East Germany Gives Birth to New B&B; Business

It’s a pitch black night; a night too dark and too thick for a tourist to be wandering in search of lodging in an unknown city.

But at No. 3 Kleine Kirchgasse hope is waiting. On the second floor of Peter and Andrea Schliez’s tidy house, that hope is manifested in one of East Germany’s new private businesses. It is a zimmervermittlung: the tourist room agency. And the Schliezes’ specialty is the East German equivalent of bed and breakfast inns.

The embryonic network is flourishing throughout East Germany, particularly in Weimar, a town of fewer than 50,000 that has only two good hotels despite having once been among Germany’s top tourist destinations.

I came to Weimar on a journey outlined in a 1929 travel book. I wanted to get a feel for a town that was praised 50 years ago as the ideal jumping-off place for mountain hiking. But the surprise was on me. What I found was a rare look not into nature but into a nation.

Because it’s not until you get to shabby Weimar that you understand the political events of the past few months. Seeing the top line of East Berlin is not enough. You must experience the bottom line--the depressed areas such as Weimar--to understand why revolutions are born.

A visit to Weimar is a visit to a gray, neglected town. Yet historically it is a town of note: Home of Goethe, Schiller and Liszt . . . and the Buchenwald concentration camp. In southern East Germany’s Thuringian Forest, Weimar’s tourist industry flourished for the better part of a century until the Nazis came to power.

Inextricably linked to Germany’s greatest dramatic poets, Weimar was a kind of shrine for art lovers. Seasoned travelers were drawn by its village atmosphere and proximity to other attractions: the cathedral town of Erfurt, Bach’s birthplace at Eisenach, the university at Jena and the inviting hiking trails and bubbling streams of the Thuringian woods.

I arrived in Weimar at 8 p.m. on a wintry day, the last day of March. It was cold and rainy and I didn’t have a hotel. The small, century-old station was nearly deserted. I made my way across the muddy station plaza to the pathetic International hotel, whose forlorn sign was only half illuminated.

But despite my lack of enthusiasm for the hotel, I was alarmed when a West German Mercedes-Benz pulled up in front and its driver dashed inside, leaving the engine running. If that prosperous-looking person was willing to stay in a place like this, clearly rooms were at a premium.

My reasoning proved accurate. There was not a hotel room to be had in Weimar; not at the two good hotels; not even at the three, including the International, that were not. The town was overrun with West German tourists and business people.

Uncertain what to do, I waited for the tram into town. And then came a miracle: Three West German students wandered past. They had spent the day at Buchenwald just outside town. They pointed the now-desperate visitor to the Schliez home, also known as the local tourist agency.

In true entrepreneurial tradition, the Schliezes, who are in their 30s ad have two small children, are creating the bed and breakfast network by recruiting friends and neighbors to the cause. A hundred families already have signed up, and Peter Schliez told me in German that he is confident the number will rise to 125 in time for the summer tourist rush.

When he is not running his wood-working business, Peter Schliez is promoting tourism. He has just painted directions to his home and tourist agency on a building in the town center two blocks away.

Despite the lateness of the hour, Andrea Schliez’s first phone call is successful. A school teacher, she reports, is on her way over to fetch me. The cost of the room, including breakfast, will be about $15, payable in West German currency. The Schliezes get another $1.50, also in West German marks, for their assistance. I marveled at my discovery.

Yet for the average traveler there is a Catch 22. Because I was traveling on a journalist’s visa, I didn’t have to pre-book and prepay my hotels to be issued a visa. Regrettably, at least for the next few months, B&Bs; are off-limits to American travelers who must prepay to obtain a tourist visa. The East German embassy in Washington, aware that West Germans are exempt from this rule says, merely, “Changes are coming, but we don’t know when.”

At the West German embassy, a consular official said if the unification talks go well, perhaps within six months Americans may be able to travel to East Germany without any visa at all.

Happily, that was not my problem on this cold night in Weimer.

Unlike the Schliezes, who are archetypal yuppies in the new capitalism being swiftly fashioned from nearly 50 years of socialist austerity, Beate Hoffmann lives rather a modest life.

As a suitcase is lifted onto the back seat of Hoffman’s pale green Trabant car, she apologizes in German that there is no interior light. We wheeze through deserted streets to a neighborhood of semi-detached stucco houses across from a block-long warehouse.

In the garage is another, older black Trabi used by Hoffmann’s husband, a long-distance truck driver.

The main bedroom where I am to stay is on the second floor. It is comfortable and relatively modern. It has a reading light next to one of those classic German beds that are like narrow platforms with too-thin mattresses topped by a large comforter.

Strangely, the wall at the foot the bed is covered with a large color poster of a beach in Guam. Across the hall is a sitting room with a shelf of books and a small television set. Next door is the bathroom with an electric heating coil stretched across the ceiling. An East German hair dryer hangs from a hook next to the toilet. Soap from Hungary, shampoo from Czechoslovakia, deodorant from Poland and face cream from West Germany stand in a neat row on the shelf above the tub.

Downstairs, Hoffmann has lit a burner on the stove for heat and has spread a meal for her guest. She offers two kinds of delicious Thuringer sausage, black bread in a basket, a jar of prized gherkin pickles. We sit at stools, drink local beer and chat.

Some things are slow to change, she says. Despite massive political adjustments, nothing is different at the school where Hoffmann teaches third grade. Same principal, same curriculum, she says.

Yet behind Beate Hoffmann’s glasses are worried, reddened eyes. What will happen, she asks, when long-frozen prices are freed and rents and utility costs soar? Won’t there be mass unemployment, she wonders, when East German factories are forced to compete with modern factories in the West?

Enthusiasm is apparent only when the conversation turns to events in the Soviet Union. That’s when Hoffmann bursts from the room and returns with Gorbachev’s book on perestroika. Pointing to the Soviet leader’s photograph on the cover, she says, “Here is the man who made our peaceful revolution possible. Compare him to Honecker and Stalin. They were liars and thugs and ruled by terror. Here in Thuringia we were liberated by the Americans in 1945, but they went away and the Russians came. And look what they did.” She makes a mock pistol with her finger, shoots and pretends to blow smoke from the barrel.

Hoffmann, who speaks fluent Russian, has been on vacation in the Soviet Union four times (she likes Leningrad best) and thinks Lithuania and the other Baltic republics should be permitted independence.

“Why not,” she says, “they were taken by force.”

At 6:45 a.m. there is a knock on the door of what is surely Hoffmann’s own bedroom when there are no guests. Downstairs, the table is elaborately set. Coffee steams from a white cup and saucer. There is a hard-cooked egg in a ceramic holder on the blue place mat, two kinds of cheese, sausage and bread.

Fifteen minutes later we’re back in the Trabi, tangled in traffic on our way to the train station. I am directed to take a heavy paper bag sealed with a plastic band in the back seat. Opened three hours later as the train approaches East Berlin, it is a neatly wrapped sandwich roll of salami and cheese. And a gherkin pickle.

Places to Stay in Weimar

Where to stay: A new luxury hotel, the Belevedere, just opened. It will cost about $160 a night for a double. If that is filled, try the Elephant for about $100. Forget the two run-down hostelries across the square from the station. When visa changes finally allow, you’re better off with the tourist agency and a slice of East German life, bed-and-breakfast style.

For information on the B&B; network, contact Peter Schliez at Kleine Kirchgasse 3, Weimar 5300, German Democratic Republic; in Weimar, telephone 3642. Until visa requirements change, travelers must go to a travel agency and book and pay for hotels in advance. The hotels will respond to the tourist agency, usually sending a voucher within 10 days. The voucher can then be traded for an East German tourist visa at the border. Single-entry visas cost $8.

How to get there: Weimar is four hours by train or 2 1/2 hours by car from Berlin.

For more information: In California, the East German embassy directs visitors to contact Kaven Travel Service in Glendale (818) 502-9999 or Los Angeles (213) 245-9999 or Trans World Visa Service in San Francisco, (415) 752-6958.

With East Germany preparing to reunite with West Germany, travel regulations are expected to change dramatically this summer.