Hotel Adlon

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Today's Hotel Adlon, 2004

The Hotel Adlon Kempinski is one of the most luxurious and famous hotels in Germany . It is the Dorotheenstadt in Berlin district center on the boulevard Unter den Linden 77, near the Brandenburg Gate on Pariser Platz , right at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe . It opened on August 23, 1997. It follows the tradition of the original Hotel Adlon, which opened in October 1907, which burned down in 1945 and was later demolished except for a side wing that stood until 1984.

The Hotel Adlon belongs to the hotel group The Leading Hotels of the World .

Old Hotel Adlon

The first Hotel Adlon during the Weimar Republic , 1926

prehistory

Around 1900 it became fashionable among the European upper class to celebrate balls, dinners and other festivities on large public stages. These stages of society were hotels that - following the American model - fulfilled all the luxury that the world had to offer at the time. Hotels, and Germany was no exception, had been viewed in earlier centuries as purely “overnight accommodation”. To organize a festival or even a large reception in such a setting was initially unimaginable, since both the nobility and the wealthy upper class were used to celebrating at home or on a country estate.

There was no such development in the United States. Luxury hotels opened early in major centers such as New York or Boston , which were not only reduced to sleeping options, but also offered space for private entertainment, such as games rooms, smoking salons, libraries and cafes . This new type of hotel life penetrated Europe and soon began to bear fruit in the big cities. In Paris and soon in London the fine opened Ritz , in Saint Petersburg , the Hotel Astoria ( ru ) in Vienna feudal Hotel Imperial . In Germany, too, there were elegant hotels, such as the Bristol or the Grand Hotel de Rome , but these were old-fashioned and antiquated compared to the new top class. So the Berlin of the imperial era was eager to finally accommodate one of these great addresses in order to catch up with the other metropolises. Kaiser Wilhelm II supported the project and helped with the procurement of the building site. In 1905 the hotelier Lorenz Adlon bought two plots of land on Unter den Linden boulevard .

On October 24, 1907, the Vossische Zeitung reported in Berlin:

"During yesterday's day, the emperor, empress , princesses and princes had toured the magnificent hotel building and honored Mr. Adlon with their appreciation of what had been created here."

- Quoted from: History of the Hotel Adlon Kempinski 

Building history

Lorenz Adlon was an ambitious businessman who - starting out small - owned several localities and coffee houses (including in the zoological garden ) and financed the construction with the fortune thus created. He had no problems with the permits, as the German Kaiser soon became aware of the project and did everything in his power to support Adlon. For almost two years, the address Unter den Linden, at which the Palais Redern , built by Karl Friedrich Schinkel , stood, became a construction site. Leading architects such as Carl Gause and Robert Leibnitz accompanied the work. When the outside facade became visible, some Berliners were initially amazed. A representative building of feudal architecture was expected, a counterpart to the Berlin City Palace . Instead, the building showed clear, classicist lines with a few Art Nouveau decorations . Here it became clear for the first time that Lorenz Adlon saw himself as an esthete . It was not his intention to compete with the imperial court, nor was the hotel to dominate Pariser Platz. The overall view seemed coordinated, the hotel took up the clear lines of the Brandenburg Gate and thus harmonized with its surroundings. Together with the Palais Arnim , it formed the southeast corner of Pariser Platz.

A unique technical equipment was hidden behind traditionally conservative walls. Electricity and running hot water were standard in the guest rooms. On the lower floors, a café, a restaurant, a lounge , a spacious lobby , a smoking salon, a library, a ladies' room, a music salon and a winter garden , in which the guests took their tea, could be used around the clock. There were also large conference rooms and a ballroom. The interior furnishings of almost all areas were in neo-baroque or Louis-seize style, and there were mostly interior fittings from the Mainz furniture company Bembé , where Lorenz Adlon had once started an apprenticeship as a carpenter. The furnishing of the dining rooms, the ballroom, the winter garden and the bar in “ Adam-Style ” was carried out by the Berlin cabinet maker Kimbel & Friederichsen .

The Vossische Zeitung wrote on the occasion of the opening:

“No unauthorized person wants to deny that the new hotel is an extraordinary and great achievement in new hotel construction and hotel furnishings for a modern city. To make such a creation possible, of course, such a builder was required, his cooperation with such architects, artists, artisans and technicians as those who worked here and - a capital of 15 million. "

- Quoted from: History of the Hotel Adlon Kempinski 

The Adlon myth

The opening was a complete success, and in the first few years the Hotel Adlon , as it was now officially called, began to become an institution. High nobility families sold their winter palaces in Berlin to reside in the hotel's suites. Wilhelm II fled from the draughty rooms of his castle to the luxurious and well-heated rooms of the Adlon. The Foreign Office also liked to use the hotel as an “unofficial guest house”, as there was still no suitable accommodation for high-ranking visitors from abroad. Under the leadership of its founder, the Adlon developed into a house of seeing and being seen. Europe's kings and emperors, the Tsar of Russia , the Maharajah of Patiala , but also industrialists and politicians such as Thomas Alva Edison , Henry Ford , John D. Rockefeller , Walther Rathenau , Gustav Stresemann and Aristide Briand were famous guests of the early years.

Ball of the foreign press in the Hotel Adlon, 1930s
View from the Brandenburg Gate onto Unter den Linden , on the right the ruins of the Adlon with the massive air-raid barrier around the ground floor from the war period, March 1950

After the end of the First World War , only the guest list changed for the time being. Court society and the upper class had perished with the old world. Rich Americans who were on vacation in Europe and who soon brought the name of the hotel across the Atlantic Ocean found themselves where the Kaiser used to stay. In 1919 the American occupiers had their headquarters in the Adlon. However, it was not the US flag, but that of the Red Cross that was flying over the hotel. The " Roaring Twenties " also brought golden times for the Adlon. Charlie Chaplin lost his trouser buttons to the Berliners on the way to the hotel, Marlene Dietrich was discovered here. The Berliner Morgenpost wrote in 1929: “In the great hall of the hotel you could hear the languages ​​of all cultural nations buzzing around each other”. Between 1925 and 1930, the hotel had almost two million visitors, and it was now a permanent establishment in Berlin, indeed a sight . The Greaves travel guide from 1928 called the Adlon a “first-rate hotel, with 450 hotel beds”, while the Baedeker praised the Adlon wine restaurant as “particularly elegant”.

Old Adlon's last years

Immediately after the seizure of power of the Nazis in April 1933 which was briefly Foreign Affairs Bureau of the NSDAP (APA) of Alfred Rosenberg set up in a wing of the building. The steady upswing of the hotel gradually came to an end with the beginning of the Nazi regime in the German Reich . This was mainly due to the decreasing number of American tourists. However, there were high points, such as the Olympic Games in 1936. Louis Adlon had now taken over the management of the hotel with his wife Hedda. The National Socialist celebrities chose the Kaiserhof in Wilhelmstrasse and not the Adlon as the new meeting place for SS generals and the main venue for festivities; Historians assume that the atmosphere of the house was too cosmopolitan and international and so did not fit in with the "German fanaticism".

During the Second World War , the Adlon bunker was built under Pariser Platz . It offered the guests the luxury of the hotel and also served to protect the staff of the neighboring authorities such as the general building inspector . In 1943 the number of guests increased again because the imperial court had been completely destroyed in a bomb attack .

Until the surrender of Berlin on May 2, 1945, the Adlon stood undamaged on the otherwise destroyed Pariser Platz , which was ultimately also used as a military hospital . In the first few days afterwards, the building, occupied by celebrating and plundering Red Army soldiers , burned out for an unexplained cause - except for one side wing. The walls remained and were removed in 1952. The left wing served as a hotel and restaurant for the trade organization HO until the beginning of the 1980s - with walled-up west windows after the Wall was built in 1961 - and as a boarding school for vocational students until it was blown up in 1984 .

The owner of the hotel, Louis Adlon , was arrested on April 25, 1945 by members of the Red Army in his home in Neu Fahrland and died "after an odyssey" on May 7, 1945 "of a weak heart" on a street in Falkensee . His wife Hedda survived the end of the war and died in 1967.

kitchen

A large number of dishes were newly created in the historic Adlon. These include, for example:

New Hotel Adlon Kempinski

New building, around 1996
Hotel Adlon by night, 2009
Lettering on the roof of the hotel

After the fall of the Berlin Wall , a new building was built from 1995 to 1997 on the site of the previous hotel complex. It was designed in traditional architectural language by Rainer Michael Klotz in the architecture office Patzschke, Klotz & Partner (Jürgen Patzschke, Rüdiger Patzschke, Rainer Michael Klotz) and AIC-Consulting. The new building is not a reconstruction of the old hotel building, but a historicizing new design based on the previous building, whereby the Kempinski property at Unter den Linden / Wilhelmstraße was also included. For this, part of the property was given to the British Embassy . Today's Adlon has almost the same height as the old one (the attic is now also used as a room - previously only ancillary rooms). The aim of marketing is to transfer the history of the old hotel to the new. On August 23, 1997, today's Hotel Adlon Kempinski was reopened by Federal President Roman Herzog . 1998 was followed by the Gourmet - Restaurant Lorenz Adlon .

Extensions

Felix ClubRestaurant

In 2003, the building was expanded to include the Adlon-Palais located at the back on Behrenstrasse ; the corresponding property was previously owned by the state and assigned to the neighboring Academy of the Arts . No guest rooms were set up in the new wing of the building, but instead restaurant, club and conference rooms as well as a second ballroom on a total of eleven storeys . The Adlon-Palais is located in the Behrenstrasse, the Adlon Spa by Resense, the Lorenz Adlon Weinhandlung, the restaurants Sra Bua and India Club as well as the Sra Bua Bar. The owner of these establishments is the Adlon Holding , which belongs to the Jagdfeld Group .

A second extension, now with 69 rooms and suites (Adlon Residence), followed in 2004 on the corner lot on Wilhelm- / Behrenstraße. Here, the architect Gustav Peichl had already built a shell for a community of owners , which was originally planned as a senior citizens' residence in Wilhelmseck. Even before completion, the Adlon owner took over the property for hotel use. Together with the Adlon residence Adlon encloses the at Wilhelmstrasse preferred British message on three sides. After the renovations and extensions, the hotel had a land area of ​​around 8,000 square meters and a gross building area of ​​58,700 square meters.

In 2018, the 500 square meter ballroom of the Adlons was renovated for 2.5 million euros. The Murano chandeliers and Églomisé mirrors are said to be inspired by historic ballrooms.

Hotel operator

Hotel Adlon GmbH, an indirectly wholly-owned subsidiary of Kempinski AG , has been leasing the hotel since September 1997 . The lease contract originally had a ten-year term and was extended in 2012 to 2032. The rent was initially 8.6 million euros per year and is adjusted annually based on the index. In addition, the contract provides for a performance-related additional lease that amounts to 50 percent of a positive operating result.

The hotel's directors were Jean K. van Daalen from 1997 and Thomas Klippstein from April 2005 to September 2006, who resigned when his IM work for the Ministry of State Security was discovered. Stephan Interthal succeeded him as managing director of the hotel. From August 2010 to September 2014 this position was held by Oliver Eller, who previously headed the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow . He was replaced by Emile Bootsma from the Netherlands. Matthias Al-Amiry, who in turn was replaced by Michael Sorgenfrey in January 2020, took over from him.

The Hotel Adlon belongs to the hotel group The Leading Hotels of the World . With 53 million euros, it was ranked third among the hotels with the highest turnover in Germany in 2015.

Developer, owner and financing

The new Adlon Hotel was developed by Altstadtbau and built by Strabag . The purchase price of the 6170 square meter property in 1994 corresponded to a square meter price of 6330 euros. Altstadtbau sold it to a closed real estate fund launched by the Fundus Group , which in turn sold its shares with a minimum investment of 25,000 euros, mostly to Dresdner Bank's investment customers . The investment volume of the fund, including the two extensions, was around 400 million euros. The annual dividend forecast in the prospectus of the expansion issue in October 2002 should amount to four percent in each of the years 2004 to 2009 and more than five percent in 2017. Among other things, the forecast for 2011 assumed a positive operating result for the hotel of more than ten million euros and corresponding income from the success-related additional lease. After the fund failed to make the expected distribution several times, the investors organized themselves into the "Protection Association of Adlon Investors". There was a dispute between investors and the management of the fund for several years.

Restaurant Lorenz Adlon dining room

The Hotel Adlon is home to the gourmet restaurant Lorenz Adlon Dining Room , which was awarded two Michelin stars by the chef Hendrik Otto .

Movies

There is a feature film, a three-part television film and three television documentaries about the history of the Hotel Adlon.

In addition, the action thriller Unknown Identity (USA / Germany, 2011) takes place in the Adlon and describes the fictional story of an attack in the hotel (director: Jaume Collet-Serra with Liam Neeson and Diane Kruger ).

literature

  • Hedda Adlon: Hotel Adlon, the Berlin hotel that welcomed the whole world. Kindler, Munich 1955 (also: Wilhelm Heyne Verlag 2003, ISBN 3-453-00926-6 ; Komet, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-89836-386-4 ; paperback: Hotel Adlon. Wilhelm Heyne Verlag, ISBN 3-453-00926 -6 ).
  • Laurenz Demps , Carl-Ludwig Paeschke: The Hotel Adlon. Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, Berlin 2004, ISBN 3-87584-130-1 .
  • Peter Dorp (Ed.): The old Hotel Adlon in Berlin. Reprint from the year 1908. With a review of the interior designer Wilhelm Kimbel and the decorative painter Paul Herrmann by Peter Dämp. epubli, Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-7450-4445-4 .
  • Jürgen Ebertowski : Number one under the lime trees. The Hotel Adlon novel. (= BvT. 469). Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-8333-0469-9 .
  • Jürgen W. Schmidt: Prince Joachim Albrecht of Prussia and the incident in the Berlin hotel "Adlon" from March 1920. In: Rolf Sauerzapf, Jürgen W. Schmidt (ed.): A life for Prussia. Festschrift for the 75th birthday of Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Stribrny. (= Series of publications of the Prussian Institute. 13). Ludwigsfelder Verlags-Haus, Ludwigsfelde 2010, ISBN 978-3-933022-64-6 , pp. 32–72.
  • Year100Book, 100 years Hotel Adlon. Hotel Adlon Kempinski, Berlin, February 27, 2007.
  • Wolfgang Hoebel: From the bellboy at the HOTEL ADLON to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2014, ISBN 978-3-7357-5135-5 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b at www.hotel-adlon.de
  2. ^ Melitta Jonas: Wilhelm Kimbel. A historist in the modern age . In: Christian Juranek ao: Art Déco. Art of historicism? (= Edition Schloss Wernigerode, vol. 22), Janos Stekovics, Wettin-Löbejün OT Dößel 2019, ISBN 978-3-89923-402-2 .
  3. ↑ The newspaper The Stars and Stripes , published in Paris, reported in its April 25, 1919 issue that a doctor in the US Army had his fiancée sewed a 1.50 wide Red Cross flag, which he hung over the Adlon.
  4. ↑ Reinhard Bollmus: The office of Rosenberg and its opponents. Studies on the power struggle in the National Socialist system of rule. Stuttgart 1970, pp. 19, 42.
  5. ↑ information of vereins berlin-under
  6. ↑ ZDF documentation on January 6, 2013 at 9:50 p.m.
  7. ^ "GDR travel guide", VEB FA Brockhaus Verlag (Leipzig), 1969
  8. ↑ Götz Eckardt (ed.): Fates of German architectural monuments in the Second World War. A documentation of the damage and total losses in the area of ​​the German Democratic Republic. Volume 1. Henschelverlag Art and Society, Berlin 1980, p. 46 f., With illustration
  9. ↑ Treasure trove of the city archive: Falkensee is still being sifted through and systematized. ( Memento from January 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) In: Märkische Allgemeine , January 11, 2013.
  10. ↑ Hedda Adlon died in 1967
  11. ↑ zeit.de: Marble ennobles, wood makes old, money sensual
  12. ↑ stadtentwicklung.berlin.de ( Memento from December 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Creme Guides: Adlon The ballroom in a new look. Retrieved January 9, 2019 (German).
  14. ↑ Parissa Kerkhoff: Hotel Adlon: Kempinski extends lease with the help of Görling Acker and Hogan Lovells , Juve.de of December 25, 2012
  15. ↑ Adlon director stops. In: Der Tagesspiegel , September 30, 2006.
  16. ^ Hotel Adlon-Kempinski Berlin: Oliver Eller takes over the management
  17. ↑ Adlon boss Oliver Eller goes - change over three corners
  18. ^ Change at the Brandenburg Gate. Hotel Adlon Kempinski, February 7, 2017, accessed on September 19, 2019 .
  19. ↑ Michael Sorgenfrey is the new director of the Hotel Adlon . Report of the Berliner Mottenpost from January 31, 2020.
  20. ↑ Guests and investors fly to German hotels. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of May 20, 2016, p. 22.
  21. ↑ House crash in a luxury hotel. In: FAZ , August 24, 2011.
  22. ↑ Lorenz Adlon dining room. Retrieved August 10, 2020 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 57 ″  N , 13 ° 22 ′ 50 ″  E