Hotel Atlantis

Deep in the former DDR, in a winter sports town high on a hill stands this old hotel. It’s actually an ensemble of a very old hotel, a later added building and swimming pool. It’s hard to find any history on these buildings but using the dates on historic photographs and postcards I found online it’s possible to sketch a rough timeline. The oldest photograph I found of the hotel is dated 1912. It pictures the building standing alone on a snowy hill with people around it having a fun time in the snow. In the late 1950s the building was bought by a DDR mining company. In true DDR style, the ‘Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund’ (the comprehensive DDR trade union) organised holidays for the miners in hotels like these. In the 70s another hotel building and a swimming pool were added.

There is a good amount of vandalism inside and it’s getting worse every year, but luckily the vandals don’t seem to get past the swimming pool and the ugly modern hotel building. The beautiful old building remains unharmed. It’s very authentic and just screams ‘DDR’; it’s probably still entirely like it was in the 60s / 70s. Over time more and more water is seeping inside and is slowly but surely making everything rot. Moss grows on walls, floors and the bits of furniture that are left, and with every stair you ascend in this building the decay gets more intense. It’s impressive but it’s also a shame that this magnificent building has to end up like this.