Cambridge University Press
From a splendid suite at the Hotel Kaiserhof in Berlin, Adolf Hitler and his henchmen conducted the negotiations that brought them to power in 1933. This book explains why the hotel’s owners, most of them Jewish, allowed it.
Why didn’t they kick him out before it was too late? In answering the question, I take you back to the 1870s, when the Kaiserhof opened, to tour the premises, upstairs and downstairs. We’ll locate the secrets and weaknesses that made the hotel’s owners think that acquiescence to Hitler might be the right course of action. Soon, though, the owners were fleeing Germany for their lives, and ten years later, the Kaiserhof lay in smoldering ruins. A case study in spectacular failure, this story is also a warning: In the event of a crisis, businesspeople won’t necessarily know what’s good for them. Or their businesses.Reviews
Pieter M. Judson – author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History
“In Bisno’s elegant prose, Berlin’s grand hotels come alive as critical sites where titans of the hotel industry abandoned their nineteenth-century liberalism for an increasingly anti-liberal politics after 1918. Despite their globalist interests, and against the evidence of their own books, hoteliers of the 1920s increasingly adopted a political pessimism that ultimately required nothing less than a right-wing national revolution to solve the challenges they faced. For this choice they and their hotels suffered dearly. In weaving his beautifully persuasive narrative of the rise and fall of the grand hotel, Bisno pays close attention to the people who inhabited every floor of these hotels as well as the spatial, material, and social dynamics they faced, from the rise of ensuite bathrooms and walk-in refrigerators to the strict hierarchies imposed on both staff and guests.”
Molly Loberg – author of The Struggle for the Streets of Berlin
“A fascinating glimpse behind the facades of grand hotels and into the complex social world of privileged guests, struggling service workers, and beleaguered bosses. Bisno reveals the startling potential of liberalism to consume itself by literally opening doors to those who make no secret of their desire to destroy it.”
