The notion of service as a prerequisite for a healthy tourist industry has yet to catch on in east Germany. Forty years of communism have proved tough to shift, so “Nein” is a likely response still to even the most reasonable requests.

But if, as a traveller, you decide to be sanguine about this counter-intuitive approach to making visitors feel welcome it can become part of the region's attraction. When we lived in Berlin not so long ago, terrible service became something we looked out for and even looked forward to.

My favourite example happened in the Uckermark region in northeast Brandenburg, a wooded, lake-filled wilderness an hour or so's drive from Berlin. We stayed in a decaying, once-grand mansion that had been converted into a hotel.

We rode our bikes through the woods, swam in the reedy lakes and watched bohemian Berliners doing what they like best - hanging with Nature and taking their clothes off at every available opportunity.

Our first night was magical: dark sky, bright stars, the warm musty smells of the forest as it cooled, well-behaved German families with their clothes back on and dinner outside. The food, like all food in east Germany, was unexciting, but we finished contentedly and sat back to enjoy the scene and the rest of our bottle of wine... for two minutes.

The gruff waitress informed us that we would have to move. “Herr Günther wants your table.” Herr Günther was the owner of this strange establishment and what Herr Günther wanted, Herr Günther got. Forget the customer. We knew who was king.

It was as if the east Germans didn't care. Their land was a secret kept to themselves for the decades after the war. Why encourage outsiders to spoil their idyll? It meant that important tourist attractions could be visited in almost total isolation.

When we visited Colditz, the castle used as a prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War, we had this remarkable monument almost entirely to ourselves. Tourism in Britain in the 1930s must have been like this.

As with many buildings and places associated with Nazism, Schloss Colditz was part-museum, part-wreck and the authorities weren't quite sure what to do with it. Feelings towards such historic monuments like Colditz and Prora - the Nazi holiday camp on the island of Rügen - were ambivalent, especially in the east, where the communist authorities had never held the populace to account for their Nazi past.

The only other person we saw at Colditz was a genial, elderly guide in a green-feathered beret, who stayed with us as we wandered from room to room.

The displays at Colditz - paintings and sketches by prisoners, maps of escape plans, Red Cross parcels, even a battered version of the board game Escape From Colditz - were endearingly makeshift.

Most exciting of all was what remained of an escape tunnel: just a big hole in the ground with nothing to stop any of us climbing into it. I half expected the castle's guide to invite us to have a go.

I used to think that a clever person could make a lot of money marketing east Germany as “retro -tourism”. Come to where the tourists aren't! Eat bad food! Enjoy a unique take on local hospitality! But then I would think that maybe it was just me who enjoyed the oddball delights of what was this strange, beautiful, unique patch of Europe.

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