Dr Deborah Holmes from the Department of German has co-written an article for the magazine History Today, entitled ‘Strange Guests at Hotel de L’Europe’, the article asks the question: ‘Was one of Europe’s finest hotels occupied by members of the English working class during the inter war years?’
History Today is an illustrated history magazine which aims to present serious and authoritative history to as wide a public as possible, commissioning articles mainly from academic authors and historians. It was first published in 1951 and has a circulation of around 21,000.
The article looks at what seems at first sight to be thoroughly implausible claims in the autobiography of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose writing inspired the recent Wes Anderson film Grand Hotel Budapest. In his famous memoir, ‘The World of Yesterday’, Zweig insists that in the 1920s the Hotel de L’Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English ‘Proletariat’, who could live there more cheaply than their slums at home; thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received.
There has been little enthusiasm for Zweig’s claim among historians. ‘British working class-communities during this period were insular and relied upon their own internal support mechanisms, clubs, societies and close-knit support networks, rather than outside agencies and opportunities,’ says Dr Brad Beaven, author of Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850-1945 (Manchester University Press, 2005).
However, there may be a grain of truth in Zweig’s version of events, as Dr Deborah Holmes points out, drawing on her research on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Austrian literature and culture, she comments ‘It is certainly true that in the 1920s, Austria was full of what were known as Valuta-Touristen – tourists taking advantage of the exchange rate’.
The full article can be found on the History Today website at: www.historytoday.com/rhys-griffiths/strange-guests-at-hotel-de-l%E2%80%99europe