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5 - Men in Hotels

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Bettina Matthias
Affiliation:
Middlebury College
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Summary

I could arrive at the Hotel Savoy with a single shirt, I could leave with twenty trunks and still be the same old Gabriel Dan.

How do men deal with and survive their stay in upscale hotels in the early twentieth century? What is the role of hotels in these men's stories? Joseph Roth's character Gabriel Dan's statement suggests that the relationship between the male guest or hotel resident and his environment is much less unsettling than that of young female guests. He expects this hotel to offer him possibilities for social ascent, but the prospect of economic success would not affect his identity. The Hotel Savoy would be a magic castle without the problems that Else (Fräulein Else), Christine Hoflehner (Rausch der Verwandlung), and even Francine (“Die Hoteltreppe”) have to confront eventually. As a man in a male-dominated society, and in spite of the many roles that he, the former soldier, had to adopt during the war and his three-year internment in Siberia — as a victim, as a perpetrator — Dan relies on an inner identity that is not derived from or dependent on external factors or other people. This man, as well as men in general, enjoys an autonomous place in society that makes him much less vulnerable to the effects of the semi-anonymous and capitalist nature of hotels, a place in life that women are generally denied.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2006

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  • Men in Hotels
  • Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College
  • Book: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
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  • Men in Hotels
  • Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College
  • Book: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
Available formats
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  • Men in Hotels
  • Bettina Matthias, Middlebury College
  • Book: The Hotel as Setting in Early Twentieth-Century German and Austrian Literature
  • Online publication: 05 February 2013
Available formats
×