Performing Belonging in Early Twentieth-Century Literary Hotels and the Case of Rich Americans

Hotel narratives from the interwar years suggest that the early twentieth-century European leisure class became increasingly cosmopolitan. In many of these texts, belonging to said class is a matter of performing a semiotic code of “conspicuous wealth and consumption” (Th. Veblen) rather than of coming from old privilege. However, authors such as Henry James, Stefan Zweig, and the Swiss Meinrad Inglin show that somewhat “tribal” attitudes in members of the European leisure class ultimately undercut the cosmopolitan spirit, rejecting representatives of the newly rich American elite at a time when European economies could only survive due to massive American subsidies.