On the Fragility of Grand Hotels

“In all their fragility, grand hotels were liberal institutions par excellence. They depended on the free movement of goods and people as well as the self-regulatory capacity of guests and staff. And yet, at the heart of the thing lay a dark irony. The grand hotel as a liberal institution, much like the era’s liberal constitutions, disenfranchised the majority for the benefit and prestige of the minority... this story of the failure of liberal hoteliers is in microcosm the story of the failure of German liberalism, a catastrophe that expanded from the Kaiserhof to the chancellery to the rest of Europe and then the world. The decisions of liberal businessmen mattered. Faced with their nemesis in flesh and blood, they turned to liberal argumentation for support. It didn’t work. Their dilemma has become a perennial one. What should a corporate board of directors do when the interests of democracy and the interests of their business don’t seem to align? Favor the latter was the answer in 1932. Is it still?”

Adam Bisno, “Hitler, the Hotel Guest,” - http://www.cambridgeblog.org/2023/11/hitler-the-hotel-guest/. This post on Bisno’s open access new book Big Business and the Crisis of German Democracy: Liberalism and the Grand Hotels of Berlin 1875-1933, provides a terrifying insight into the paradox of tolerance noted in Popper’s The Open Society. The hoteliers of Weimar Republic Berlin failed to respond to this paradox and ended up complicit in the rise of Nazism. As the chairman of Hotel Kaiserhof argued, “we must remain neutral on matters of religion and politics. Our houses must remain open to all.” The all under consideration was the Nazi hotel guest Adolf Hitler. The loss of Jewish guests and business was, of course, excluded by Meinhardt’s ‘all.’ As Bisno astutely notes: “Meinhardt’s… liberalism was of no help against the Nazis, who were adept at using the precepts of free speech, free political association, and equal access to gain entry to liberal institutions only for the purpose of destroying them.” The paradox of tolerance is its opposition to intolerance. In order to protect a tolerant space for people to speak freely, people must actively oppose those who seek to destroy the freedom of others. On the one hand, it fosters spaces where people are free to disagree with each other on a wide array of topics, such as religion and politics. On the other, it opposes racism which undermines the equality of all human beings. In sum, Hotel Kaiserhof should have been clear-minded about why it should have excluded Hitler for the sake of protecting a tolerant space of free access by Jewish patrons. Or said another way, it’s the historical context through which to appreciate the tensions in Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, which I wrote about some years ago and the absurdities explored in Ruben Östland’s The Square.