Hotel Exile

Paris in the Shadow of War

De: Jane Rogoyska

The extraordinary story of the Hotel Lutetia in Paris—once a hub for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis after 1933, later commandeered by German military intelligence during the occupation, and finally, after Liberation, a refuge for survivors returning from concentration camps.

A hotel is not an actor in a drama but the stage upon which dramas unfold.

The Hotel Lutetia is a Paris institution—the only grand hotel on the city's bohemian Left Bank. Since its opening in 1905, it has been a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. But in the years before, during, and after the second World War, the hotel had a darker, more tragic history—a place in the shadow of Nazism.

Set in Paris from 1933 to 1945, Hotel Exile recounts the real stories whose lives intersected at the famed Lutetia over the course of 12 transformative years. From artists and intellectuals fleeing Nazi Germany, including Walter Benjamin, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett; to German counterintelligence officers who commandeered the hotel during the Occupation; and finally, Holocaust survivors and displaced persons who found refuge there after Liberation, Jane Rogoyska brings to life the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of outsiders existing on the edges of war. Rogoyska explores what it meant for three profoundly different groups to live in exile, while passing through the doors of a normally functioning hotel, a site under occupation, and finally, a shelter and place of healing. Vital and tragic, Hotel Exile interweaves portraits of people connected by race, nationality, language, and a legendary Paris establishment, under the dark ideology that dictated the course of lives around the world.