Hotels
Kaiserhof, Berlin
In the ‘golden twenties’, Berlin’s role as a hub of intellectual, cultural and diplomatic activity saw it ascend to the status of a major world city. In this new era, grand hotels like the Kaiserhof provided luxurious settings for Berlin’s cultural and political elites to gather at receptions, conferences and meetings. The Kaiserhof hosted organisations of all types and political persuasions, from the SeSiSo Club and Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Union to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party, who made it their Berlin headquarters in 1931. Among the political events hosted by the Kaiserhof was a July 1931 meeting of the ‘German-English Society’, convened on the occasion of the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s trip to Berlin to discuss peace and trade. This photo, taken by Erich Salomon, shows MacDonald (standing) in the company of an assortment of high-ranking members of the German political elite, including the Chancellor Heinrich Brüning and Foreign Minister Julius Curtius. At this point in time the German-English Society was primarily an economic endeavour. However, after the Nazi party rose to power it collapsed, only to be renewed by Joachim von Ribbentrop as part of the operations of his new Dienststelle Ribbentrop, an unofficial shadow Foreign Office tasked with conducting unorthodox propaganda efforts to win over British sympathies for Nazi Germany. The Kaiserhof, the Chancellery, the Foreign Office and the offices of the Dienststelle Ribbentrop were all located in close proximity to one another on Wilhelmstrasse.
Further information:
On Berlin in the ‘Golden Twenties’: Mathias Schreiber (2012) “The Age of Excess: Berlin in the Golden Twenties” (trans. Christopher Sultan), Der Spiegel (23 Nov), http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/spiegel-series-on-berlin-history-the-golden-twenties-a-866383.html
Film of the Kaiserhof hosting the 2nd anniversary of the signing of the 1940 Tripartite Pact between Germany, Italy and Japan, in 1942: https://youtu.be/pBoup6lpZtg
On the cultural phenomenon of the ‘Grand Hotel’, which started in Berlin with the serialisation of Vicki Baum’s novel Menschen im Hotel: Noah Isenberg (2016) “Eavesdropping on Weimar” New York Review of Books (9 May), https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/05/09/grand-hotel-vicki-baum-eavesdropping-on-weimar/
Majestic Hotel, Paris
Few hotels have been more prominent in international affairs than the Majestic on the avenue Kléber in Paris. Purchased during World War One by Henry Devenish Harben, a wealthy British liberal, the Majestic accommodated British delegates at the 1919 peace conferences, artists and writers in the 1920s, France’s War Ministry in the 1930s, and the German high command during World War Two. The entrance ticket shown is that of Alan Ogilvie, a young intelligence officer at the time of the 1919 peace conferences, and later Professor of Geography at the University of Edinburgh. After World War Two, the Majestic served as the headquarters of UNESCO, launched in November 1945 at a conference in London (replacing and superseding the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, whose archives it inherited), until that organisation moved to its present purpose-built Parisian premises in the late 1950s. The vacant Majestic was acquired by the French Foreign Ministry and relaunched as an international conference centre, in which capacity it hosted the convention that established the OECD in December, the protracted negotiations that eventually brought an end to the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, and those between Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge leaders in the early 1990s. In 2008, the building was sold to a major international hospitality and hotel company and, following an expensive refurbishment, re-opened in 2014 as the Peninsula Hotel.
Further information:
For the current hotel’s website, which makes surprising little of the building’s history, see: https://www.peninsula.com/en/paris/5-star-luxury-hotel-16th-arrondissement
For postcards of the Majestic in its golden age, from the archives of the Hong Kong and Shanghai Hotels company which co-owns the Peninsula Hotel, see: www.hongkongheritage.org/Pages/news.aspx?post=138
Palais Wilson, Geneva
While the presence of the League of Nations in Geneva is most readily associated with the modernist, purpose-built Palais des Nations that now houses the UN, this did not open until 1937. For most of its life, the League was instead housed in a converted hotel, the Hôtel National. Built at great expense in luxurious, neo-Renaissance style in 1875, the National was declared bankrupt and resold two years after opening, but succeeded in attracting the famous and wealthy to its doors. In the post-World War One wave of reconstruction the hotel was refurbished and modernised, with the installation of elevators allowing for reception areas to be moved to the top of the building. The League secretary-general Eric Drummond saw the potential for this building to house his new organisation, and bought it in 1920 for 5.5 million Swiss Francs, converting the receptions to meeting rooms, the bedrooms to offices, and the service areas to storerooms and archives. The building immediately became home to the Secretariat, hosting Council meetings and many conferences (although the large annual Assemblies were held elsewhere in Geneva, first in the Salle de la Réformation and after 1930 in the Bâtiment Electoral). In 1924 the Hôtel National was renamed the Palais Wilson in honour of the recently deceased US President Woodrow Wilson, who had done so much to bring the League into being, though it was also known informally as ‘Hottop’s Palace’ after the Hotel’s former manager M. Hottop, who had been kept on as the building’s superintendent.
Further information:
Simon Bradley (2018) “The turbulent history of the Palais Wilson”, swissinfo.ch (13 August), https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/multimedia/international-geneva_the-turbulent-history-of-the-palais-wilson/44280080
Joëlle Kuntz (2016) “Palais Wilson: the memory and hostage of Geneva” (trans. Viviane Lowe), Genève internationale: Peace, Rights and Well-Being (19 May), http://www.geneve-int.ch/palais-wilson-memory-and-hostage-geneva
Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, Lausanne
Geneva was by no means the only site of internationalism in Switzerland, or even on Lake Geneva. 36 miles northeast along the lakefront, the grand neo-baroque Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel, built in 1861, also played host to several key international conferences. Two significant peace treaties were signed here: the armistice ending the war between Italy and Turkey in 1912, and the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, by which the territorial losses of the Ottoman Empire in World War One were conceded in exchange for Allied recognition of the sovereignty of the new Turkish state. Equally significant at the time, though largely forgotten now, were the World Disarmament Conferences of 1932-34, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to bring about perpetual peace. The economic component to these deliberations, including the central issue of reparations, was discussed at the 1932 Lausanne Conference held at the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel. The Conference was presided over by Ramsay MacDonald (sat at the head of the table here), for whom it formed the culmination of his efforts to build a personal legacy as a peacemaker on the international stage. Discussions at Lausanne were successful, but the agreement reached was thwarted later that year by the US Congress.
Further information:
On the history and present of the Beau-Rivage Palace Hotel: Guy Martin (2015) “The Beau Rivage Palace: Swiss Hotel Hosted Victor Hugo, Coco Chanel And Negotiations With Iran”, Forbes (31 March), https://www.forbes.com/sites/guymartin/2015/03/31/the-beau-rivage-palace-swiss-hotel-hosted-victor-hugo-coco-chanel-and-negotiations-with-iran/
On the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne from the Turkish perspective: Embassy of Turkey, Bern (2008) “85 years of representation of the Republic of Turkey in Switzerland”, http://www.mfa.gov.tr/data/Kutuphane/Yayinlar/bern.pdf
On the characters present at the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne: Alois Derso & Emery Kelèn, Cartoons on Peace conference in Lausanne, https://www.peacepalacelibrary.nl/collection/special-collections/image-collection/cartoons-by-alois-derso-and-emery-kelen-on-the-peace-conference-in-lausanne/
Le Grand Hôtel, Paris
Hotels were key spaces of internationalism. By virtue of their size, location and facilities they offered ideal spaces to host international conferences and events. This is true of not only the hospitality infrastructures they offered (rooms, board, meeting spaces), but also the prestige and significance they often bestowed. This was the case with Paris’s historic Le Grand Hôtel opposite the city’s famous Opera House. Opened in 1862 as part of the complete reconstruction of Paris under Baron Haussmann, the hotel has an illustrious past including hosting royalty and numerous international events. Pictured here is the first Pan-African Congress which was hosted at the hotel in 1919. At a time when many of Paris’s grandest hotels had been seconded for delegations attending the Paris Peace Conferences, Le Grand offered an important space for delegates to lend a critical voice to the deliberations underway concerning the post-war role of African colonies.
Further information:
Institutional history of Le Grand Hôtel, since 1982 known as ‘InterContinental Paris le Grand’: http://parislegrand.intercontinental.com/en/history/
History of the Pan-African Congresses: https://blackpast.org/perspectives/pan-african-congresses-1900-1945
The issue of The Crisis that this photograph was published in: https://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1295987016703125.pdf