HOTEL BERLIN: THE POLITICS OF COMMERCIAL HOSPITALITY IN THE GERMAN METROPOLIS, 1875–1945 by Adam Bisno A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland December, 2017 © 2017 Adam Bisno ii Dissertation Advisor: Peter Jelavich Adam Bisno Hotel Berlin: The Politics of Commercial Hospitality in the German Metropolis, 1875–1945 Abstract This dissertation examines the institution of the grand hotel in Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Berlin. It is a German cultural and business history of the fate of classical liberalism, which in practice treated human beings as rational, self-regulating subjects. The major shareholders in the corporations that owned the grand hotels, hotel managers, and hotel experts, through their daily efforts to keep the industry afloat amid the vicissitudes of modern German history, provide a vantage point from which to see the pathways from quotidian difficulties to political decisions, shedding light on how and why a multi-generational group of German businessmen embraced and then rejected liberal politics and culture in Germany. Treating the grand hotel as an institution and a space for the cultivation of liberal practices, the dissertation contributes to the recent body of work on liberal governance in the modern city by seeing the grand hotel as a field in which a dynamic, socially and culturally heterogeneous population tried and ultimately failed to determine the powers and parameters of liberal subjectivity. In locating the points at which liberal policies became impracticable, this dissertation also enters a conversation about the timing and causes of the crisis of German democracy. The dissertation is divided into two parts. The first covers the period 1875 to 1914, between the opening of Berlin’s first grand hotel and the start of World War I. Chapter 1 examines the invention of the grand hotel and its arrival in Berlin, as well as iii the ways in which the presence of women and employees challenged hoteliers in the enactment of what they understood as a liberal project. Chapter 2 focuses on the ten years before World War I and analyzes the tensions between cosmopolitan and nationalist imperatives, especially with respect to American tourists, as hoteliers negotiated the demands that Berlin be seen both as a “world city” catering to guests from across the globe and the capital of a newly unified and increasingly self-assertive nation. Part 2 covers the period 1914 to 1933, from the beginning of major shortages of labor and material as a consequence of war to the destruction of the Weimar Republic. Chapter 3 focuses on the grand hotel at war, particularly the abrogation of liberal practices in face of authoritarian impulses and the slow evaporation of hoteliers’ hopes for a return of the prewar liberal order. The next chapter locates the particular postwar struggles and frustrations that led the majority of Berlin’s hoteliers to abandon liberalism and the pro-Republican parties. The last chapter establishes the extent of the reemergence of liberalism in Weimar’s “golden years” of relative stability as well as why, after that period, the board of directors of the principal hotel corporation in Berlin decided to let Hitler continue to use their flagship property as his Berlin headquarters. An epilogue extends into the Nazi period, when every last grand hotel burned to the ground. iv Contents List of Figures vii Acknowledgments x Introduction 1 Chapter 1: The Grand Hotels of Imperial Berlin 23 The First Grand Hotels 29 Grand Hotels of the Friedrichstadt 34 Twentieth-Century Additions 55 The Grand Hotel Hierarchy 68 Case Study: The Kaiserhof 84 Conclusion 107 Chapter 2: Cosmopolitanism, Nationalism, and the Grand Hotel in Wilhelmine Berlin 108 The Sociability of Hotel Society 113 The Parvenu’s Berlin 116 The Nationalist’s Berlin 125 The Cosmopolitan’s Berlin 131 The American’s Berlin 146 Conclusion 153 Chapter 3: The Grand Hotel in Wartime 157 Shortages 158 A Silver Lining 167 The End of Cosmopolitanism 171 The End of Conspicuous Consumption 173 The Hierarchy 176 Combining Forces 182 The Disappearing Hotels 185 Conclusion 192 Chapter 4: Hoteliers Against the Republic 194 A Litany of Disasters 194 Hyperinflation 223 Recriminations 231 Conclusion 239 v Chapter 5: The Grand Hotel and the Crisis of German Democracy 241 Hotel Berlin in Weimar Culture 242 Under Pressure 262 The Politics of Pessimism 276 The Great Depression 287 The Crisis of German Democracy 296 September 15, 1932 303 Epilogue: Hotel Germania 311 Gleichschaltung 312 The Kaiserhof Myth 319 Business in the Third Reich 323 Renovations 326 Olympic Hospitality 334 Germania 335 War 336 Destruction 340 Reunification 343 Bibliography 346 vi List of Figures Figure 1. The Hotel Kaiserhof, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 16. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 39! Figure 2. Corner elevation of the Kaiserhof, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 20. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .............................................................................. 39! Figure 3. Fire at the Kaiserhof, October 11, 1875. Illustration by Karl Röhling for the Illustrirte Zeitung, October 23, 1875. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. ........................ 41! Figure 4. The Central Hotel in Berlin, Illustrirte Zeitung 72 (1879), 480. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. ............................................................................................................... 45! Figure 5. Illustration by Robert Meinhardt, 1868, in LAB, F Rep. 270, A 2062. Landesarchiv Berlin. ............................................................................................. 49! Figure 6. Detail from a drawing of the Central Hotel in Berlin (op. cit., fig. 4). .............. 54! Figure 7. Detail from a drawing of the Central Hotel in Berlin (op. cit). ......................... 54! Figure 8. Detail from a drawing of the Central Hotel in Berlin (op. cit.). ........................ 54! Figure 9. The Hotel Fürstenhof, postcard (undated), author’s collection. ........................ 58! Figure 10. Palm garden of the Hotel Adlon, Innen-Dekoration 19 (1908), 12. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 64! Figure 11. Reception hall of the Hotel Adlon, Innen-Dekoration 19 (1908), 13. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 64! Figure 12. The American Bar at the Hotel Adlon, Innen-Dekoration 19 (1908), 16. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 65! Figure 13. The Beethoven Parlor in the Hotel Adlon, Innen-Dekoration 19 (1908), 23. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 65! Figure 14. Ensuite bathroom at the Hotel Adlon, Innen-Dekoration 19 (1908), 51. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 67! Figure 15. Page boys at the Elite Hotel in central Berlin, ca. 1910, in LAB, F Rep. 290– 02, v. Nr. 47231, I. Nr. 0276610. Landesarchiv Berlin. ....................................... 79! Figure 16. Kitchen workers in the basement of the Hotel Esplanade, 1908, in LAB, F Rep. 290–02, v. 47245, I. 0199493. Landesarchiv Berlin. ................................... 81! Figure 17. The Kaiserhof cellar. Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 17. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 87! Figure 18. Kaiserhof cross section, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 21. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................... 88! vii Figure 19. Ground floor of the Kaiserhof, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 18. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .............................................................................. 90! Figure 20. “Overview of Hotel Personnel,” in Edward Guyer, Das Hotelwesen der Gegenwart (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1874), 172. ....................................................... 96! Figure 21. Courtyard of the Kaiserhof, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 22. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................. 100! Figure 22. Upper floor of the Kaiserhof, Atlas zur Zeitschrift für Bauwesen 28 (1877), 19. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. .................................................................................. 105! Figure 23. Detail from a bill of the Hotel Schaurté, in LAB, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030, Nr. 13390, f. 53. Landesarchiv Berlin. ...................................................................... 108! Figure 24. Grill room and American-style bar, opened 1908, of the Esplanade Hotel, postcard (undated), author’s collection. .............................................................. 117! Figure 25. Advertisement by Ernst Deutsch (a.k.a. Ernst Dryden) for an informal restaurant on perhaps the most fashionable corner of the Friedrichstraße, the epicenter of Berlin’s central pleasure zone and, not coincidentally, the city’s thriving sex trades. Anthony Lipmann, Divinely Elegant: The World of Ernst Dryden (New York: Penguin, 1989), 40. ............................................................ 122! Figure 26. Bust