of furniture dealers.

A display case in the hotel lobby contains East German souvenirs such as plastic egg cups, chocolate GDR-Mark coins and even a rare roll of GDR toilet paper, German media report.

Guests cannot escape the party's watchful gaze, as the hotel also boasts portraits of former Socialist Unity Party leaders, such as General Secretary Erich Honecker and Prime Minister Horst Sindermann.

Denise Levertov +Twins= Double Mint Gum poem

The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

-Denise Levertov