Last resort

On Dora Kellner, Walter Benjamin and the biography of a hotel

You could tell the story of modernity in Europe through its hotels. There’s surely not a single topic or debate that wasn’t discussed over their polished wooden tables and chrome bars, or in the snug armchairs of their lobbies and the deckchairs of their beachside terraces. We might imagine them as hideouts or shelters, at once public and clandestine, boltholes against the swarm and rush of the world. A comforting thought, yet if the door’s always open, you’re only ever passing through.

When Edward Lear settled in San Remo, the city of flowers, he built himself a paradise. Twice. The writer of nonsense verse, who boasted of having given drawing lessons to Queen Victoria, had a grand house constructed in the 1870s that he named the Villa Emily after the wife of Alfred Tennyson, whom Lear had come to know while illustrating some of Tennyson’s poetry. But when a massive modern hotel was built right across the way, obstructing his view, the enraged Lear had an exact replica of the Villa Emily built closer to the sea, which he named Villa Tennyson and where he would live out the last decade or so of his life.

The Villa Emily, meanwhile, became a guest house and was renamed Villa Verde alla Foce. In March 1934, a year after the Nazis took power, the Austrian-Jewish translator and journalist Dora Sophie Kellner fled her home in Berlin to travel to Cannes for the first time in her life and then on to San Remo. Her son Stefan followed a year later. Dora’s emigration effectively marked the end of her writing career, but not of her association with European literary culture. She first worked as a cook at San Remo’s Hotel Miramare, and later took over the running of the Villa Verde. This establishment, perched above the azure waves of the Mediterranean amid the verdant, sun-kissed hills of the Ligurian riviera, would become a haven for Europe’s literary exiles, writers and intellectuals vying for an escape from the rising tides of fascism. It bore witness to, and offered precarious respite from, the eddies and storms of the twentieth century.

One such itinerant exile was Dora’s ex-husband and Stefan’s father, the critic, philosopher, and translator Walter Benjamin. Theirs had been an intense, sometimes very difficult marriage, but as Eva Weissweiler recounts in her book on the history of the hotel, Villa Verde oder das Hotel in San Remo, it really became a kind of friendship in which each led their own life. In biographies of Benjamin, the Villa Verde is only mentioned in passing. Weissweiler is the first to tell the story of this hotel — to write, that is, the hotel’s biography. Its bedrooms and terraces staged plenty of drama: jealousies, intrigues, romances, and tragedies of exile, both large and small. Nowadays, the shabby elegance of itinerant intellectuals, coasting up and down the Riviera, might tempt us to nostalgia. Weissweiler’s book resurrects a sharper and more multifaceted picture of life and survival in some of modern Europe’s darkest days.