Stasi jail opens doors to guests

The Scotsman ^ | August 20, 2004 | ALLAN HALL

[MadIvan]

GERMANS’ seemingly insatiable desire to relive the hardships of the communist era is about to find a new outlet in a "theme hotel" in the former female political prison of the old Stasi secret police.

The themes on offer to the paying guests at Schloss Hoheneck are pretty much what the Stasi offered to its captives: deprivation, discomfort and "abysmal food".

The towering fortress-style place of incarceration is not dissimilar to the infamous Colditz Castle, where prominent Allied POWs were incarcerated during the Second World War.

For £66 a night Bernhard Freiberger is offering "dissident breaks". No "wellness" or hydro-therapy cures on offer here. Instead the guests - though he prefers to call them inmates - get a hard bed in a damp, dark cell stinking of rot, jailhouse slops to eat and, as an optional extra, a prison uniform.

"It is important to make people feel what happened here," said Mr Freiberger, who plans to renovate an underground chamber where prisoners were suspended waist-deep in frigid water for contravening prison rules.

"You don't understand these things by seeing them in a museum but by living them," he explained.

He claims to have lined up 800 bookings for next month alone - testament to the strange urge that Germans have to experience a state that now only exists in the mind.

Although the hotel will accept American Express cards, it has not found acceptance with Schloss Hoheneck’s former female inmates, who suffered under Soviet Russia’s most hardline communist ally during 40 years of the Cold War.

The formal opening planned for last weekend was cancelled after a group of former political prisoners protested that he was "making money from misery". They view his capitalist conversion of their communist nightmare as "crass exploitation". But he vows to open the doors this weekend regardless.

"He is making fun of our suffering," said Leni Koehler, 77, jailed there by the Red Army in 1950 for helping Russian conscripts escape to the West.

"I had to sleep on a concrete floor while pregnant. I spent three years in there. It was no hotel," Ms Koehler said.

"They would never allow someone to open a hotel in the Buchenwald concentration camp - why should they be allowed to get away with it here?

"The suffering and the misery were the same."

Murderers and other convicts were also imprisoned in Hoheneck, a grim 13th-century castle near the town of Stollberg. The political prisoners suffered as much at their hands as they did from the guards.

Human rights groups are also protesting at Mr Freiberger’s plans but he is unmoved and says the first "inmates" will move in this weekend.

He bought the prison for an undisclosed sum in 2003 and says he also plans a proper four-star hotel and gourmet restaurant in parts of the prison - complete with rooms without bars on the windows.

[MadIvan]

I've heard of "Ostalgie" before, but this is ridiculous.

Regards, Ivan

[MadIvan]

Ping!

[KangarooJacqui]

Lemme guess - next month they're opening Spandau Prison to paying guests.

I knew the Germans had a sick sense of humour, but 66 pounds a night? You have GOT to be kidding me.

Then again, the Deutschmark (or do they all use Euros now?)-to-Aussie Dollar comparison might be a tad more favourable. Just doing the math at 1AUD=38p makes me fall over in shock.