This is already the situation and the safeguard has in the past been triggered, for instance, to stop hooligans going to international football events.

Visitors to the Propeller Island City Lodge near the famous Kurfuerstendamm shopping district are given operating instructions for their room when checking in. No two rooms are the same as the Lodge promises unlimited diversity in what it calls a habitable work of art in the heart of Berlin. Repeating nothing and copying nothing are the guiding principles here.

Lion cages on wooden stilts can be found in one room, other guests can spend the night in a coffin in a crypt, while there is also the option of the upside down room where the bed hangs upside down from the ceiling. There is even a prison cell with the toilet sitting in the bedroom.

Christian Taenzler from the Visit Berlin tourist authority says there are between 10 and 15 hotels in the German capital which offer a completely different experience to the usual fare. “The most entertaining ones have only opened up in the past two or three years,” says Taenzler, who believes the reason for such diversity is down to economic reasons.

“Berlin is one of the most challenging hotel markets in the world so anyone who discovers a niche certainly has better survival chances,” he explains.

Many tourists travel to Berlin with the expectation that the city is exceptionally creative, unusual and a little wild. Hotels like Propeller Island fit that image perfectly.

Another unusual hotel is Ostel which is situated in a GDR pre-fabricated building near the Ostbahnhof train station and tries to give its guests a taste of life in the Communist East Berlin of the 1970s and 1980s. The hotel is kitted out in original GDR furniture while the walls are adorned with pictures of former Communist leader Erich Honecker.

While Ostel playfully remembers design life in the GDR, Das andere Haus VIII deals with the more serious side of living under a dictatorship.

The hotel is situated in a red-bricked building that used to be a medical station in the former GDR prison in Rummelsburg. Each cell was bugged and locked with a heavy metal door while there were also cells with no light.

Political leaders such as Honecker and Minister of State Security Erich Mielke were held here briefly following the collapse of the Berlin Wall but now tourists travel to Rummelsburg voluntarily in order to spend a night in the former prison. There is a “Silent Room” in the basement to remember the building’s grim history.

The hotel boat Eastern Comfort is anchored beside the historic Oberbaumbruecke bridge, which was once a border crossing point between East and West Berlin. The internationally renowned East Side Gallery, which is also the longest stretch of Berlin Wall remaining, is also nearby.

Tourists travelling on a limited budget can bring their own sleeping bag and spend the night on the ship’s deck. The boat’s engine does not work and non-swimmers, animals and children under the age of six are not allowed on board.

The open-air Scube Park swimming baths open this year in the Neukoelln district. The accommodation consists of 40 wooden blocks positioned on a 2000-square-metre space, which can be lived in all year round. Each block can fit up to four people but swimming in the pool is not allowed during the hours of darkness.

It is also possible to camp on the production floor of a former vacuum cleaner factory in the heart of Neukoelln. The Huettenpalast offers wooden huts and restored caravans dating back to the 1950s.

He explained that alongside the 500 billion euros maximum agreed in the new bailout fund that comes into effect in July can be added money already loaned out to crisis-hit countries, plus 60 billion in European Union funds.

“It’s about 800 billion euros (over $1 trillion) … to fight contagion to protect our stability,” he said. “It’s convincing, it’s sufficient. We will have a similar protection by the IMF as we got in the last two years and then I think we can be optimistic that it can work.”

“It’s a good solution and I think we should all get behind it,” he added.

Eurozone ministers are set to bolster their defences against the crisis by increasing the volume of their firewalls to prevent contagion to larger nations such as Italy and Spain.

Several options are on the table but there is little agreement in the bloc, with France calling earlier Thursday for around one trillion euros but Germany more reticent. Until now, Berlin has mooted a figure of around 700 billion euros and Schaeuble insisted he was not talked about new figures.

Speaking at the same conference, Danish Economy Minister Margrethe Vestager, who will chair the meeting as Denmark currently holds the rotating EU presidency, predicted: “The euro will survive the crisis, I’m confident it will.”

“I’m sure that the euro will come out of the crisis in better shape.”

She said there had been a lot of “drama queen debate” about the potential survival of the currency bloc but insisted that the euro had “done its job” by ensuring low inflation and a stable exchange rate. For his part, Schaeuble stressed that “no country will be forced to leave the eurozone.”

The collection of some 4,300 posters, valued at around 4.4 million euros ($5.7 million), was taken by the Nazi propaganda ministry from Jewish dentist Hans Sachs, the top poster collector in Germany from the early 20th century.

Troopers say 45-year-old Jeffrey Yeaw shot at the officers at a home on Peck Street shortly after 10:30 p.m. Thursday. One of the officers returned fire and wounded Yeaw, who is being treated at Hartford Hospital and is expected to survive. The officers weren’t injured.

Competition entry Barbara is tipped to become the first German film since 2004 to win the prestigious Golden Bear.

Police say the men — all of them Syrian or of Syrian origin — destroyed furniture in the building Friday afternoon and sprayed slogans on the facade.

They were briefly detained as they left the embassy.

Germany, the biggest and richest country in the euro zone, has provided the bulk of the funds for the bailouts of Ireland, Portugal and Greece. Now it is firmly rejecting calls to come up with yet more funds for Greece to compensate for any shortfalls in a debt relief deal with private creditors.

On Friday Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle defended Berlin’s tough stance. The Greeks, he insisted, should show that they are willing to implement reforms before getting more money.

“We Germans do not expect from anyone in Europe more than what we are asking from our own citizens. We cannot explain to taxpayers in Germany that they have to do things that others do not want to do while at the same time asking for their money,” Westerwelle said in Brussels.

He pointed out that Germany had already come up over 200 billion euros ($262 billion) for the bailout funds. “It makes no sense” he said, to give more money to Greece, “if we don’t know whether the reforms which have been agreed upon will be really implemented.” He argued that coming up with more money just lessened the pressure to reform.

Negotiations are continuing in Athens with private creditors to find a way of cutting the amount of private sector debt Greece has to pay back. Olli Rehn, the EU Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs, said Friday that a deal was “very close.”