6 - Menschen im Hotel

Summary

We have arrived at our last stop, Vicki Baum's Grand Hôtel in Berlin's city center. The time is March 1929, the global economic crisis has not yet hit, and modernism rules in Weimar Germany's capital. The electric-lit streets are lined with shops and filled with cars and noise; people rush from one end of the city to the other, and technology and mass events structure their use of time. The revolving door of the elegant Grand Hôtel never stands still, creating a constant exchange between the street and the inside, and as Baum sweeps us into the hotel on the first page of her novel, we enter a universe that she herself thought of as a “symbol of life” in modernism. Given this concept, the novel neither attempts to portray an individual guest's story nor to discuss the complex relationship between the individual and the hotel setting in the way many other texts do. As the programmatic title Menschen im Hotel (literally: people in a hotel) suggests, people in general are the topic, and only the novel's German subtitle “Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen,” a “dime novel with backgrounds,” promises more information. The novel's generic-sounding title announces one of the book's basic aesthetic principles, which finds itself mirrored in the important symbol of the revolving door: Vicki Baum is about to tell the story of random people in a random hotel whose only thing in common is the fact that they all stay in the same place at the same time.