Provincialising Berlin in Menschen im Hotel

Journal article

In this article, I take the peculiar source of Vicki Baum’s Menschen im Hotel (1929) in a Southern-Moravian town as a starting point to reveal the ways in which the hierarchies between metropolis and province are negotiated and complicated by the novel. Focusing on the provincial in this big-city novel sheds light not only on how the popular image of Weimarera Berlin – as glamorous and progressive, bountiful and exciting – emerges as the construct of petit-bourgeois, provincial unfamiliarity and excitement, but also on how the novel shows the province itself as less parochial, ignorant and close-minded than the stereotypes suggest. It shows how the novel brings together local and global geographies by entangling provincial life with global and colonial trade. It shows how the newspaper in which it was first printed equally painted a picture of a more provincial Berlin. And it shows how the novel complicates the relation between modernist and conservative aesthetics between Berlin and the provinces. Re-reading Baum’s novel from the margins thus starts to decentre Berlin from the geographies of Weimar-era modernism and modernity.

Authors: Peters, ME

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: German Life and Letters
• Publication date: 2026-01-18
• Acceptance date: 2025-06-13
• DOI: 10.1111/glal.70010
• EISSN: 1468-0483
• ISSN: 0016-8777
• Language: English
• Keywords: Vicki Baum; Berlin; Provincialism; Colonialism