{"id":3490,"date":"2014-12-10T15:37:09","date_gmt":"2014-12-10T15:37:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/?p=3490"},"modified":"2017-08-29T16:16:37","modified_gmt":"2017-08-29T15:16:37","slug":"deborah-holmes-comments-in-history-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2014\/12\/10\/deborah-holmes-comments-in-history-today\/","title":{"rendered":"Deborah Holmes comments in History Today"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Dr Deborah Holmes from the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/secl\/german\/index.html\">Department of German<\/a> has co-written\u00a0an article for the magazine <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.historytoday.com\/magazine\">History Today<\/a><\/em>, entitled \u2018Strange Guests at Hotel de L\u2019Europe\u2019, the article\u00a0asks the question: \u2018Was one of Europe\u2019s finest hotels occupied by members of the English working class during the inter war years?\u2019<\/p>\n<p><em>History Today <\/em>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.<\/p>\n<p>The article looks at what seems at first sight to be thoroughly implausible claims in the autobiography of\u00a0Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, whose writing inspired the recent Wes Anderson film <em>Grand Hotel Budapest. <\/em>In his\u00a0famous memoir, &#8216;The World of Yesterday&#8217;, Zweig insists\u00a0that in the 1920s the Hotel de L\u2019Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English &#8216;Proletariat&#8217;, who could live there more cheaply than their slums at home; thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received.<\/p>\n<p>There has been little enthusiasm for Zweig\u2019s claim among historians. \u2018British 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,\u2019 says <a href=\"http:\/\/www.port.ac.uk\/school-of-social-historical-and-literary-studies\/staff\/dr-brad-beaven.html\">Dr Brad Beaven<\/a>, author of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk\/cgi-bin\/indexer?product=9780719060281\">Leisure, Citizenship and Working-Class Men in Britain, 1850-1945<\/a> (Manchester University Press, 2005).<\/p>\n<p>However, there may be a grain of truth in Zweig&#8217;s version of events, as\u00a0Dr Deborah Holmes points out, drawing on her\u00a0research on late nineteenth and early twentieth century Austrian literature and culture, she comments \u2018It is certainly true that in the 1920s, Austria was full of what were known as <em>Valuta-Touristen<\/em> &#8211; tourists taking advantage of the exchange rate\u2019.<\/p>\n<p>The full article can be found on the <em>History Today<\/em> website at: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.historytoday.com\/rhys-griffiths\/strange-guests-at-hotel-de-l%E2%80%99europe\">www.historytoday.com\/rhys-griffiths\/strange-guests-at-hotel-de-l%E2%80%99europe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Dr Deborah Holmes from the Department of German has co-written\u00a0an article for the magazine History Today, entitled \u2018Strange Guests at Hotel de L\u2019Europe\u2019, the article\u00a0asks &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/2014\/12\/10\/deborah-holmes-comments-in-history-today\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5829,"featured_media":3498,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[124],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5829"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3490"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7812,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3490\/revisions\/7812"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/secl-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}