12 Nov Hotel Berlin
The 1943 novel by Vicki Baum
(1945) Hotel Berlin is all about what was happening in a grand Berlin hotel near the end of World War II. What is interesting is to watch it with the perspective of the viewer in early to mid-1945 … before the war was over, before everyone knew what was really happening in camps like Dachau. Incidentally, one month later the true horrors of this camp were exposed.
The film is based on a 1943 novel by the Jewish Austrian writer Hedwig “Vicki” Baum, Hier stand ein Hotel (Hotel Berlin/ Here Stood A Hotel.) An earlier book, Menschen im Hotel (“People at a Hotel”) was the inspiration for another movie, 1932’s “Grand Hotel,” also set in Berlin.
Both movies focus on the political activities of the guests’ comings and goings. All the characters are German. Every Nazi stereotype is used, but it is also obvious that many of the Germans are just regular people, struggling to get through the war, still unaware of how bad things would become there.
According to this TCM article, “You won’t see another movie made on American soil that so dares to sympathize with Nazi Germany and attends to its dread of the war’s end, and its day of reckoning.”
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