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  • The Hotel As Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature: Checking in to Tell a Story
  • Felix Tweraser
The Hotel As Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature: Checking in to Tell a Story. By Bettina Matthias. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2006. x + 226 pages. $75.00.

This entertaining and original monograph is part creative non-fiction and part engaging scholarship. Matthias frames her investigation of the hotel as setting in early twentieth-century [End Page 582] prose with a virtual tour of a typical grand hotel of the time, complete with cast of characters and settings, as well as a brief history of the hotel's rise as a function of the increased buying power of the middle class, before constructing a cogent theoretical apparatus to anchor the insightful readings of selected texts in which the hotel functions as setting: Georg Simmel on money, Thorstein Veblen on conspicuous consumption and the leisure class, and Siegfried Kracauer on the function of the hotel lobby in modernity. Matthias justifies such an interdisciplinary approach by arguing that the hotel—as a micro-community within a larger whole—both suspends and reinscribes social distinctions based on class, gender, and status: "In order to understand the appeal that the hotel as a setting may have had for authors around 1900 and afterwards, we need to examine its role in the social life of the time, the trends that contributed to its status as an important social meeting place, and specific combination of time, space, and money in hotels, factors that determine the character of inhabited space in general" (2).

After this introductory tour, Matthias gets down to the interpretation of key hotel texts, including Arthur Schnitzler's "Fräulein Else," Franz Werfel's "Die Hoteltreppe," Stefan Zweig's "Untergang eines Herzens," Franz Kafka's Der Verschollene, Joseph Roth's Hotel Savoy, and Thomas Mann's Felix Krull, before devoting one entire chapter to Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel. Such a diverse array of writers was drawn to hotels because "they are perfect experimental settings. They offer ample material for those who wish to study the dynamics between the individual and society or a chosen sub-group thereof and the subject's struggle to find the right balance between feelings of estrangement and liberation. As isolated places away from the familiar context of everyday life, hotels represent social laboratories for writers to test the stability of traditional value systems, and they use the spatial limits of their setting to zoom in on a potential struggle that would be harder to detect or isolate in a less formal setting" (5).

As a laboratory for narrative experimentation and investigation of social and cultural roles, the hotel was in this way ideal. Matthias thoughtfully groups the texts she analyzes according to markers of gender and class, identifying in her chapter "Women in Hotels" the possibilities of liberation from patriarchal structures that open up for her gallery of female protagonists, possibilities that prove illusory and form the substance of the texts' social criticism. In the chapter "Men in Hotels" Matthias argues that for the male protagonists in the texts under discussion, the hotel represents a complex system of signs and codes that is then mastered in a way that is unavailable to the female protagonists—here one thinks of Felix Krull and Karl Rossmann. The final chapter is a more lengthy exegesis of Vicki Baum's Menschen im Hotel, which Matthias correctly places in the context of Neue Sachlichkeit and the movement's attendant concerns with the individual's engagement with modernity: "the hotel as a stage on which the human drama unfolds, as a symbol that mirrors man's existential predicament, but also as the realm where the mediated and often enforced artificial nature of human relations in modernism is obvious" (191).

The volume's bibliographic apparatus is exemplary: the endnotes are invariably informative and fun reading in their own right—the author has a winning and humorous style here and generally, but not at the expense of scholarly rigor—and the bibliography puts together a wide variety of sources in an easy-to-use format. As one has come to...

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