Tracing Tracks

The luxury hotels of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries can be described as the most glamorous, colourful and, at the same time,‘opaque sites of the psychological topography of modern life’. ¹ These so-called ‘grand hotels’ ² always lead to a wide range of associations: show business and mob deals, richness and adultery, honeymoon and suicide. Offering a home away from home, they succeeded in fusing opposites together. A personal sphere and anonymity, the familiar and the unfamiliar, illusion and reality constantly mixed in the vertical cities grand hotels were. Yet, these hotels not only imitated the urban fabric by installing within their walls a swimming pool, shops and restaurants. Hotel guests were also, like every newcomer in a city, subjected to a (dis)assembling of their identity. They obtained a new identity in the form of a depersonalized room number, or deliberately decided to carve one out when checking in. Of course, even a self- chosen identity was not always coterminous with easy, instant success. In a dark reflection on living at home in the post-1945 world, Theodor Adorno argued that hotels epitomized the twentieth-century, resultless struggle to situate oneself in the world. They embodied an existential homelessness. ³