torn grace

Is this place beautiful or ugly? Is it weird to live here, nice, or just "okay"? Interestingly, no one seems to ask these questions in "Cliff Hotel", Baabe, island Rügen. None of the up to 530 people sleeping here per night. (By the way, Rügen is Eastern Germany—just to be precise. Or rather, to be utterly unprecise? For what does that "Eastern" mean today, if anything? Is that information still, or the ultimate desinformation? )

Calling this huge place a hotel is not enough. Rather it is an own city, with hideouts, malls, hidden underground alleys, the whole lot. Getting lost here is as easy as in the postmodern hotel icon, the Los Angeles Bonaventure. Fred Jameson would just love it.

So, this thing is a city—but a hidden one. Cliff Hotel, which used to be a hostel for the GDR "Zentralkommitee", seems to be ducking away in the woods between Baabe and Sellin. It is trying to make itself invisible—although its geographical position is in fact amazing, directly by the sea, some 50 meters high. Its geography creates that ultimate fetish of seaside tourism: the "great view". Still, Cliff Hotel is hiding: hiding its shape, and hiding its size, a performativity that has a lot of grace to it, compared to the blunt hyperpresence of similar mega structures in Western German sea resorts (think of the hideous Timmendorf, or Travemünde).

Cliff Hotel, did I mention?, is an architectural legend. This is because of its magnificent swimming pool, designed by GDR star architect (yes, there is such a thing) Ulrich Müther. Müther, known for his concrete shell style, has created a bunch of wonderful modernist buildings, most of them on Rügen, where he comes from. He is also famous for being one of the prominent victims of Western German post-Wall architectural triumphalism. One of his coolest, the Ahornblatt in Berlin Mitte, had to make way for a thinking of meaningless construction efficiency.

Good that the pool of the Cliff still stands. Is it because visitors like it? A lot of them probably don't care much. None asking whether the pool is nice or ugly. No one asking whether the hotel is ugly, too. I couldn't say myself, although I certainly find it fascinating. Could give tens of examples of bad interior jokes though, like a big ape greeting new arrivals. But as a whole, the place is so torn, representing so many failed economic-political ambitions that surviving them is justification enough to be. And with a lot of questions no longer asked, the hotel develops something you don't find often: a thoroughly relaxed atmo, a spirit of not caring, which ultimately creates a strange kind of friendliness. All the slightly ridiculous old ladies from Berlin or Hamburg, at first trying to represent a lifestyle slightly posher than their own. Does it matter? In the end, not to them, not to the other visitors. Not to the sea. And certainly not to the architecture. So they stop pretending. And have a swim.