Hotel Victoria (Berlin)

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The Victoria-Hotel with Victoria-Café (building on the right) was on Berlin's boulevard Unter den Linden No. 46, at the intersection with Friedrichstrasse.
Map of the Victoria Hotel. Detail from Sineck's Berlin plan, 1882.
Glance into the Victoria Café. Photo montage from 1902 .

The Hotel Victoria or Victoria Hotel was a smaller first-class hotel in the Prussian , later German capital, Berlin , in the second half of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th century . The Victoria Hotel was closely connected to the Victoria Café and stood on the north side of the boulevard Unter den Linden (No. 46) at the intersection with Friedrichstrasse . The hotel was closed at the end of the First World War . The Victoria Café, however, continued to exist until the end of World War II .

The origins

The house on Unter den Linden No. 46 was originally the home of the director of the Berlin Botanical Garden , Carl Ludwig Willdenow, who died in 1812 . In 1820 the house was owned by his widow, b. H. Habermas., Later owned by another member of the family.

In 1848 the Hotel Victoria appeared for the first time in the Berlin address book under Hotel I. Class . The owner of the hotel was the cafetier H. Obermeyer from Charlottenburg . However, the house was owned by the Guard Lieutenant a. D. Wil (l) Denow. Löwenberg's Berlin travel guide, published in 1850, mentioned the Victoria Hotel as one of Berlin's first-class hotels. It is noteworthy that in the immediate vicinity there were numerous first-class hotels in the late 1840s , such as Meinhards Hotel (Unter den Linden 32), Hotel du Nord (Unter den Linden 35), Hôtel de Rome or Luz's Hotel (Unter den Linden 44).

Location and accommodation

The house at Unter den Linden number 46 was at the northeast corner of the intersection of the Berlin boulevard Unter den Linden with the also extremely busy Friedrichstrasse, which runs north-south. It later connected the Berlin Central Station Friedrichstrasse with the east-west axis of Leipziger Strasse in the south . As a corner house, the four-story building had fronts to both major streets. Café Victoria was on the ground floor and first floor . The upper two floors were used for hotel operations. While the Café and Hotel Victoria were initially run by different people, the management of the company was ultimately taken over by one hand.

In the middle of the metropolitan gears

The coffee house and the hotel profited from the economic and political upswing in the Prussian, later German capital, Berlin. Even better known than the hotel was Café Victoria.

The management of the Victoria establishment (consisting of a hotel and café) confidently claims in a magazine advertisement at the end of 1902: “Whoever is not at the window of the Victoria Café, who is not from the balcony of the Victoria Hotel, the inexhaustible, immeasurable, unfathomable rushing of the German metropolis who has not observed from these unsurpassed vedettas the busy industry and the flirtatious elegance, the seriousness and the pastime, the hurrying and lingering, the size and the petty, the day and the night, light and shadow of the German metropolis has followed, he doesn't even know her. […] Standing in the focal point of capital city life, as central and yet as wonderfully situated as possible, the Victoria establishment with its café and hotel is one of the most attractive objects in Berlin that no one is allowed to pass by. "

Standard and services

The Hotel Victoria was a smaller hotel in terms of its size, with 32 rooms in 1904. A travel guide from 1905 describes it as the “smaller branch of the Central Hotel”. The Victoria-Café advertised with its special meals: the Victoria breakfast and the Victoria dinner, which the restaurant served at “extraordinarily moderate prices” and which (according to the self-promotion) became a “specialty of Berlin supplies”, “which many have already done Has become indispensable for locals ”. In addition, the establishment offered its guests a large selection of foreign-language, especially English-language newspapers, which were available to read free of charge. Robert Springer counts the Victoria Hotel 1861 among the best of the first-class hotels.

End of the First World War

In 1918 the Hotel Victoria was closed. It shared the fate of many Berlin hotels from the 18th and early 19th centuries, which were operated in former residential buildings and which at the beginning of the 20th century were faced with the need for fundamental and expensive renovations. The historian Renate Düttmann wrote: “They were all housed in ordinary houses and under the competitive pressure of the newly emerging, economically much better organized grand hotels in the last third of the century suddenly had to put their nobly furnished guest rooms, coach houses and stables with electric light at high cost , Heating, telephone and elevators. If such conversions could not be carried out for financial reasons, the operations would go out. ”By contrast, Café Victoria continued to exist at the same location until the end of the Second World War.

Owner of the hotel

  • 1848-1852: H. Obermeyer
  • 1853–1871: E. Schütz
  • 1872-1889: L. Horn
  • 1891-1892: F. Haas
  • 1893–1918: Victoria Hotel GmbH , also Victoria-Café and hotel operating company .

gallery

  • House on Unter den Linden No. 46, around 1820.

  • Advertisement picture of the Victoria Cafe.

  • Victoria Café billiard room.

  • first floor of the Victoria Cafe.

  • Kaiser Wilhelm II (2nd from left) with entourage in front of the Victoria Café.

  • Victoria Cafe staff, 1902.

literature

  • Anonymous: Berlin and the Berliners. People, things, customs, hints. J. Bielefeld Publishing House, Karlsruhe 1905.
  • Karl Baedeker : Berlin and surroundings. Guide for travelers. Verlag Karl Baedeker, 5th edition, Leipzig 1887.
  • Karl Baedeker: Berlin and the surrounding area. Guide for travelers. Verlag Karl Baedeker, 13th ed. Leipzig 1904.
  • Karl Baedeker: Berlin and the surrounding area. Guide for travelers. Verlag Karl Baedeker, 18th ed. Leipzig 1914.
  • Bodo-Michael Baumunk: Grand Hotel. In: The trip to Berlin . Ed. I. A. of the Berlin Senate for the exhibition of the same name, Berlin 1987. P. 192ff.
  • Renate Düttmann: Berlin inns of the 18th and 19th centuries. In: The trip to Berlin. Ed. I. A. of the Berlin Senate for the exhibition of the same name, Berlin 1987. pp. 181–191.
  • Hans Werner Klünner: Panorama of the street Unter den Linden from 1820. Nicolai Verlag, new edition Berlin 2013. ISBN 978-3-89479-815-4 .
  • J. Löwenberg: The stranger in Berlin and Potsdam. The latest and most reliable guide when visiting these capitals and their surroundings with details of all sights, time of the visit, etc. , 7th consistently improved edition, Verlag EH Schröders Buch- und Kunsthandlung, Berlin 1850.
  • Ludwig Metzel: Berlin inns towards the end of the 18th century. In: MVGB, Vol. 24 (1907), pp. 187-188.
  • Wolfgang Müller: Hotel buildings. In: Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin (ed.): Berlin and its buildings. Published by Wilhelm Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, Munich, Düsseldorf 1980. Part VIII Buildings for trade and commerce. Volume B Hospitality. Pp. 1-38.
  • Hasso Noorden: German big city hotels. In: Velhagen & Klasings Monatshefte, Vol. 24, Issue 1, pp. 42–55.
  • Robert Springer: Berlin. A guide to the city and its surroundings. Verlag II Weber, Leipzig 1861.
  • Volker Wagner: The Dorotheenstadt in the 19th century: from the suburban residential area of ​​baroque style to part of the modern Berlin city. Verlag De Gruyter, Berlin, New York 1998. Publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin, Vol. 94. ISBN 3-11-015709-8 .

Web links

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

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ cf. Klünner: Panorama of the street Unter den Linden from 1820. Nicolai Verlag, new edition Berlin 2013. p. 32.
  2. ↑ Hotel 'Victoria', UdL 46; Landlord Obermeyer . In: General housing indicator for Berlin, Charlottenburg and surroundings , 1848, III, p. 717 .; Nothing is known about the details of the naming. It is assumed that the name Victoria, which was chosen in the revolutionary year of 1848 , was related to the initial course of the bourgeois revolution in Germany.
  3. ↑ cf. Berliner Leben magazine , issue 12 (1902).
  4. ↑ cf. Karl Baedeker: Berlin and the surrounding area. Guide for travelers. Verlag Karl Baedeker, 13th ed. Leipzig 1904. p. 3.
  5. ↑ cf. Anonymous: Berlin and the Berliners. People, things, customs, hints. Verlag J. Bielefeld, Karlsruhe 1905, p. 429.
  6. ↑ cf. Robert Springer: Berlin. A guide to the city and its surroundings. Verlag II Weber, Leipzig 1861.
  7. ↑ cf. Düttmann: Berlin inns of the 18th and 19th centuries. In: The trip to Berlin . Ed. I. A. of the Berlin Senate for the exhibition of the same name, Berlin 1987, p. 188.

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '2 "  N , 13 ° 23' 21"  E