About the work
“Hotel Savoy” is a novel by the Austrian writer and journalist Joseph Roth. It was serialised in the Frankfurter Zeitung from 9 February to 16 March 1924 and published as a book in Berlin the same year. At the Vienna Burgtheater a production by the Musicbanda Franui with Nicholas Ofczarek opens on 7 November 2026, combining Roth's text with operetta hits from 1900 to 1935; the stage version is by Rita Czapka and Andreas Schett, the text arrangement by Tamara Metelka and the music by Andreas Schett and Markus Kraler.
Plot
In the summer of 1919 Gabriel Dan returns west after three years as a prisoner of war in Siberia and takes a room in the huge Hotel Savoy in an industrial city in Eastern Europe. The building mirrors society: the rich live on the lower floors, the impoverished under the roof, where they pawn their luggage with the lift boy. Gabriel falls in love with the dancer Stasia, his old comrade Zwonimir stirs up the workers, and everyone pins vain hopes on the American millionaire Bloomfield. In the end the hotel burns down during an uprising.
Cultural significance
The novel is regarded as an analysis of the social upheaval after the First World War, with the hotel as an image of a Europe that has lost its home. Together with “Das Spinnennetz”, “Die Rebellion” and “Rechts und links” it forms Roth's panorama of the years 1919 to 1929. Its model was the real Hotel Savoy in Łódź; stage versions include one at Vienna's Volkstheater in 2012.