Everybody knows circus people are zany. So what do you expect when two former East German circus acrobats start a hotel? Zaniness.

The Ostel Hotel, out the back door of the old East Berlin train station (Ostbahnhof), is the creation of Guido Sand and Daniel Helbig. The theme of the 150-bed hotel, tarted up in Iron Curtain kitsch, is Ostalgie - a play on words because Ost in German means "east."

It's a look back to when life was easy and nobody had to work very hard. Of course, people tend to forget that, back then, they couldn't go anywhere without the secret police (Stasi) knowing about it. And they never could have converted a clunky apartment building into a hotel making fun of the communists.

The building is one of hundreds of mud-colored, Soviet-era monstrosities - poured-concrete apartment buildings covering an entire block. The Soviets thought that everyone's home should look the same. One color, identical layout inside - classless society and all that.

But Berliners have turned the Plattenbauwohnung into colorful homes.

The Ostel is an inexpensive but very modern hotel, with rooms ranging from $22 a night for a bed in a dormlike room to $200 for suites for a family of four.

The BBC calls it "East German chic."

Out front, the lighted emblem of the former German Democratic Republic lures you in. In the lobby, you're greeted by wallpaper from the Soviet era in horrid orange and brown. And in a striking example of gallows humor, smiling grimly on the wall is a huge painting of former East German Prime Minister Horst Sindermann - the man who ordered border guards to kill anyone trying to escape over the Berlin Wall.

Clocks display the time in Moscow, Berlin, Beijing and Havana.

But there's one major difference between then and now: the hotel staff, especially the charming young women behind the front desk. For those of us who skulked behind the Iron Curtain back in the day, "dour" pops to the mind, but they're hardly that.

It's all a joke, and they know it. And they still run a heck of a hotel.

I was in a money-saving mood, traveling solo and not minding a little walk down a hallway to use the bathroom. The room was clean but simple. Tiny bed, one window.

All of this for $80. Breakfast was $6.70 in a little joint around the corner called Ossi-hof. It was also done up in Soviet frimfrappery - big red flag on the wall with gold embroidery and a hammer and sickle.

The hotel rooms are filled with real items from the Soviet era, rounded up from basements, secondhand furniture stores, and e-Bay.

It's a little eerie. You enjoy the guilty pleasure of tuning in the once-forbidden BBC on the East German radio. A picture of Soviet stooge Erich Honecker stares from the stark white wall in every room.

It took Sand and Helbig a year to renovate their portion of the building, but they showed a profit within a month of opening on May Day 2007.

"I am not sure why no one did this before," Sand says, "but business is going really well."

And they're not done. They've just opened rental apartments on another favorite Communist-era vacation spot - the Baltic Sea.