TOURING | GERMANY
Main image: Hannover’s neo-gothic New Town Hall Top right: The Prora resort on Rügen: a monument to megalomania Bottom left: Rügen’s famous chalk cliffs Bottom right: The Möhne Dam: target for 617 Squadron
Rügen is perhaps Germany’s best-kept holiday secret. A sprawling landscape of sandbars, peninsulas and long, sandy beaches, Rügen has long been popular with German holidaymakers, but is all but unknown to the world beyond. It was here, for instance, that the artist Caspar David Friedrich was inspired to paint one of his most stunning works, reflecting the natural beauty of the island’s chalk cliffs. Vacationers still come to Rügen in their droves, drawn by its scenery, its numerous spa resorts and its bracing maritime climate. It does not disappoint. Indeed, it is not so long ago that Rügen was planned as a laboratory for the way in which all future holidays were foreseen. At Prora, on the island’s east coast, the Third 132 Discover Touring
Reich established an all-inclusive resort to provide package holidays for Germany’s working men and women – a sort of Nazi version of Butlin’s. This being Nazi Germany, of course, Prora was conceived on a vast scale: the main building alone stretched for 4.5km along the beachfront, with room for as many as 20,000 holidaymakers, as well as swimming pools, theatres, restaurants and a ‘festival hall’ that was designed to hold all the resort’s residents at once. The main building at Prora was completed in 1939, but was overtaken by events and never welcomed a single Nazi ‘Redcoat’, being used instead as a barracks and sometime home for wartime refugees. It is still there, a monument to megalomania, and to the very birth of mass
tourism: a place of pilgrimage, perhaps, to all of us who wholeheartedly reject such horrors. As we turn the ‘van around to chase the sunset west once again, I am struck by the rather unconventional route that I have followed – from Germany’s westernmost city, to its watery north-eastern fringe, with Poland just across the estuary. I have passed through quite a few places that rarely feature on the standard tourist trail, but I hope I have done this fascinating country justice, highlighting its diversity, its modernity and its history. That history – and the ‘dark history’ as well – is one that is never far from the surface in Germany, both in what is present and what is missing, but it is no less enthralling for that. “Don’t mention the war”? Don’t be silly.
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