Hotel Savoy

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Hotel Savoy is a novel by Joseph Roth that was preprinted in the Frankfurter Zeitung from February 9 to March 16, 1924 . In the same year the printing took place in Berlin. The returnees Gabriel Dan tells how the revolution reaches and destroys the run-down Hotel Savoy .

time and place

The novel is set in Łódź in the summer of 1919 . The Hotel Savoy described in the novel is still in Łódź.

characters

  • Gabriel Dan, homecomer
    • Zwonimir Pansin, homecomer, Croat, Gabriel's loyal friend
  • Phöbus Böhlaug, Gabriel's uncle
    • Alexander Böhlaug, his son
  • Stasia, variety dancer
  • Liftboy Ignatz, alias Kaleguropulos, owner of the Savoy
  • Henry Bloomfield, billionaire
  • Mr. Neuner, manufacturer
  • Hirsch Fisch, "lottery dreamer"

content

The Hotel Savoy in Łódź

After three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia, Gabriel Dan returns home and stays at the Hotel Savoy . He walked in without luggage and got room 703 - one of the cheapest - on the sixth floor. The giant hotel Savoy has 864 rooms and all of them are occupied. Gabriel, who has neither parents, wife, nor child, makes a petition to his uncle Phöbus Böhlaug, who lives in luxury in the city. The shabbily dressed soldier only gets a well-worn suit from the stingy relatives.

The guests on the upper floors of the hotel cannot pay their bills. The old lift boy Ignatz lends money to everyone who has suitcases . The poor swallowers among the hotel guests fear the patrols of the hotel director Kaleguropulos. Rumor has it that the director is said to be Greek. Gabriel does not see him and tries to find out the secret of the invisible director. The rich live on the lower floors. In the hotel bar at night young girls who no longer have a suitcase to pawn have to strip naked in front of manufacturers and real estate agents .

Gabriel falls in love with the young variety dancer Stasia, who lives directly above him on the seventh floor. Gabriel has a rival - his cousin Alexander Böhlaug. Alexander, a student in Paris, stays at the Savoy to be close to Stasia.

The Croatian Zwonimir Pansin returns home. Gabriel picks up the soldier in his room. Zwonimir wants to make a revolution in the city . The future revolutionary gets to know Stasia straight away and reports to Gabriel: Kanaille is in love with you . Gabriel corrects the friend: Stasia is a good girl . Stasia wants to be besieged . The obstinately silent Gabriel realizes that too late. Alexander makes the race.

Zwonimir and Gabriel find work. At the freight yard they load bales of hops for transport to Germany. A flood of returnees pours into the city. Gabriel feels a close bond with the newcomers when he thinks back on the war: we were one fear in the cruelest moment of our lives . Not only is the situation of the numerous returnees loitering around the city hopeless. The workers from Mr. Neuner's bristle cleaning factory , who usually die of lung bleeding in their fiftieth year , also revolt. Zwonimir mingles with the murmuring; incites the people to resist.

The rescue from the economic misery appears: Henry Bloomfield, billionaire from the USA, visits his hometown. Gabriel becomes his secretary. Bloomfield by no means lives up to the expectations placed in it. He just goes to his father's grave and sneaks out of the dust shortly before whole groups of people revolt against the Hotel Savoy . In the hotel bar , manufacturer Neuner reaches for the breasts of the naked girls . One of the revolutionaries throws a hand grenade into the hotel. The whole bar company flees . The residents of the upper floors have long since left the Savoy . Military moves against the insurgents. The hotel is on fire on all floors . The crowd storms the Savoy . It turns out Ignatz was Kaleguropulos. He died in the flames of his hotel.

shape

The first-person narrator Gabriel once wanted to be a writer. But now after the war he is lonely and cannot write for everyone .

words and phrases

  • They marched through the terrified streets , singing songs.
  • The shop is timid and tightly closed.

reception

  • The novel analyzes the social upheaval of the post-war period .
  • Steierwald points to the symbolic content of the fable.
  • The novel, in which the author paints a picture of the area around Łódź immediately after the war, together with the spider web , the rebellion and right and left, primarily rounds off the depiction of an era - namely the period from 1919 to 1929.

Stage versions

A stage version by Koen Tachelet had its Austrian premiere on March 16, 2012 in the Vienna Volkstheater . The director Antú Romero Nunes presented his version under the title Hotel Europa or Der Antichrist, a project freely based on Joseph Roth on December 11, 2015 in the Vienna Akademietheater , the small house of the castle .

literature

source

  • Fritz Hackert (Ed.): Joseph Roth Works 4. Novels and Stories 1916–1929 . Pp. 147 to 242: Hotel Savoy. A novel. 1924 . With an afterword by the editor. Frankfurt am Main 1994. 1086 pages, ISBN 3-7632-2988-4

expenditure

Secondary literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Nürnberger p. 63
  2. ↑ Hackert p. 161
  3. ↑ Hackert p. 234
  4. ↑ Hackert p. 240
  5. ↑ Nürnberger p. 63
  6. ↑ Steierwald p. 64
  7. ↑ Kiesel p. 246 and p. 560