You can check out any time you like, but they can never leave.
Hello? Room service? There’s a hissing sound coming from my chandelier!
North Korea is converting part of its embassy in Berlin into a hostel to earn foreign currency for Kim Jong Il’s cash-strapped regime, Japan’s Sankei newspaper reported, citing diplomats it didn’t identify. The Cityhostel Berlin will initially have 37 rooms at a charge of 20 Euros ($31) per head a night, Sankei reported. A reception with a grand piano is being built and a Korean restaurant is due to open in May, the newspaper said. [Bloomberg, Hideo Takayama]
The North Koreans built their 88,000 square foot embassy in East Berlin in the 1970’s, back when they needed all that square footage to write five year plans for embracing the world in gray vinalon, concertina music, and concertina wire. See if you can spot any North Koreans among the fedoras, fatigues, khaffiyas, and trenchcoats of the rogues’ gallery on this reviewing stand (at around 1:50):
Or here, between Ceaucescu and Arafat. (On a side note, that video, circa October 1989, leaves no room for any rational person to question the unassailable stability of East Germany, where health care and education are universal and free. Let us accept reality and abandon our neocon collapsist fantasies. Perhaps we’ll find some way to reach an accommodation with Honecker after a few decades of aid and cultural exchanges.)
More recently, however, the volume of brotherly comradeship with the Stasi has dropped off, and the North Koreans found that procuring sensitive technology and — of course — espionage still didn’t take up 88,000 square feet. Suddenly, 70% of the embassy’s space became redundant, so the North Koreans leased out the rest to corporate tenants, including a design company and a “psychology association,” thus proving that 40 years of dour Teutonic Leninism didn’t do lasting harm to the German sense of irony. (Can you imagine a work environment so grim that even the sort of people who call this light entertainment find it depressing?)
Plans for the new North Korean hotel call for “a reception with a grand piano” and a Korean restaurant, which should open in May, just in time for the famine back home. The North Koreans are said to be just two diplomatic pouches away from having all those renovations paid for.
It has long been rumored that North Korean embassies are expected to finance themselves, and North Korean diplomats have found some creative ways of doing that (file opens in pdf). This may be the first time I’ve seen it done legally, at least as far as we know.
You can see more photos of the embassy at this Flickr page.
The video clip is from the October 1989 parade for the 40th, and last, anniversary of the GDR, an anniversary that was to have crowned Honnecker’s career. A remarkably dull parade when you watch the entire video. Not sure why this clip is in black and white: Perhaps that was intended to show the “grayness†of life in the worker’s paradise?
I noticed that Yasser Arafat and Daniel Ortega were in the front row among the “fedoras and trench coats.†Are the North Korean delegates to Ortega’s left and in the second row?
Many Berlin hotels are rather pricey, regardless of the rate of exchange. It will be interesting to see if tourists will stay at the “Cityhostel Berlin†to save money, or just for the novelty. I bet this is one Berlin hotel where everyone will pay their bill on time. Incidentally, I think a catchier name like the “Juche Inn†or the “Songun Palace†will attract more tourists.
You can find a few color versions of part of this footage, but most of the ones on YouTube are B/W. I suspect East Germany was probably still using B/W back in the late 80’s. I went through the former East Bloc in 1990, less than a year later, and found that no color 35mm film was available in the largest department store in Prague. (Prague photographs better in black and white anyway.)
I can’t verify that those are North Koreans standing next to Ortega, but that’s my guess.
You have to marvel at this footage, taken a month before the Wall fell. The system seems completely stable, but by then, East Germans were already crowding into foreign embassies in Budapest and Prague and fleeing through Hungary into Austria. When systems like these collapse, it can happen very quickly.
“When systems like these collapse, it can happen very quickly.â€
Like many who post on your blog, I worry that the world will be no more prepared for North Korea’s collapse than it was prepared for the collapse of Communism in the USSR and the East Bloc countries. Perhaps even less so, in light of the gravity of the situation in North Korea.
The irony of the collapse of the DDR when it appeared (in this parade, at least) to be at its zenith reminds me of the German comedy/drama Goodbye Lenin! Having said that, when North Korea collapses I doubt many will look back on the Kim Jong Il era or any “transition†period with laughter….
I think the reason for the clip being in black and white is because it was captured with western equipment. West and East Germany had different ways of transmitting colour in television. Of course there were also people, mostly in the east, who had dual-standard tv sets.
I travelled to East Berlin and Jena in August 89 and was smugly and confidently told by an SED party member– relative of my West Berlin friend–that the Berlin Wall would NEVER come down and the two Germanies would NEVER re-unify. Ever. Permanent. Don’t waste your time thinking about one Germany we were advised. He mentioned the October 7th(?) 40th anniversary celebrations of the founding of the GDR in which world leaders of both communist and capitalist countries would be attending.
He later requested that we buy for him some chocolate, coffee, ice-cream and bananas from the Jena Intershop. How I would have loved to see his bearded round face and bowl haircut no more than three months later to remind him of what he said to us that muggy evening over pork and warm, but tasty East German beer.
As for the drabness of East Germany, I took photos in West and East Berlin and Jena whch I still have today and the eastern shots do lack colour. At the time I thought it was the neon signs and other western advertising but on closer reflection it was the clothes, buildings and even the weather semed gloomy.
On a side note to my previous comment I met again the East German relative of my friend on a visit to Germany in 1996. Still in Jena and still a local government official, he spoke of the fall of the Berlin wall and German re-unification not so much in terms of the end of a vile police state and the freedom that followed but more of a momentous event in 20th century German (and indeed world) history.
It’s scary to think that in a few years no one will recognize a ‘Hotel California’ reference anymore.