Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy

Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin, 1875-1933

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

Av Adam Bisno

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Through the colorful world of Berlin's grand hotels, this book charts a new history of German liberalism and explores the changing relationships among big business, society, and politics. Behind imposing facades, managers and workers were often the picture of orderly and harmonious service, despite living in sometimes uncomfortable proximity. Then, during World War I, class tensions rose to the surface and failed to resolve in the following years. Doubting the ability of the Weimar Republic to contain these conflicts, a group of hotel owners, some of the most prominent Jewish industrialists and financiers in the country, chose to let Adolf Hitler use their hotel, the Kaiserhof, as his Berlin headquarters in 1932. From a splendid suite opposite the chancellery, Hitler and his henchmen engineered the assumption of power, the death of the Weimar Republic, and the ruin of their hosts, the Kaiserhof's owners: Jewish liberals now fleeing for their lives. Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy asks how this came about and explores the decision-making processes that produced such catastrophic consequences. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-11-02
Mått159 x 235 x 18 mm
Vikt480 g
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SeriePublications of the German Historical Institute
Antal sidor234
FörlagCambridge University Press
ISBN9781316515631

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'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.' Pieter M. Judson, author of The Habsburg Empire: A New History