Mommy, Can I Have One of Those Cute Hats the Surly Border Guards Wear?
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 02.28.03 | 3:34 PM ET
Further proof that everything and anything these days is fodder for a theme park: A company in Berlin plans to construct a theme park recalling life in East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall, according to a report on CNN.com. The park, believe it or not, is designed to capitalize on a wave of nostalgia for the era. Among other attractions, it would feature “surly border guards, rigorous customs inspections, authentic East German mark notes, and restaurants with regulation bland East German food,” the article states. I might have a harder time believing this if I hadn’t read about it once before. In his landmark 1995 book, “Jihad vs. McWorld,” Benjamin Barber writes about just such a plan: “Whether the plan, goofy to be sure but hardly goofier than some of Disney’s projects now under way, will come to fruition is uncertain in Germany’s troubled fiscal condition. That it could even be considered suggests how far the theme park ideology has come from its inception in London in 1851 or its second coming (with Disney) at Anaheim in 1955.”
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Jim Benning is the cofounder and coeditor-in-chief of World Hum.
