Speaking Mutely

“The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.”

The words of Heinrich Heine, a 19th century German Romantic poet after whom this hotel in the East German countryside was named. The Heinrich Heine Hotel was demolished in 2016 to make way for another vacation resort – perhaps one where the stones take a little longer to open up and it may take years to know their language.

But this hotel has definitely been speaking to me in the few years since my visit, with the poetry of wallpaper curtains, sunken ballroom lighting and a sci-fi invasion of fungus and mold. A great reminder that things are always creeping downward and sideways and nothing here is really still.