The Age of the Grand Hotel

In History and Culture

by Sam Bluefarb (March 2012)

The Maria Cristina opened its doors to the public in 1912, scarcely two years before the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1918). When we walked into the dining room, we found ourselves spirited back to that more optimistic time when pomp and ceremony pervaded the collective psyche, and waiters in white jackets hurried to tables to take orders and rush off to deliver them.

And so as a recipe from the crepuscular hotel, its hermetic hallways. its claustrophobic bedrooms, and the supercilious comments of its haughty guests Marcel turns to gaze out at the strand, and the sea beyond.

Like the toadying manager of Lost Time, Aschenbach is led to his room by another of those types who seem to have been drawn to such servile positions in Grand Hotels at the turn of the century.

Since he was expected, he was received with attentive care. A manager, a short, quiet man of flattering courtesy with a black moustache and a French-style frock-coat, accompanied him in the elevator to the second floor and showed him his room. . . . (19)

[2] Jean Renoir, Charles Spaak, Grand Illusion: A Film by Jean Renoir, Classic Film Scripts, trans., Marrianne Alexandre, AndrewSinclair ( New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968), 17.

[3] http://www.connexionfrance.com/expatriate-news-article.php?art=346

[5] Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, Stanley Applebaum, trans. (New York: Dover Publications, 1912, 1924, 1995), 3.

Sam Bluefarb is Prof. Emeritus, Los Angeles Harbor College.

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