Event: 20th century hotel writers – Darran Anderson and Marcel Krueger in conversation

People in the hotel

“The hotel that I love like a fatherland is situated in one of the great port cities of Europe, and the heavy gold Antiqua letters in which its banal name is spelled out (shining across the roofs of the gently banked houses) are in my eye metal flags, metal bannerets that instead of fluttering blink out their greeting. Other men may return to hearth and home, and wife and child; I celebrate my return to lobby and chandelier, porter and chambermaid—and between us we put on such a consummate performance that the notion of merely checking into a hotel doesn’t even raise its head.” – Joseph Roth, “Arrival in the Hotel”

by Marcel Krueger:

I am not going to lie: I really like hotels. There is something very appealing about entering my room after I've checked in, unpacking my bags, setting up my laptop, notes and reference books I require for the piece of writing I'm working on the desk, and beginning to fill the blank canvas that a hotel room presents for each new guest, even if it's just for a brief stay. Checkout will come soon, my presence erased by the cleaning staff and the room again turned into a blank canvas for the next guest. Hotels, after a fashion, can provide us with a  fresh start whenever we visit. Or with an escape, to a a temporary home turned into a room of one's own by the magic of the “do not disturb” sign. And that applies to any hotel, regardless if it's the Grand Hotel des Londres in Istanbul or a B&B franchise behind the train station in Lüneburg.   

Of course, I am aware of the fact that being able to avail of a hotel on my travels is a privilege. And there are many other aspects of hotels that have nothing to do with the romance of travel or creative work: of being used as emergency (or permanent) accommodation for homeless people and refugees in the Republic of Ireland; of the Hotel Lux in Moscow becoming a trap for exiles that had fled Nazi Germany and being transported from here directly to the GULAG and the murder basements of the NKVD; of the Hotel Europa in Belfast becoming the “most bombed hotel of Europe” during the Troubles; of both Tito and Serbian war criminal Arkan using the Grand Hotel Pristina, the latter and his gang posting a sign at the main entrance of the hotel that read: “The entrance is forbidden for Albanians, Croats, and dogs”.

Hotels have always fascinated writers, as places of refuge and as setting alike, so it is no wonder that especially the first half of the 20th century is rife with books and stories set in hotels. I therefore honoured that one of my favourite Berlin hotels, the Circus Hotel on Rosenthaler Platz, has invited me and one of my favourite European writers, the mighty Darran Anderson (who was just awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction), to talk  more about our favourite 20th century hotel writers and their books. And we'll not only talk about the likes of Joseph Roth and Vicki Baum, but also about the real-life hotels that influenced them. 

“I have been here for long enough. If I stayed longer I would be unworthy of the great blessing of being a stranger. I might degrade the hotel to a home if I no longer left it unless I had to. I want to feel welcome here, but not at home. I want to be able to come and go. It’s better to know that a hotel is waiting for me here.” – Joseph Roth, “Leaving the Hotel”

READING: FAVOURITE 20TH CENTURY HOTEL WRITERS
DARRAN ANDERSON AND MARCEL KRUEGER IN CONVERSATION
Monday 26th June, 4 pm, Circus Hotel Lobby. Free event. 
Rosenthaler Straße 1 
10119 Berlin 

What We See 04: Sonnenallee Onwards

WHAT WE SEE is a new series of feuilletons to be published on Elsewhere, born out of a new project inspired by the work of the Austrian-Jewish writer Joseph Roth. On 11 March 2023, the first WHAT WE SEE event was held in Berlin, and the first four essays to be published were read by their writers at Lettretage, along with a discussion around Joseph Roth and his life and work.

Project Editors: Sanders Isaac Bernstein, Julia Bosson, Paul Scraton & Alexander Wells

By Tom Rollins:

“It’s a grotesque contradiction, a spring evening in this part of town whose grime and greasepaint don’t so much conceal its Levantine-working-class nature as emphasize it”––only it’s winter now, late cretaceous tail-end of it at least, never ends until it does, sudden and too late. 

And anyway, here and now, the contradictions are grotesque but related to different things, different people. 

*

Passing the old petrol station and the Damaskus Konditorei, a newspaperman trying to interview someone on the street about the ethno-political significance of fireworks and who exactly is it that actually runs these shawarma restaurants, I am distracted momentarily by a man in a tarboush, red-velvet and tassel-topped, who is pushing a trolley full of cardboard boxes along the pavement. It is distracting—an orientalist cartoon for the feuilleton emplotted onto a street named after the sun that somehow always feels cold as concrete. 

But despite others’ best attempts, nothing here takes precedence. This is a mid-morning corso of faces, snatches of conversation, wholesale delivery men forever moving boxes into shopfronts. 

As I keep walking, someone is shouting the prices of vegetables, first in Arabic and then in German. Two young lads, arms interlinked, greet an older man, surprised, with a familiarity that is years old, from another place. “Peace be upon you, uncle, how are your things? When did you arrive?” Theirs are warm, knowing smiles that acknowledge the distances required for this conversation to be happening here. 

*

A Syrian storyteller said recently that, here, “even a plate of hummus isn’t like the plate of hummus [one] knows from back home…a bag of za’atar isn’t either.” 

It is, at the same time that it isn’t. Community that is not quite community, common access. Tied together by a loose thread, a street. 

*

Oh by the way, the other day I was reading my copy of Roth while waiting for the M41 opposite Pannierstr. Roth was either in the middle of describing the city as framed by an apartment window-frame or the other way round. I forget. 

I was holding the book in my left hand, my peripheral vision looking down framed by dragon-skin cobblestones and a smashed bottle of Pilsner Urquell. I couldn’t concentrate. 

And then I heard an Irish guy on a date, waiting at the bus stop, saying, “Well yeah…so the reason it’s called Kreuzkölln is because it’s more like Kreuzberg than Neukölln, the restaurants are nicer, even though it’s still in Neukölln.” 

*

Off the bus, further south, the city’s dinosaur bones start to bear themselves, vertebrae-bumps of cast-iron and brickwork still traceable by hand and foot. 

Two bricks thick, the cobbled trace of the Berlin Wall darts off, crosses a road past a Lidl then takes in a really big breath. Shape-shifting through a 19th-century railway arch, it reappears on the other side, and casually walks off down the pavement. 

The Ringbahn passes overhead, and a new addition to the dual carriageway ringroad is being built underneath it. Somehow in between, an A-road leads south toward forgetful commuter towns. The canal is never far away.

Dumper trucks are shipping the sandy, loamy earth away from a construction site for the new road—how many more of them would it take to uncover all that has happened here?—digging beyond the wasteground shrubs, plastic bottles and crisp packets, past the concrete foundations of the Wall and through the underlying strata of abandoned wire-frame spectacles, rotting leather boots and saxophones, Prussian moustaches, novels about aristocratic romances frustrated in corsets and drawing-rooms.

This is what the graves of dinosaurs look like, the evidence of mass dying, bones on bones. 

***

Tom Rollins is a researcher and writer from the north of England, based in Berlin after several years in the Middle East. He's interested in place and displacement, political geography, walking, and Syria. 

What We See: Joseph Roth and Our Berlin – A call for submissions

On the 11 March 2023 at Lettretage in Berlin, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place is co-hosting an evening of discussion about the writer Joseph Roth and a series of readings inspired by his writing. We are looking for writers in Berlin to join us at the event…

"What I see, what I see. What I see is the day in all its absurdity and triviality. A horse, harnessed to a cab, staring with lowered head into its nose bag, not knowing that horses originally came into the world without cabs; a small boy playing with marbles on the sidewalk. He watches the purposeful bustle of the grownups all around him, and, himself full of the delights of idleness, has no idea that he represents the acme of creation, but instead yearns to be grown up; a policeman who fancies himself as the still point at the center of a whirlpool of activity, and the pillar of authority—enemy to the street, and placed there to supervise it and accepts its tribute in the form of good order."
—"What I See," Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth keenly observed the Berlin of the 1920s in his now-classic feuilletons, short reports on the city scene. How might he have seen Berlin today? We're looking for work that – like Roth – explores life in Berlin today, from the playful to the political. So whether you have read Roth’s pieces on Berlin or not, we are looking for contemporary short nonfiction pieces, scenes and sketches, mini-reportages and place-based essays about Berlin.

Together we will create a portrait of a city.

Need some inspiration? How about writing about one of Berlin’s underexplored curiosities, or unusual approaches to familiar places? Eavesdropping in one of the city’s many watering holes, at the barbershop or in a hotel lobby? A late-night visit to the train station or moving through the city by public transport? A profile of Berlin’s outsiders or newcomers? An early beer as the corner pub opens its doors to the morning sun?

All of these are the starting point for one of Roth’s Berlin stories, and he would certainly find plenty to write about if he were to use them again today.

Your submissions can be previously published or unpublished, but we would need you to be able to read at our event on the 11 March. We would also love to showcase the selected unpublished pieces here on Elsewhere as part of a Joseph Roth / Berlin series.

The details:

Language – English
Word Length – 500-1000 words
Send to – JosephRothToday@gmail.com 
Deadline – 24 February 2023
Eligibility – Must be available to read at Lettretage in Berlin at 7 PM on 11 March 2023

Who are we:

Sanders Isaac Bernstein, born in London, grew up in New Jersey (USA). His writing has appeared, among other places, in newyorker.com, Hypocrite Reader, and The Bad Version, which he founded and edited from 2011-2014. He has written on Joseph Roth for both Majuscule and Slow Travel Berlin. He holds a PhD in Literature from the University of Southern California.   

Julia Bosson is a writer originally from Ojai, California. Her work has appeared in publications such as BOMB, VICE, Guernica, and the Believer, among others. The recipient of grants from the Fulbright Program, DAAD, and the MFJC, she has been awarded fellowships and residencies from LABA Berlin, the Wassaic Project, Vermont Studio Center, Monson Arts, Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, and the Catwalk Institute. She currently teaches writing at the Cooper Union and resides in Berlin, Germany, where she is at work on a novel about the life and journalism of Joseph Roth.

Paul Scraton was born in the north of England and has lived in Berlin since 2002. He is the editor in chief of Elsewhere: A Journal of Place and the author of a number of books for Influx Press including Ghosts on the Shore: Travels along Germany's Baltic coast (2017) and the novella of the forest In the Pines (2021). He has written for New Statesman on the life and work of Joseph Roth and his next book explores the place of the forest in German cultural identity via a long walk in the Harz mountains, following in the footsteps of Heinrich Heine.

Alexander Wells is a freelance writer and critic from Australia. His reviews and essays—including one on Joseph Roth's urban miniatures—have been published by The Guardian, The Baffler and the European Review of Books among others. He is currently Books Editor for the print monthly Exberliner.

Elsewhere editor Paul Scraton on the Papertrail podcast

By Paul Scraton:

I was extremely pleased to be asked to take part in the Papertrail podcast, a fantastic new audio series that invites writers and other artists to chat for a while about some of their favourite books. Because of my own writing, and the theme of our journal, we decided to select three books that are somehow dealing with the idea of place but which also have a special personal connection for me. If you want to find out what they are about, and why they are important to me, then you'll need to have a listen. Thanks to Alex for inviting me, and I hope if it inspires any of you to read these books I am sure you won't regret it.

Papertrail podcast website and archive of all interviews up to now here