Hotel Bilderberg (Roman)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hotel Bilderberg is a factual novel by Bernt Engelmann first published in 1977 , which deals indirectly with the Bilderberg Conference , which has been held annually since 1954 . In terms of style, Engelmann, who is primarily known as a non-fiction author, based the story on the factual novel Großes Bundesverdienstkreuz , published in 1974 , whereby he embeds historical information in a partially invented framework.

Brief description

Journalist Pat Rosenblatt, who comes from New York, indirectly saves the lives of the elderly and - as it turned out later - rich Mrs. Cornelia Vandermeulen on a flight to Amsterdam. This invites Pat, who u. a. busy with juvenile delinquency and actually on the way to a conference, entered the Hotel Bilderberg. Pat agrees and, on the advice of Mrs. Vandermeulen, slips into the role of her granddaughter.

Mrs. Vandermeulen also suspects the reasons for the alleged assassination attempt on her: On the one hand, she owns some coveted stocks, on the other hand, a list of names that are connected to the recently notorious bribery scandal of the lockheed armaments company .

Later on, Mrs. Vandermeulen takes on the role of the narrator, who tells Pat the historical background to important representatives of the Bilderbergers in a conversational tone. Among other things, Pat learns how industrial dynasties such as the DuPonts , the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds' banking business came about. This is also closely linked to the history of the Dutch and British royal families, which were just as closely linked to Germany. Not least because Kaiser Wilhelm II was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria .

Franz Josef Strauss , about whom Mrs. Vandermeulen reports various things from his time as defense minister and his connections to Lockheed, plays another role, albeit only a presumable one in the entire novel . Some of the background to the Starfighter affair Strauss is presented.

Other people mentioned in the book include: a .: Hermann Josef Abs , Jimmy Carter , Henry Kissinger , Zbigniew Brzeziński as well as the noble families von Brühl and von Battenberg , who later renamed themselves Mountbatten .

At the end of the novel, which mainly takes place at the bar of the Bilderberg Hotel, Mrs. Vandermeulen has been able to sell her coveted shares at a profit to a prospective buyer and has also initiated a deal for Lockheed documents. For her part, Pat had meanwhile met two journalist colleagues in the hotel who had "smuggled" their way past the security guards and from time to time also listened to Mrs. Vandermeulen's stories. All three journalists are hoping for a " scoop " and would like to use Mrs. Vandermeulen's documents as evidence for their story, but she ultimately decides differently after talking to David Rockefeller on the phone. Thus, Mrs. Vandermeulen, who had previously ordered the payment of a five-figure dollar sum for Pat to save her life, refuses to publish details.

She invites Pat to take her to Edmond Rothschild's in Paris , but Pat refuses and instead wants to go on vacation to the Bahamas with one of her journalist colleagues after their conference.

The book description of the version of Hotel Bilderberg published by Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag in 1980 contains the sentence: "The information in this book is obviously to be trusted."

expenditure

  • Bernt Engelmann: Hotel Bilderberg. Author Edition . Athenäum Verlag, Königstein / Ts. 1977.
  • Bernt Engelmann: Hotel Bilderberg. Rowohlt Verlag, Reinbek near Hamburg, 1980, ISBN 3-499-14471-9 .
  • Bernt Engelmann: Hotel Bilderberg. Steidl Verlag, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-88243-316-7 .