Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, October 18, 1993 TAG: 9310180082
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK ATKINSON THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: BERLIN LENGTH: Medium
Call it crazy, call it irreverent, but impresario Frank Georgi calls it an idea whose time has come - a sprawling re-creation of East Germany on a 500-acre former military compound outside Berlin, complete with empty stores, secret police agents and gritty toilet paper.
"Somehow you miss East Germany," Georgi said. "It's not that we want it back exactly, but it was home."
So far, the ersatz East Germany exists only in Georgi's head. Yet his plan to renovate the abandoned army camp in Prenden - where Communist Party boss Erich Honecker once had his secret atomic bunker behind a 15,000-volt electrified fence - has drawn plaudits and brickbats in equal measure.
Enthusiasts have donated crates of East German relics to the cause, from matchbooks to emigration forms. Prenden Mayor Paul Alesius, on the other hand, has vowed to block the project because "mass tourism would destroy our community."
With his pointy boots, fringe leather jacket and string tie, the 28-year-old Georgi looks like a cowpoke from Wyoming. In fact, he's from Ruhlsdorf in eastern Germany and fled to the West shortly before the Berlin Wall came down.
His company, Franky's Country Promotions, organized a trucker festival near Berlin last spring that he said drew 35,000 people for three days of rockabilly music, bungee jumping and bull riding.
His proposal to re-create the bad old days in a theme park is freighted with irony and entrepreneurial ambition.
Georgi's brainstorm started with an idea for a prank: Hire a team of brick masons to begin rebuilding the Berlin Wall and record the reaction of passers-by with a hidden camera.
From that kernel has evolved a vast blueprint with 36 different subprojects, from a hotel modeled after a socialist apartment building to a shopping emporium stocked once a month with wormy apples, shriveled onions and bananas (limit one kilo per comrade).
He would like to open in 1996, although the park still lacks a name. The mass circulation newspaper Bild dubbed it Disney East Germany, but Georgi leans toward The Zone - as the German Democratic Republic once was known to West Germans - or even Ossi Town, a reference to the slightly derisive name given to eastern Germans - after Ost, the German word for east - by their western cousins after reunification.
There would be May Day parades, with a Honecker look-alike waving to the masses, Stasi secret police "agents" arresting those who complain and uniformed Soviet "soldiers" keeping their East German brothers in line. Closed-circuit television would show old East German propaganda movies. Visitors could apply to leave, but at the risk of ostracism and petty harassment.
A spokeswoman for the district Office of Property Claims north of Berlin said Georgi's proposal has drawn deep skepticism. "I really doubt," she added, "that such a concept will be permitted."
Undeterred, Georgi envisions a clientele ranging from school classes looking for an educational experience to Japanese and American tourists. He hopes to persuade skeptics, such as Mayor Alesius, with promises of some 200 jobs in an area where unemployment is nearly 50 percent. The mayor, unimpressed, has denounced the project.
"Yeah, sure it's macabre," Georgi responded. "But it will be a memorial, a part of history."
by CNB