Reviewed by: Grandhotels: Luxusräume und Gesellschaftswandel in New York, London und Berlin um 1900 by Habbo Knoch Jan Logemann Grandhotels: Luxusräume und Gesellschaftswandel in New York, London und Berlin um 1900. By Habbo Knoch. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016. Pp. 495. Cloth €24.90. ISBN 978-3835319110. Few places better captured the sense of grandeur, refinement, and modernity of turn-of-the-century metropolitan life than its new luxury hotels. Much like upscale department stores, they catered to the needs and tastes of a select few, but they sparked the imagination and desires of the wider society. Habbo Knoch's Grandhotels tells the history of these magnificent spaces, which reflect broader transformations of metropolitan cities and their society between the final decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The time "around 1900" witnessed the decline of traditional social stratifications throughout the Atlantic world and the rise of new patterns of consumption and sociability. Large hotels provided a prominent stage on which these transformations played out; they were at once symptom and cause of a more differentiated consumer modernity. Over nearly 500 pages, Knoch takes the reader on a dazzling tour of these modern-day palaces and invites us to experience them through the eyes of contemporaries. The first two chapters sketch the emergence of the modern hotel over the course of the long nineteenth century from a transnational perspective. He emphasizes the importance of British travelers in propelling the hotel business and distinguishes between the continental European model of the family hotel, geared towards aristocratic customers seeking the privacy of their homes in faraway places, and the American urban [End Page 651] hotel, characterized by its public facilities and a culture of republican sociability. The Swiss Alps and the US East Coast alike influenced the development of new models of hospitality. Spurred on by railroads and industrialization, hotels grew in size and number, and the reader is given a detailed picture, based on travel guides and urban registers, of how the "modern" and professional hotel was constructed in the minds and expectations of contemporaries. By 1900, the age of the truly lavish "grand hotel" had arrived, exemplified by the Savoy in London, the Adlon in Berlin, and above all the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. Knoch connects the proliferation of these temples of extravagance to the rise of the global metropolis and long-distance travel (particularly the advent of luxury steamships and train lines like the Orient Express). Equipped with the latest technological innovations from telephones to bathrooms and elevators, hotels also embodied the modern organization. New occupations appeared, including lift boys, waiters, porters, concierges and maître d's, who managed the constant interplay between an urban public and the privacy of hotel guests. Hotel managers joined professional organizations whose publications promoted the transnational circulation of new standards and the latest fashion. Hotel detectives surveilled the sumptuous entry halls and restaurants, which at once became centers of urban sociability and a refuge from hectic modern life. Grandhotels furnishes a comparative social and cultural history of urban high society as it played out within the confines of these luxury spaces. Everywhere—but especially in New York—traditional elites and aristocratic circles had to contend with new arrivals, foreigners, businessmen, and parvenus. Hotel dinners, dances, and restaurants reflected a society where status had become more fluid, but contemporary writers and commentators also voiced concern about the potential for moral corruption inherent in hotel life. Women traveling alone, imposters preying on guests, and other dangers became the focus of critiques of the modernity these hotels represented. World War I, finally, marked a crossroads: whereas the US continued to experience a boom in large hotels with over two thousand rooms, European hotels, shaken by political conflict, economic crises, and the decline of old, aristocratic elites, never regained their prewar grandeur. In films and popular literature hotels caught the attention of a new media culture, while the American model and the American traveler became ever more controversial figures in European eyes. We encounter the familiar tropes of modernity and its discontents, but Knoch interweaves the threads of his narrative masterfully, demonstrating the central place occupied by hotels in turn...
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Sep 13, 2022
Bernardo Mueller + 1
Open Access
