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Hotel Savoy

Joseph Roth,

Wilfred Oranje (Translator)

3.79 · Rating details · 1,409 ratings · 121 reviews

Gabriel Dan keert terug uit de oorlog, berooid en zonder vaste verblijfplaats. Hij probeert zijn geld als stationsarbeider te verdienen en neemt zijn intrek in Hotel Savoy. Daar krijgt hij een kamer op de zesde verdieping, één verdieping onder die van de dienstmeisjes. In Hotel Savoy wordt een strikt onderscheid gemaakt naar rangen en standen: hoe lager de afkomst en de fi ...more

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Paperback, 159 pages

Published 2013 by LJ Veen Klassiek (first published 1924)

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Het parfum; De geschiedenis van een moordenaar by Patrick Süskind

Het lijden van de jonge Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Dutch translations of German books

119 books — 14 voters

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· 1,409 ratings · 121 reviews

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Sep 11, 2012 Kalliope rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2014, fiction-german, literary-classics, russia, austro-hungary

What is it about Austrian and German writers and Hotels?

Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, Joseph Roth chose the Hotel as the setting in which they accommodated their stories and characters. It seems to have also been a generational preference but not solely. The younger Fred Wander also published Hôtel Baalbek.

Hotels live as sites of transit where the rites of passage are performed: crisscross of destinies, unexpected encounters, and crossroads of everyday lives. Like a Casino of Fate, Hotels are where ...more

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Jan 14, 2016 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Some books are like no other books… Some books are more like paintings…

It is always like this with great events, with comets and revolutions and royal weddings. Great events tend to take one by surprise, and anticipation only tends to postpone them.

Hotel Savoy is like an expressionist’s painting – everything happens here and now and all the scenes are painted in rich emotional colours and all the characters are full of colourful emotions…
And it is hard to say what it really is – a circus pageant ...more

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Sep 23, 2017 Jacob Overmark rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: german-language-authors, read-owned, reviewed

Lonely Hearts Hotel Savoy

1919, The Great War ended a few years ago, but PoWs held in Siberia had a hard time finding back through Russia as Red, White and Green armies fought for control of the newly formed Soviet Union.
But, the city of Łódź that had been part of The Russian Empire between 1815 and 1916, was now back on Polish hands and even it was considered an outpost, it had, and still has, one big asset; Hotel Savoy, built in 1911.

This is where our protagonist Gabriel Dan one morning turns ...more

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Nov 19, 2020 Alwynne rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: work-in-translation, fiction, german-lang-challenge-20-21

Set after WW1, in the Polish town of Lodz, Hotel Savoy has the quality of a grim fairy tale, a vehicle for Roth’s bleak vision of post-war Europe. Roth’s story’s told from the perspective of Austrian-Jewish soldier Gabriel Dan, returning after three years in a Russian prison camp. Gabriel Dan’s a curious figure he has all the attributes of a real person but something’s missing perhaps buried in memories of his past. Gabriel’s a homecoming hero with nowhere to go, his parents are dead, as is his Set after WW1, in the Polish town of Lodz, Hotel Savoy has the quality of a grim fairy tale, a vehicle for Roth’s bleak vision of post-war Europe. Roth’s story’s told from the perspective of Austrian-Jewish soldier Gabriel Dan, returning after three years in a Russian prison camp. Gabriel Dan’s a curious figure he has all the attributes of a real person but something’s missing perhaps buried in memories of his past. Gabriel’s a homecoming hero with nowhere to go, his parents are dead, as is his former life in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt. As he travels back across Europe he stops in Lodz. Planning to visit a wealthy but miserly uncle, he rents a room at the famed Hotel Savoy. As Gabriel’s point of re-entry to civilian life the Savoy’s initially inviting, almost seductive but as time passes it seems increasingly sinister. The hotel assigns people to rooms that reflect their social worth, upper floors are confined to the near-indigent or hopeless, the higher the floor, the lower the status. Below them rich businessmen hold meetings in the bar, naked cabaret girls catering to their every whim while above impoverished guests buy lottery tickets and barter for basic supplies.

The hotel’s a liminal space peopled by communities that continually form and re-form, not in itself unusual but everything in Roth’s story seems equally transitory, caught between worlds: Roth’s characters stuck between past and present; the rapidly-developing town positioned between East and West, revolutionary Russia and capitalist Europe, pre- and post-modernity. Modernist structures like the Savoy are starting to dominate the skyline but the air’s filled with dust from Lodz’s many factories, there’s no proper sanitation system and the streets run with raw sewage. There’s a façade of progress but there’s no order to it, nothing’s followed through, everything’s in flux. Characters talk about leaving but stay, relationships start then quickly fracture, workers are striking, soldiers flood in from Russia, possibly infected with revolutionary zeal, they’re convenient scapegoats shouldering the blame for Lodz’s fast-increasing social disorder. And in the middle of all this stands the oddly detached Gabriel, observer, outsider, a man with no clear identity or sense of self but through his eyes Roth also provides a tantalising glimpse of a vanished Jewish society with its bourgeois merchants, and ordinary, peaceful families - there's something wistful about the way Gabriel spies on them through their windows, playing with their children or conversing with their friends.

Roth’s novella’s ostensibly realist, partly based on Roth's own experiences - he stayed at Lodz's Hotel Savoy around the time he was writing this - but that sense is constantly disrupted. A near-allegorical thread emerges tied to the malevolent lift-operator Ignatz, personification of social decay and emblem of threats of looming disaster; and the town’s obsession with the coming of Bloomfield, once local boy Blumenfeld, who’s made his fortune in America, someone who has the power to bail out failing businessmen or support struggling widows, an otherworldly, saviour-like figure. Roth’s prose is direct, sometimes austerely lyrical, impressionistic yet acutely drawn; the structure's sometimes awkward but also has a musical aspect, scenes and phrases repeat and the atmosphere's increasingly tense as his narrative builds towards a final crescendo. But despite its many impressive features this is one of those pieces that left me conflicted, it just doesn’t have the force, wit or control of Roth’s best work. It’s too fragmentary, sketch-like, while Roth’s use of Lodz as a metaphor for the condition of post-war Europe’s thinly stretched, and too heavily underlined, directing a reading when it’s not necessary to do so. But still Hotel Savoy left, as I suspect Roth intended, a lingering, bitter aftertaste. ...more

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May 04, 2010 Jayaprakash Satyamurthy rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A soldier is on his way home after being confined to a Russian prison camp during the Great War. He fetches up in an Eastern European town in the Hotel Savoy, his first taste of civilized Europe in ages. At first it seems like a return to the pre-war verities: a soft mattress, maids with starched collars, a certain settled way of life that had gone on for ages. But he soon realises that, if the hotel is a microcosm of Europe, it is a microcosm of a Europe that has changed in a fundamental way, a ...more

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Dec 21, 2016 Jim rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: eastern-europe, fiction

As one who is descended from ancestors living in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (I am mostly Hungarian, with some Czech and Slovak), certain names such as Galicia and Bukovina have a certain resonance with me. Consequently, when I read someone like Joseph Roth, who himself is a Galician from Brody, near Lviv, and writes longingly of Franz Josef II and the old Empire, I am reminded of the old stories my great grandmother told me.

Hotel Savoy consists of the novella "Hotel Savoy," as well as two s As one who is descended from ancestors living in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire (I am mostly Hungarian, with some Czech and Slovak), certain names such as Galicia and Bukovina have a certain resonance with me. Consequently, when I read someone like Joseph Roth, who himself is a Galician from Brody, near Lviv, and writes longingly of Franz Josef II and the old Empire, I am reminded of the old stories my great grandmother told me.

Hotel Savoy consists of the novella "Hotel Savoy," as well as two shorter stories, "Fallmerayer the Stationmaster" and "The Bust of the Emperor." The best of these are the first and third stories.

"Hotel Savoy" is set at a gigantic (over 800 rooms) hotel somewhere in Galicia. It is after the Great War, and former prisoners of the Russians stop over on their way westward to whatever destint awaits them. Gabriel Dan is one of them. He momentarily falls in love with Stasia, a young entertainer with whom he feels he could live for a month, a year, or so. Then he becomes friends with the Zwonimir Pansin. The whole town is as if in suspended animation waiting for the visit of an American millionaire who was born there, but now goes under the name Henry Bloomfield. It is thought he would solve everyone's problem. But, of course, he doesn't -- and can't.

"The Bust of the Emperor" tells of Count Franz Xaver Morstin of Lopatyny. Now that the Great War is over, all the disparate parts of the old Empire have become separate nationalities, and the Count needs a passport to visit members of his family in Prague, Bosnia, and other far-flung outposts of the Empire. He pays a visit to a bar in Zurich and is disgusted by what he sees.

His first glance informed him that every type of person he hated -- although until then he had no close contact with them -- was represented at that table: women with dyed blonde hair with short dresses which shamelessly revealed ugly knees; slender, willowy young men of olive complexion, baring as they smiled sets of flawless teeth such as are to be seen in dental advertisements, disposable little dancing men, cowardly, elegant, watchful, looking like cunning hairdressers; elderly gentlemen who assiduously but vainly attempted to disguise their paunches and their bald pates, good-humores, lecherous, jovial and bow-legged; in short a selection from that portion of humanity which was for the time being the inheritor of the vanished world, only to yield it a few years later, at a profit, to even more modern and murderous heirs. [Italics mine]

That last sentence is all too true. As Sigmund Freud wrote after 1918, "I do not want to live anywhere else…. I shall live on with the torso and imagine that it is the whole." And that is the subject of this nostalgic and dispirited story.

Roth is perhaps most famous for his novel The Radetzky March, which I have read. Now I plan to read more of his work, if I have world enough and time.
...more

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Nov 27, 2015 Charles Dee Mitchell rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: modern-fiction

Gabriel Dan spent the last years of WW I in a Siberian POW camp. As a freed prisoner, he has worked his way for five years across Russia on foot and has now arrived at the “gateway to Europe,” an unnamed city in which he knows he can find wealthy relatives. He also finds the Hotel Savoy, a seven-storey edifice that promises a return to the comforts and solidities of the old Europe. But of course, that world is gone forever. Dan knows this from his five-year, postwar journey. The plot of Roth’s n ...more

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Mar 10, 2009 Catherine Corman rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

They talk about prohibition in America. What can one do in a country such as that?

"What does one do in America when one is sad - without alcohol?" asks Zwonimir.

"One plays the gramophone," says Bondy.

-Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy ...more

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Nov 09, 2015 Jonathan rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: own-kindle-ebook, 20th-century, author-male, book-type-novel, lit-german-austria

Hotel Savoy is an early work by Roth which was published in 1924. The main character is Gabriel Dan, a soldier returning home from a Russian concentration camp after World War I. He's ended up at the Hotel Savoy in an unnamed city in Eastern Europe (Wikipedia states that it's Łódź, Poland), his ultimate aims are unclear but he's currently just looking forward to some running water, a clean bed and soap.

I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I lo

I am thankful once again to strip off an old life, as I so often have during these years. I look back upon a soldier, a murderer, a man almost murdered, a man resurrected, a prisoner, a wanderer.

He has one of the cheap rooms on the sixth floor. The hotel is quite luxurious but the occupants of the hotel are a mix of the wealthy and the poor - Gabriel mixes mostly with the poor. There is a strike going on at one of the factories and there is talk of revolution in the air, especially with the influx of soldiers returning from Russia. Gabriel is scarred by his experiences of the war and finds it difficult to reconnect with humanity.

I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain.

Gabriel quickly settles into the rhythm of the hotel even if he constantly feels like he should be moving on. We're introduced to a whole load of characters in the first half of the book, there's the girl, Stasia, in the room above who paces about during the night, there's Gabriel's rich uncle Phöbus who's reluctant to part with any money, there's Phöbus's son Alexander who is attracted to Stasia, as is Gabriel. There is also Santschin, an elderly clown, whose act involves a donkey, Hirsch Fisch who dreams of winning lottery numbers and sells them to customers, and there's Ignatz the elderly lift-boy who always seems to be watching what people are getting up to. There are rumours about the Greek owner, Kaleguropulos, turning up for an inspection though no-one ever actually sees him and there are rumours that a child of the town, Bloomfield - a millionaire who now lives in the U.S., will be visiting soon. And there are many more characters that we get to know via short pencil-sketches of their more entertaining traits.

Gabriel can't decide whether to stay on at the hotel or to leave. He sometimes dreams of a life with Stasia, but at other times he just wants to move on. When Alexander offers to pay a significant amount for Gabriel's room he at first accepts and then changes his mind. In Part Two an old war buddy, Zwonimir, turns up and stays with Gabriel. Zwonimir is a revolutionary, he's a lot more talkative than Gabriel and believes that the future is with America. The novel becomes a bit more focused with the arrival of Zwonimir as he gets to know all the inhabitants of the hotel and when he's bored with that he finds some work for himself and Gabriel. Gabriel sums up Zwonimir thus:

He is a healthy person. I envy him. In our part of the world, in the Leopoldstadt, there were no such healthy fellows. He enjoys the vulgar things of life. He has no respect for women. He knows no books, reads no newspaper. He does not know what goes on in the world. But he is my loyal friend. He shares his money with me and would share his life with me.
And I would do as much for him.

So, with Zwonimir things pick up. Bloomfield arrives and both Zwonimir and Gabriel ingratiate themselves into his life for a while.

The book is quite bleak, in a way, but has plenty of humour, loads of weirdly interesting characters and a climactic ending. If I wanted to be critical then I would say that the narrative style clips along a little too quickly and the book may have been better if Roth had expanded certain bits and slowed down. But it is what it is, and in the end I thoroughly enjoyed it. ...more

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Oct 27, 2013 Robbie Bruens added it · review of another edition

Shelves: novella, translations, fiction, war

While not quite as mysteriously beautiful and haunting as Flight Without End, Hotel Savoy is still a very good novella. Roth's books are potent yet subtle explorations of class and corrosive and divisional effects of money. ...more

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Jan 23, 2018 Andrea rated it it was ok · review of another edition

I didn't actually finish this one.

Overall, I think the best conclusion I can make is this book did not age well. The story could possibly be great, but the characters are undeveloped and their relationships are declared instead of developed. Women are sadly represented and usually an object of desire. Everyone is distinguished by one feature that is often repeated. Example: the lift operator with the "beer-colored eyes" was easily stated 10 times. I also wonder if it was poorly translated, thou ...more

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Jan 07, 2018 AC rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: vienna, novels-german

Wow! What a brilliant story or parable... it needs rereading...

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Apr 23, 2010 Rick rated it liked it · review of another edition

HOTEL SAVOY is a highly symbolic history of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. Anyone who is deeply interested in the subject should find this novel interesting.

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Jul 02, 2013 Mira rated it liked it · review of another edition

A quick read. An absurdist, Eastern European take on conditions in the early 1930's. ...more

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May 31, 2014 A.M. Oldroyd rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

An incredibly evocative description of a specific time & place, that brilliantly describes the ravages of the post war experience on mind, body, soul & nation.

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Jun 11, 2015 Diane S ☔ rated it liked it · review of another edition

3.5 review to follow.

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Sep 25, 2017 Naim Frewat rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: international-fiction

I kept hesitating with the rating of this book. I started with 1 star for the first part, then progressed to two stars with the start of the second part of the book, at times even thinking that it merits 4 stars and then settling at 3 (2.5 to be accurate).
The problem is the shortness of this story. It's not about the characters who move into the hotel. It's not about the times and it's also not about some philosophical reflection about war and post-war Austria and so there's a bit of everything ...more

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Sep 29, 2018 Richard Thompson rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: german-literature

I was expecting a quirky comedy of manners, a parody of the classic story setting of people in a resort hotel, but that isn't at all what this book is. It does have its quirky characters -- Zwonimir and Zlotogor in particular, but also others who are interesting and a bit out of the ordinary. But essentially this is a post-Great War story of life and death. The Hotel Savoy is an allegory of purgatory, a gray place in a gray city that sits between east and west between life and death presided ove ...more

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Mar 08, 2020 Liam rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

"Their clothes are torn, their sticks rough and worn. They all come the same way, not by rail, but on foot. They must have wandered by the year before reaching this place. They know about foreign countries and strange lives and like me they have brushed against many lives. They are tramps. Are they happy to be tramping home?" (of returning POWs, 76)

"He [grifter Erich Kohler] is a bad man: he does not lie for the love of lying but sells his soul for shabby profit." (100)

"Henry Bloomfield came to ...more

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Jul 20, 2018 D.B. Sertaine rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Like Zweig, he evokes in the three stories (in the volume I read) the world of yesterday and the unravelling disaster thereafter in the Austro-Hungarian empire. Roth is unflinching in his description of the dissolution of the necessary lie that bound people together in the multi-cultural empire, as the tribal nationalism fed hatred and did more so much more harm than good. A reminder to be careful what you wish for.

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Jun 04, 2019 Steve rated it it was ok · review of another edition

A soon-after-WWI novella by Roth. More about post war Europe, on the Eastern border of Europe, than about the fallen Empire. I was surprised, this felt more like something that his estate would have published years after his death, when a renewed interest in his writing would have warranted its publication. Quick study of "types" and decadence soon after WWI.
2 out of 5 = "it was OK". Felt quick and disjointed. ...more

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Oct 02, 2017 Shannan rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: book-club

This a short read I read for my book club, in the aftermath of the Great War men have to get home on foot. Like plastic blown in a hurricane they get caught on things. One is the Hotel Savoy.

I enjoyed this for being transported into another time, and hundred year ago, half a world away. The beauty is in the details.

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Feb 24, 2018 David C Ward rated it really liked it · review of another edition

The Hotel Savoy: you can check in but. . . The hotel as microcosm, a ship of fools, a bit like the steamboat in Melville’s Confidence Man. Everyone is going somewhere else but everyone is waiting. The business men all speculate and the poor pawn their suitcases and die. An allegorical novella of Europe in the early 1930s, on the brink. Reminded me a bit of the Waste Land.

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Jul 19, 2017 Erik rated it liked it · review of another edition

***3.5 stars***

Too short and poorly translated (I assume). Otherwise, excellent.

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Mar 31, 2018 Sue rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: olympic-challenge-2016-2018

3.5. clever but wasn't particularly engaged with the characters, who seemed a pretty rum lot! But then in times of great change they would have to be just to survive. ...more

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Feb 04, 2019 Erinn Klein rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Quick read, but very smoothly written. Felt similar to Fitzgerald. Haunting and compelling.

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Jan 23, 2020 Hannah rated it did not like it · review of another edition

Shelves: readandtoss, reviewed, extremereader2020

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Sep 09, 2020 Clive La pensee rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A brilliant read. I'm glad to see Roth has earned a translation. Well overdue and it tells us the reality of being on the losing side in a conflict. ...more

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Nov 25, 2020 Siddhartha rated it really liked it · review of another edition

It's a good novel truly describing the unhappy period of Europe between the two WWs. ...more

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Dec 22, 2020 Monika rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: hotel

An important book for remembering the situation in Europe not that very long time ago. This book should be compulsory in high school.

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About Joseph Roth

Joseph Roth

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Joseph Roth, journalist and novelist, was born and grew up in Brody, a small town near Lemberg in East Galicia, part of the easternmost reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire and is now Ukraine. Roth was born into a Jewish family. He died in Paris after living there in exile.

http://www.josephroth.de/ ...more

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Quotes from Hotel Savoy

“I am alone. My heart beats only for myself. The strikers mean nothing to me. I have nothing in common with the mob, nor with individuals. I am a cold person. In the war I did not feel I was part of my company. We all lay in the same mud and waited for the same death. But I could think only about my own life and death. I would step over corpses and it oftened saddened me that I could feel no pain.” — 4 likes

“Ora toda a gente entende sempre palavrões bem arrotados” — 1 likes

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