Home truths and uncomfortable spaces : Swiss hotels and literature of the 1920s

Switzerland was at the centre of the European grand hotel scene, geographically and discursively. This article considers Swiss hotel literature and life in the 1920s, a decade in which the country’s hotel landscape became politicized and, relatedly, was often portrayed in popular literature. Against the backdrop of more canonical and intellectual hotel literature set in Switzerland, the following reads Meinrad Inglin’s Grand Hotel Excelsior (1928) as a response to a contemporary ‘culture war’, and as an attempt at centrist cultural criticism. Drawing especially on magazine and other archival evidence, this essay also uncovers the promotion, sponsorship, and discussion of hotel literature by the Swiss hotel lobby, which was concerned with increasing the commercial viability of hotels after the First World War, and improving their image at a time of polarized debates about the direction of Swiss society. Thus Inglin’s novel occupies a centre ground not only in its argument, but in a formal sense as well. Grand Hotel Excelsior is a literary means of mediating the problems of Swiss culture in the 1920s, manifest in hotels as actual spaces or subjects, rather than a novel written for, or adaptable to, vested interests, or a work that employs – in the vein of Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse – the hotel as a material setting to explore abstract ideas.