Springtime for the Hotel Elephant?
I think it was Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a US late-1960’s TV show, that first labelled the German tyrant ‘Herr Schickelgruber’. The stage show ‘The Producers’ lampooned the dictator further, tastelessly, according to some. Both shows amused and scandalised in equal measure, although Laugh-In became a cult amongst art students of the end of that decade, a group that represented perhaps the first generation born in the post war years, and in the UK perhaps the first generation not to do national service (as consription was known)
In Weimar Herr Schickelgruber's ghost is still causing problems. Weimar is a charming German town, which has a large claim to fame in the art and design world for being the birthplace of the Bauhaus. The legacy of Itten and Schlemmer, Gropius and Albers, Klee and Steinberg lives on in art school curricula as well as in the traditions of the minimalist style of design. The Bauhaus still exists as a University Faculty in Weimar, it’s influence historically spread across the UK/USA when its creators fled the brutal rise to power of the Schickelgruber sect in 1933.
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Reception was extended to increase lobby size for the stay of President Putin. A new bar was added through the door to the left of the image. Fans reveal the lack of air conditioning.
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Lift lobby and stair landing has seating and further historic references to the hotels past.
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Most doorways date back to 1937 – 1938, with new doors picking up on the style.
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Art is set against the original interior fittings to create a different sense of style.
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Elephant has been an hotel since the sixteenth century, with a proud list of guests signed into the register. Goethe was a regular and celebrated his 80th birthday in style in the cellar bar. Hans Christian Anderson, Liszt, Schiller and many others were also guests, as was Herr Schickelgruber, who first signed the register in 1926 as a ‘writer’. The hotel owes its re-emergence as a five star hotel in 1955 to Thomas Mann who refused to return to Weimar at the invitation of the East German government unless he could stay in the hotel, forcing its reopening. The building that is in use to day was designed by Herman Giesler, the tyrants own architect, reputedly with input from Schickelgruber himself. Many of the rooms are as they were created in 1937/38, and the style of the period has been continued throughout the hotel, with pieces of the period being reconstructed, light fittings restored and some rooms exactly as they were. This weights the hotel down with a sense of history. Lighting standards and methods have also changed in the intervening period leaving the lighting levels of the hotel currently in the ‘gloomy’ part of the lighting scale.
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