The Grand Hotel Heiligendamm, first built in 1793, quickly became a spa retreat for the aristocracy of central Europe. But it has been a struggle to keep in going in modern times.

The Latin inscription on the pediment above the Tuscan-style columns of the Kurhaus reads Heic Te Laetitia Invitat Post Balnea Sanum. Which loosely translates as ‘joy awaits you as you emerge from your bath’.

A sentiment that is not so original, perhaps, given how many hotels today have spas, but then this is the Grand Hotel Heiligendamm, first established in 1793, which makes it Germany’s oldest and smartest seaside hotel.

The property was first established here, on the Baltic coast a dozen miles west of Rostock, at the instigation of the Duke of Schwerin. Besides the Kurhaus with its classicist facade, it comprises seven historic white mansions, surrounded by beechwoods on either side and with sweeping lawns down to a pier and a sandy beach.

It quickly became patronized by German aristocracy, by literati such as Proust and Rilke, and even by Russia’s Tsar Nicholas I. At its peak in the mid 19^th century it was a meeting place for Europe’s rich and famous, who came to bathe in the Baltic and to gamble at the first horse-racing course in Germany.  But then came two World Wars, the dismal curtain of communism, closure and decay.

Today it is back, and determined to roll back the years.

In truth, the Grand hasn’t had an easy ride even since it re-opened, post-reunification. In two short decades it was transformed from a crumbling ruin to a luxury Kempinski-steered property chosen by Angela Merkel to host 2007’s G8 summit. But despite all the associated publicity, complete with that iconic image of the world leaders in one giant tailor-made strandkorb (basketwork beach chair), it was bankrupt by 2012.

In truth, there were always going to be problems with trying to re-establish an elite beach resort on the Baltic in the era of easy air travel to the Med. Especially with no airport nearby.

Back in the day, the glitterati used to arrive at the Grand on a dedicated steam railway, built specifically to chuff them right to the front door. Today, the Molli, although charming, is more of a curiosity than a method of travel.

Then there’s the issue of retaining quality staff in a relatively remote location. Particularly because Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is the poorest of the German states, where old anti-capitalist attitudes still prevail. Moreover the beach at Heiligendamm is not much to write home about.

When it went bust in 2012, the hotel’s Perlenkette (pearl necklace) of villas had to be sold, and have since been reconstituted as luxury apartments. The remaining core buildings were bought by Paul Morzynski, a tax accountant from Hanover, who is working to re-establish the hotel by concentrating on the spa, the sanctity of the enclave and the quality of the food.

With these things in mind, he has added a spacious outdoor pool and seasonal staff accommodation. Interiors have been refreshed with silk fabrics, marble and brocade. All of it, of course, in the best possible taste.

Arriving here on a weekday night is like stepping back 50 years, to the days when it was still called Karl-Marx-Stadt. The wide streets are walled by looming brutalist blocks, and they seem practically devoid of life.  There’s a metaphorical chill in the air.

But it wasn’t always thus. This crucible of Germany’s industrial revolution kicked off in the 19^th century with textiles and then machine-making, and moved on to producing the likes of trains and cars, the bread and butter of modern Germany. But then came World War II, which destroyed 80 percent of a thriving industrial city.

Virtually the only showpiece of that most prosperous pre-war era which is still used for its original purpose is the magnificent Bauhaus-influenced public swimming pool, unchanged since the glory period of the 1930s. And then there’s Villa Esche, the art deco mansion of a stocking manufacturer from the beginning of the 20^th century.

After the War, the GDR did a hasty rebuild and tried to make Chemnitz a socialist showpiece and a powerhouse of mechanical engineering. They re-named it Karl-Marx-Stadt and installed the giant head of Marx himself on a wide boulevard intended for grand parades. The 40 tonne bust is still there, despite the fact that the man himself never set foot in the city. And when the Berlin Wall came down, three quarters of the population voted to go back to the original name, ‘Chemnitz’.

A lot of them also left at the first opportunity, largely because all that government-run industry was based on outdated technology, and accordingly went belly up as the Wall came down. At that point there was a mass exodus of 80,000 mostly well educated citizens, and the 260,000 who remained felt overlooked and unloved. Unsurprisingly, the right wing AfD Alternative for Germany is strong here.

Capital of Culture

In an attempt to bring the city in from the cold it was designated as one of two European Capitals of Culture in 2025. Special exhibitions, installations and events brought in a lot of interested visitors, and have restored some of the citizens’ self respect. The heart of downtown around the Old and New Town Halls embodies something of the pre-war era, albeit as a reconstruction, surrounded by a bit of a dogs dinner of modernist styles. But beyond that Chemnitz remains indisputably a physically unappealing place, thrown together in too much of a hurry after World War II by a regime that cared little for flair and individualism.

Today one thing that Chemnitz does have, in spades, is museums, converted from former industrial complexes. For example the Industrial Museum in a magnificently restored former foundry where it shows a copious cross-section of two centuries of manufacturing output.

There are galleries, too, particularly the Gunzenhauser, in a former bank, which is particularly good at researching and exhibiting artists from this part of Germany, and from other destinations in central and eastern Europe.

For someone interested in Germany in general, and in its recent history, Chemnitz is worth a visit.  It is certainly a journey of discovery. And a big blast from the past.

The names refer to the sheaves of wheat (Strausse) or the brooms (Besen) which are hung outside to indicate the establishment is open. And that’s important, because these places only operate seasonally, depending on whether the winemaker has the time, or the personnel.

This one was at Griestal, south of Freiburg down in the Rhine corridor, on the western flank of the Black Forest (griestal-strausse.de). Finding it, hidden as it was amongst head high sweetcorn fields, wasn’t easy.

Griestal looks like a converted barn, with a lot of tables outside under a large retractable roof. On a summer evening it felt like a celebration, a festive gathering of families and locals. Many of the tables were fashioned out of old cable drums, and were shared between groups, so there was plenty of communication, especially once the first glasses of wine had been consumed.

On the winelist were Muller Thurgau and Weisser Burgunder at £3 for a large glass. Both made very pleasant drinking. And on the menu was inexpensive local food such as Brägele (£4.75), a local equivalent of Swiss rosti, and a plate of Käsespätzle (£11.20), small macaroni-like pasta smothered in cheese and topped with caramelised onions. It was not haute cuisine, but certainly good fodder for working in the fields.

All in all, a highly recommended experience.

The sleepy village of Trendelburg sits around the skirts of a castle-topped outcrop, amid a sumptuous flowing landscape of forests and fields in the region of Hesse, north of Kassel. These days the castle itself, Burg Trendelburg, is a hotel which plays a significant role in the Fairytale Road, as it is from one of its five towers that Rapunzel was meant to have let down her hair for her handsome prince to climb.

Not far away, through the wild boar and deer rich forests of the Reinhardswald, is Sababurg, which also plays a role on the Road, this time as Sleeping Beauty’s Castle, although here the whole place is currently sleeping, pending refurbishment as a hotel. Its grounds remain popular for walking.

There’s a lot more good walking between the two, in the Urwald section of the giant Reinhardswald forest, a place where you can really suspend your disbelief whilst wandering through a cathedral of beech trees and giant anthropomorphically-shaped oaks, some of which are thought to be between 700 and 1,000 years old.

As for Burg Trendelburg itself, it is a lovely place to stay for anyone with a smidgen of imagination or romanticism.

The thousand-year-old fortification surrounds a courtyard of chestnut trees which is entered across a drawbridge. Its entrance hall has tapestries and metal knights, from where a creaking dark oak staircase leads up to bedrooms with ‘himmelbett’ (heaven bed) four posters and modern bathrooms hidden ingeniously away through pretend cupboards. By virtue of its position each of the bedrooms has a commanding view, especially the tower bedroom where Rapunzel supposedly hung out.

It’s moderately priced, and particularly popular with overseas visitors.

A place to celebrate

Of course there’s no evidence of the truth of any of the Rapunzel malarkey – it’s a fairy story – but one of the early editions of Grimm’s fairytales had an illustration of a tower castle, and the tourism people were looking for a suitable lookalike when contemplating the creation of the Fairytale Road, over 50 years ago. Hey presto: Trendelburg becomes Rapunzel’s castle. Great marketing.

It certainly capitalizes on it. A large downstairs restaurant – far too big for a 22 bedroom property – has embossed leather armchairs, fleur de lys carpets and swords on the walls, plus an expansive outdoor terrace with commanding views. It’s an obvious choice for celebrations.

So the place that was once known for hiding maidens away in towers, is now a very popular wedding venue.

The official reasons were mixed: signal failure was mentioned, as were summer thunderstorms, as was a shortage of staff during the holiday period.

Afterwards I had a look at the national statistics, and was surprised to find that long distance train punctuality is down at 73 percent (compared to a UK performance rating of 79 percent). UK trains better than German ones! That’s a novelty.

Deutsche Bahn says that around 75 per cent of those delays are because the trains are transiting through at least one construction site, due to their massive programme of investment and renovation.

Whatever the reason, it’s all a bit hit and miss. On my way back on this particular journey, all was so on time – nay early – that the ICE from Frankfurt airport to Brussels had to loiter for 15 minutes in the freight yards of Cologne. Schade!

At the latter, where the only remaining stretch of Wall has been preserved thanks to the famous imagery painted onto it, there’s far more activity around the new Mercedes Benz Arena and in the East Side Mall than there is actually by the Wall itself.  Meanwhile Berlin’s rougher, more alternative, neighbourhoods, have become more anodyne. These days, if you want a taste of raw and punchy Berlin as it used to be, the best location is the Teufelsberg Cold War listening post, an installation atop an artificial hill out in the woodland to the west of the city, covered in political street art, and moaning in the wind.

The city’s history hasn’t gone away, of course, it has just gone indoors, where it has become a digitised commodity. The Cold War Museum, the DDR Museum, The Deutschland Museum, the Spy Museum – all have opened recently. There’s very little in the way of actual artefacts in these places. It’s mostly touch-screen, mostly footage, with a lot of dependency on smartphone scanning of QR codes.

It’s a long way from the museums of old – although one of the biggest openings of the last year, the Humboldt Forum, is still very much in the mould of the likes of the British Museum, an immense collection of sculptures, carvings, costumes, etc from all around the world, stuffed into glass cases.

So Berlin has lost some of its distinctiveness, in my eyes, but you can’t stand in the way of progress, and the gaping nomanslands that divided the city were no good to anyone. What we have today is a city which has perfectly adapted to all year round modern living and tourism – albeit without the urgency and the raw immediacy of the most significant slice of recent European history.

Far and away the biggest slice of the pie is in city breaks, at 41 percent. Next on the list is multi-destination tours, at 14 percent, then rural tourism, at nine percent. In terms of source markets, the Netherlands is top, followed by Switzerland and then the USA. Word is that the UK has climbed to fourth in the current year.

Some 90 percent of visitor bookings are made online, with 18 percent via a travel agent or tour operator (either online or in person).

This year’s themes are sustainability and UNESCO World Heritage sites, with particular emphasis on newcomers, the Jewish-medieval heritage of Erfurt, and the Alpine and sub-alpine meadow marshes of Bavaria.

Every year thousands of artists and performers of all varieties and ages arrive in Germany to populate a rich year-long cultural agenda. Many will have come before, and know exactly what to expect, but for others it could be a first-time experience. Some will be just on a short tour, others intend to stay for a protracted period, and still more will be looking to relocate on a permanent basis, particularly to Berlin.

For all of these groups and eventualities, our organisation Touring Artists can be invaluable for fact-checked information, and a general orientation on topics likes visas and tax requirements.

Financed by the EU and the German government, we also collaborate with the Arts Infopoint UK and the British Council in Berlin, and have specifically created a Brexit Infopoint to reconnect the cultural scenes of the UK and Germany once again.

Most of our communication is with musicians, concert promoters, visual artists and some theatre companies. The main concerns of these clients are:

Visa and Residence
Contracts and Work Status
Taxes
Social Insurance
Transport and Customs
Insurances
Author’s Rights
Mobility Funding

Touring Artists provide a help desk where artists can ask individual questions or discus their individual cases. This service is free and we also provide a small free handbook which can be ordered on our website.

As an example of what we do, one of the bands we helped with information about the Carnet ATA has written about the experience on our website here, in order that others can be better informed

We also organise a regular Monthly Meet Up online on different topics and networking events. For example the next one will give an overview of the structure of the German and British art scenes.

Touring Artists is under the umbrella of the non-profit organization On The Move and other countries like France, Belgium or the US have a similar service.

Düsseldorf has long been the headquarters city for the Ruhr, Germany’s powerhouse industrial region. It is the place for worker relaxation and for the spending of big industrialist salaries, which in turn patronises great arts and culture in a succession of big public galleries. It pays for eyecatching city architecture, too, and the net result is the secondmost liveable city in Germany (after Munich).

The city’s mostly pedestrianized centre is so new and modern it feels like an architect’s model. There’s Daniel Liebeskind’s curvaceous Kö-Bogen, whose ‘cuts’ in its façade sprout with greenery, and nearby Kö-Bogen II, a shopping centre disguised under beech hedges. Its most famous more traditional shopping boulevard, the ‘Kö’ – Königsallee – looks like a slice of Amsterdam, running as it does down both sides of a leafy canal, lined with flagship stores of famous names and patrolled by the unfeasibly tanned.

The old town

Beyond the Kö towards the Rhine is old Düsseldorf, a network of cobbled streets busy with bars and restaurants. There’s not a lot in the way of truly old architecture here but what it lacks in antiquity it makes up for in conviviality. The nightlife is vibrant, particularly along Bolkerstrasse, although you might want to steer clear on a football night.

The speciality of some of the old town taverns is Altbier, whose darker colour comes from the roasting of the malt. It is unpasteurised, so best drunk fresh at traditional locations like Uerige, Füchschen or Schlüssel, where the breweries themselves are directly on site. Here there’s a whole culture around drinking, mostly at convivial standing tables, where service is by middle-aged men (Köbes) who record your tally with marks on your beer mat.

Bordering the old town is the Rhine, with fully laden barges lumbering laboriously around its giant bend. Sheep graze on the floodplain on the far bank, while the near bank is lined with a long promenade, hugely popular amongst locals when the weather is kind. There are bars here, but the most dramatic view is from the top of the 240 metre Rheinturm, looking down on the river and the parliament building.

The city has a big encampment of galleries and concert halls – mostly just downriver from the old town – with a particularly large and significant art academy. No fewer than four art movements started here in the 1960s, during the time when the likes of Joseph Beuys and Gerhard Richter were students. These days its K20 art gallery has one of the biggest collection of 20^th century artists – Picasso, Kandinsky, Klee, Miro, Chagall etc – of any institutions in the world.

Art in the region has always been cutting edge, but not always recognised as such. Back in the 1980s, Joseph Beuys placed five kilograms of butter in an exhibition in the art academy, and called it ‘Fat Corner’. Eventually a gallery cleaner mistakenly cleared it away. Ever since then there’s been a German saying: Ist das Kunst oder kann das weg? “Is it art, or can I throw it away?”

The Colossus of Prora may sound like a piece of ancient history, but don’t be fooled by the name. This giant of a building (originally the longest in the world at a massive 4.5km) was built on the holiday island of Rügen by the Nazi party between the two World Wars.

Prora was planned to be an all-inclusive resort on an unprecedented scale, a new kind of tourism for the masses with 20,000 beds. It was the prototype of a handful of mega resorts intended by Adolf Hitler to create a nation of ‘people with strong nerves’, so they wouldn’t fail in a fight.

You can see why this location on the causeway-connected island of Rügen was chosen. The 10km beach here is of magnificent silky white sand, and back in the early 20^th century it was already attracting elite holidaymakers, who built themselves handsome villas in the fashionable spa settlement of Binz, at the beach’s south-eastern end.

Prora, however, was intended for the masses, but it never opened. It was just nearing completion when World War II broke out, and after Germany’s defeat it was garrisoned by Soviet troops, who blew bits of it up, for fun. The Stasi, the secret police, took over the remains for a while, and then for many years it was left to fall apart, shrouded in trees.

But now this sleeping giant has been reborn. In the course of the past decade, the five blocks still standing of the original eight have become a mix of hotel, youth hostel and luxury apartments.  Today, serried rows of glass balconies glint in the sun, each six-storey block slightly different to its neighbour, extending into the distance as far as the eye can see. Swimming pools sit out front, and at its road-served back, there’s newly-planted saplings and an endless repetition of protruding stairwells every 50 metres. There are a couple of spa hotels – the Dormero and the Solitaire – and a sprinkling of coffee shops, restaurants and a supermarket in the centre.

There is, however, very little reference to the building’s history, apart from in the dowdy looking Documentation Centre, where the exhibition MACHTUrlaub (‘make holidays’) fills in the detail. Here you learn how the centralised design was such that guests would have had to walk as far as 2.2km through the interconnected buildings, carrying their luggage, to reach their rooms. And how the daily programme would have included parades and communal games which may not have been described as compulsory, but there would have been informers amongst the holidaymakers, noting the non-participants. It was a matter of ‘have fun, or else’.

Along the shore

The beach itself is serenely unchanged since Prora was conceived, apart from lavish new (slightly military-looking) lifeguard posts, and regular signboards announcing ‘textilfrei’ stretches. During the post-war GDR times, FKK or Freikörperkultur was a big deal for people who wanted to experience some sense of freedom in the face of an unduly repressive state.

The original resort of Binz itself remains a period piece. The sand is demarcated with neat ranks of Strandkörbe, wicker beach chairs, which can be rotated to face the sun whilst turning their backs to the wind. There’s a pier, a bandstand outside the grand Kurhaus, and a shaded shoreside promenade that is lined with stalls selling trinkets and Milchreis, rice pudding with fruit puree.

Inland, villas of distinctive Bäder architecture, a mix of art nouveau and Long Island clapperboard, line its streets behind white picket fences with their ornate wooden balconies, rooftop gables, octagons, lanterns, and domes. Once private properties, with staff, they are now mostly sub-divided into apartments.

Binz is no longer a posh place for holidays, although the key activities are still the same:  a steamer still runs from the end of the pier to the chalk cliffs of the Königsstuhl, or King’s Chair, which were memorably painted by Caspar David Friedrich, the 19^th century Romantic landscape painter who played a big part in making Rügen popular.  And the ‘Raging Roland’ steam train still weaves its way along the coast to subsidiary resorts of Sellin, Baabe and Göhren, chugging past allotments and through thin forests of oak and beech, dappled with sunlight and laced with footpaths.