Beat Hotel

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In front of the Beat Hotel in Paris : British fashion designer Peter Golding, owner Madame Rachou and Peter's partner busking. Photo: Mike Kay
Commemorative plaque at the successor hotel Le Relais de Vieux Paris

The Beat Hotel was a narrow, shabby 42-room hotel on 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter in Paris . The hotel played an important role as a meeting point and accommodation for members of the Beat Generation from the late 1950s to the early 1960s .

history

The hotel had no real name and was a cheap, shabby dump that barely met the minimum health and safety standards. The name Beat Hotel came about as a mock name. The windows faced the stairwell in the courtyard and offered little light. Hot water was only available on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays. The only bathtub on the ground floor of the establishment had to be paid for in advance with an extra charge for hot water. Curtains and covers were changed and washed once a spring, the bed linen once a month.

The hotel has been run by the Rachou couple since 1933. After the early death of her husband, who died in a traffic accident in 1957, Madame Rachou managed the hotel alone until it closed in 1963. In addition to rented rooms, the hotel had a small bistro on the ground floor. Based on the experience that she had made in an earlier work in an inn - in which Monet and Pissarro , among others , frequented - that artists like to pay their bill “in kind”, Madame Rachou encouraged artists and writers to stay in her hotel and the rent to be paid in the form of paintings or manuscripts. Another unusual thing that found favor with the Bohème customers was the permission to design the rooms according to their own ideas. The hotel was particularly popular with the "extended family" of the Beat Generation, who stayed here from the late 1950s to the early 1960s.

Two residents of the “Beat Hotel”: Allen Ginsberg (left) with friend Peter Orlovsky
Today's Hotel Le Relais de Vieux Paris

Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky were the first writers to billet here in 1957; followed by William S. Burroughs , who is said to have finished the text of Naked Lunch with the help of Brion Gysin and made a lifelong friendship with Gysin. Gysin invented the " cut-up technique" that Burroughs used in the work. In the wake of Burroughs and Gysin was also the math student, hobbyist and programmer Ian Sommerville , who invented the " Dreamachine " with the two and became Burroughs' right-hand man and lover in the 1960s. Furthermore, followed Sinclair ax , Gregory Corso , Jack Kerouac and Harold Norse . Norse wrote the novel Beat Hotel here in 1960 , in which he also used Gysin's cut-up technique. Ginsberg wrote large parts of his poem Kaddish (1958) at the Beat Hotel and Corso wrote the verses for his poem Bomb , which deals with the atomic bomb .

The Beat Hotel closed in January 1963. In its place is now a much more comfortable four-star hotel called Le Relais de Vieux Paris . There are numerous photographs of the beatniks in the rooms . As a Parisian local flavor and tourist attraction, the hotel is often referred to as the “cradle of the beat generation”.

Romain Gary makes fun of the beatniks of Rue Gît-le-Cœur in his autobiographical novel First Love - Last Love :

“I was young, younger than I thought. But my naivete was old and blasé. It was eternal: I met it in every new generation, from the "rats" of 1947 in Saint-Germain-des-Prés to the Californian Beat Generation , with whom I occasionally hang out in order to entertain ... the grimaces of mine To be found again for 20 years. "

literature

  • Barry Miles: The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs and Corso in Paris, 1957–1963 . Atlantic Books, 2001, ISBN 1-903809-14-2 .
  • Harold Norse: Beat Hotel (1960); First publication, translated by Carl Weissner, in MaroVerlag , Gersthofen, 1975. Further editions 1978, 1983; 2001, ISBN 3-87512-229-1 . In the USA first from Attica Press in San Diego, 1983, ISBN 0-912377-00-3 .
  • Harold Chapman, Michael Kellner: Beats à Paris: Paris and the poets of the beat generation 1957–1963 . Kellner, 2001, ISBN 3-933444-12-8 .
  • Harold Chapman: The Beat Hotel . Photo book with a foreword by William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Editeur Gris Banal, 1984, ISBN 2-903942-02-1 .

music

The British singer / songwriter Allan Tylor celebrates the Beat Hotel in the song of the same name, which was published in 2003 on the compilation Closer to the Music, Volume 1 by Stockfisch Records .

Web links

Commons : Beat Hotel  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

annotation

  1. ^ First Chapter The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1957-1963 , by Barry Miles. 2001. ISBN 1-903809-14-2 . The New York Times
  2. ↑ German edition p. 202, trans. Lilly von Sauer. Neuübers. 2010. The hotel was inhabited by rats next to humans, Gary alludes to that. The topos of animal roommates also with Günter Schütz: Peter Weiss and Paris. Röhrig Univ.Vlg., Saarbrücken 2004 ISBN 3-86110-365-6 p. 37, note 57

Coordinates: 48 ° 51 ′ 13.8 "  N , 2 ° 20 ′ 33.9"  E