You can check out any time you like, but they can never leave.
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.