The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature Checking in to Tell a Story

As social microcosms, hotels are fitting experimental settings for literary inquiries into the tension between the individual's quest for a place in the world and the technocratic rationalism of modern life. The book has two parts, the first establishing the cultural and theoretical context and the second providing analyses of literary works set in hotels. A brief history of commercial hospitality and a chapter establishing the theoretical framework of the hotel as a paradigmatic, ambivalent, semi-public, and stage-like modern space lead to readings of texts by Schnitzler, Zweig, Werfel, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, and Vicki Baum. BETTINA MATTHIAS is assistant professor of German at Middlebury College.The employment of the hotel as a setting for literary works of the period and the cultural reasons behind it.This study examines the cultural and literary significance of the hotel as a setting of choice in German/ Austrian literature between 1890 and 1945. As the bourgeois concept of "home" became problematic after important changes in German-speaking society during the nineteenth century, many writers of fiction chose the literary setting of the hotel to explore the status of the individual and the notions of public and private. The hotel itself is a product of forces that enabled greater social mobility after 1830, and stands as a symbol for the new social-that is, capitalist-reality. It is also the space in whose semi-anonymous atmosphere the individual finds the "Simmelian distance" to feel liberated from social and cultural constraints and to explore cultural taboos including sex, drugs, and crime. As social microcosms, hotels are fitting experimental settings for literary inquiries into the tension between the individual's quest for a place in the world and the technocratic rationalism that governs modern life. The book has two parts, dealing with, first, the cultural and theoretical context of the hotel, and second, analyses of literary works set in hotels. A brief history of commercial hospitality situates the hotel within the socio-economic context of the late nineteenth century. The following chapter establishes the theoretical framework within which we can consider the hotel a paradigmatic modern space (with reference to Simmel, Kracauer, and Veblen) and discusses the ambivalent, semi-public, stage-like nature of this capitalized place. A presentation of stock elements of modern hotel culture that form the basic grid for hotel stories leads to readings of texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, and finally Vicki Baum, whose Grand Hotel represents a new form of hotel narrative in which the urban hotel, not the individual, becomes the main player.