Besides the island’s many seaside eccentricities, everywhere there are little reminders of the Cold War. Rectangular, beachfront bungalows in GDR-grey sit alongside plush new apartments and the odd turquoise Trabant still chugs around the island looking for a mechanic and a garage selling its high-polluting fuel.  Most visitors travel around on mountain bikes or aboard the island’s narrow-gauge steam train Rasende Roland and, with destinations called Spyker Castle and Cockroach Bay, it’s hard not to imagine you’re part of a Famous Five adventure.  Johannes Brahms used to go for a dip in the warm sea off Sassnitz on the east coast. Its cobbled harbour was one of Germany’s main bathing centres in the 19th century; today it’s a centre for arts and crafts.  The striped swimsuits have disappeared but there are plenty of boathouses smoking fish and, moored to the quayside, a huge, black submarine that was formerly part of the British fleet. No one seemed to know why she had ended up there, but HMS Otus is open to the public all year round.  I kept seeing the dachshunds on every promenade and clifftop walk and they followed me to the great chalk cliffs of the upper-east coast. The vast white façades were made famous by the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, who painted them during his honeymoon here in 1818.  Large sections have since been eroded and, in the past two years, swathes of chalk have crashed into the sea. It is a great location for fossil-hunters but, just when the island has opened up to the world, it is starting to disappear.  I already had a little piece of Berlin wall in a perspex globe and now I’ve got a tiny shard of Friedrich’s chalk to go with it. But I’m most proud of my Baltic amber, found lodged in a piece of driftwood on the beach near Sassnitz.  Amber turns up all along the Baltic coast. “It’s best to hunt for it after a storm when the sea is cold enough for amber to float and everything has been churned up,” said Georg Heissler, director of the island’s AVR hotel group.  “I don’t go for walks with my wife on the beach any more as every time I turn round she is bending over some rocks 50 metres away.”  You can buy amber (or pretend you found it) in Rügen’s swish east-coast resorts. Restaurants there serve the usual beer-and-sausage spectaculars as well as large portions of perch, sander and — for one month only — the green-boned hornhecht that swims up from the south Atlantic, fills up on herring eggs and vanishes.  “Because 99 per cent of the holidaymakers are German, you don’t find menus in English or with pictures of your food,” said Porter. In fact, it’s still very unusual even to hear an English voice on the island. It was nice to go into a hotel in Europe where you still need sign language to explain that you’ve lost the key to the minibar.  The writer Christopher Isherwood visited the island in the early 1930s and described seeing a roe deer being chased through the woods by a Borzoi dog. You could still imagine seeing the chase. Nothing has changed. The beech forests are still thick and dark, hiding tall hunting platforms and wooden lodges where you can have a picnic and a proper swing.  Handkerchiefs tend to be worn in blazer pockets rather than on heads. It’s a place where the sandcastle is still king and where the locals spend their afternoons talking to birds in thatched roofs and mending wicker baskets.  Newcomers to the island (there is a new bridge linking it to the mainland) should head first to the seaside mansions in Binz or to pinstriped Sellin, just down the coast. I took the glass elevator down to the sand there and settled into a Strandkorb, a cross between a Brighton deckchair and something an illusionist would use to make his assistant disappear. The double seat tips backwards and there is even a locker underneath where you can store your towel and any amber trapped in your flip-flops.  With swans tracking you from the sea, it’s a two-hour walk down the coast to Göhren. You need to be strong-willed not to stop for every glint of amber and also be aware that most people who bid you good day will not be wearing any clothes. Most will also be holding a glass of freshly pressed Sanddorn juice with an appropriately placed serviette.  The amber-coloured Sanddorn berry (sea buckthorn) is meant to increase stamina and everyone on the island drinks it. You need to if you want to swim out to the Buskum rock off Göhren’s beach, a Lilo-foundering outcrop a few hundred yards from the shore. Newly-weds swim out and dance on it to ensure a happy life; in winter, when the sea freezes, you can skate out almost to Sweden.  “In the summer, southern Rügen has the most sunshine and lowest rainfall in Germany and the ground temperature is the same as Sicily’s,” said Heissler, who came to the island 12 years ago and fell in love with a former Miss Rügen.  Beauty pageants were banned elsewhere in East Germany but, as a holiday destination, Rügen was spared the worst excesses of the Stasi regime. Exercising and bathing were encouraged, but there was no going to the beach after dark.  What has made Rügen notorious, however, is something left over from an altogether darker period. Running alongside one of the island’s finest beaches, Prora is a vast, reinforced-concrete holiday camp built by Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s to prepare people for the forthcoming war.  The building stretches for more than three miles and it takes 20 minutes just to cycle along it. A six-storey seaside hotel for 20,000 people, Prora would have been dreadful to stay in despite the guaranteed sea-view. Construction was never completed and no one ever did have a holiday there. “The locals think of Prora more in terms of its use as a soldier training camp during the Cold War rather than as part of Hitler’s holiday plans,” said Heissler.  The building currently houses Rügen’s largest discotheque, a youth hostel and museum. A large slab of it was recently sold to a developer from Hamburg who wants to turn the listed structure into — what else? — a budget holiday camp, although Prora’s ceilings are so low it might be better used as a retirement home for dachshunds.  Rügen is certainly up there with the best family holiday destinations in Europe and, even better, most British holidaymakers have never heard of it.  Ryanair (www.ryanair.com) flies twice daily from Stansted to Lübeck (Hamburg) airport , which is a two-hour drive from Rügen. Berlin and Hamburg airports are both less than three hours away. There is also a train connection from Berlin or Hamburg to Binz (08718 808066, www.bahn.co.uk), with singles from €41.  Hotel MeeresBlick, Friedrichstr.2, 18586 Göhren (00 49 (0) 38308 5650, www.avr.de/english/hotel-meeresblick/. The restaurant has the best reputation on the island and also offers courses in cooking with herbs. Double rooms €46-€81 (£36-£64) per person.  Schloss Spyker, Schlossallee 1, 18551 Spyker (38302 770, www.schloss-spyker.de). Unusual to find a hotel the same colour as your passport; rates at this supposedly haunted castle are €50-€100 per person.  Hotel Badehaus Goor, Fürst-Malte-Allee 1, 18581 Lauterbach (38301 88260, www.hotel-badehaus-goor.de). This 19th-century, colonnaded bathing house near picturesque Putbus has been turned into a smart hotel and business centre. Double rooms cost between €110 and €210, including breakfast and dinner.
The Baltic island of R&uuml;gen has been a popular holiday destination since the   19th century. Jon Bryant finds out why.