The Latest at Goethe

New York is going to a hotel. To Hotel Savoy. Here, on a very special building site, a drama in 27 rooms is presented to the audience. There is an imense surge of interest – and yet one never meets any other visitors. By Stephan Wackwitz

The theatrical installation Hotel Savoy by Dominic Huber is the product of an emergency situation. At the beginning of 2010 the Goethe-Institut New York had to vacate the 27-room townhouse opposite the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue as it was due to be refurbished and renovated – but we still wanted to use it somehow.

The house had been the villa of James W. Gerard, for many years US ambassador at the court of William II in Berlin. And then for four decades it was the transatlantic cultural representation office of a Germany that, after 1945, once again sought its role and its place among the democratic ‘cultural states’. Hannah Arendt, Günter Grass, Willy Brandt, Theodor Heuss, Konrad Adenauer, Uwe Johnson, Ingeborg Bachmann, Andy Warhol, Wim Wenders were frequent visitors here. And in the library the residents of the German district Yorkville, slightly eastwards towards the East River, used to meet with German emigrants, who loved everything German - with the exception of the country itself, the country that had expelled them. An ideal projection surface for artistic interventions on the topics of exile, homeland, literature. On the twilight zones of politics.

The artist Dominic Huber now came up with the opportune and absolutely effective idea of using Joseph Roth’s novelHotel Savoy as an inspiration for the showcasing of the house and its history. When Huber landed in New York in summer, accompanied by an entourage of quite awesomely competent and industrious young people - who were also, it has to be said, extremely nice – the conceptual planning had already been completed. As had most of the logistics. Working with a model of the house, detailed plans and a photo documentation in Europe, he had already developed an almost Hitchcock-like exact idea as to how he wanted to convert the house for his artistic purposes.

There followed a phase of intensive sawing, hammering, nailing, painting and shopping at Ikea. With an abundance of small changes he transformed the former office building into a kind of sinister, Eastern-European suburban hotel, i.e. into the “Hotel Savoy”. A wall was opened up and led into a veritable forest hut. My own office was downsized and transformed into a shabby hotel room – I almost preferred it like this. In October everything was ready. In a series of ‘dress rehearsals’ the first visitors were sent through the building. I had seldom felt quite so nervous in my role here as programme director. But it went well.

Ghosts in the echo room

“You enter the Hotel Savoy as the only guest,” writes the Neue Zürcher Zeitung,“and during the next hour you will encounter many a strange figure, but no other guests. The deserted lobby is already pervaded by a spooky presence. The design of the clock above the reception desk is redolent of times past, and it is on the trails of this past that you are guided through the house, by an elevator operator, a maid with a bird’s egg, a lottery salesperson who gives you a ticket with the number 1924, and all sorts of other surreal characters, who are part of the increasingly bizarre interior. A creaking, squeaking and rustling emanates from behind the walls, you hear music and voices and the rattling of a typewriter, a telephone rings, a television hums without a picture. You are sent from one room to the next, into mirrored wardrobes and backyard shafts, you pass through a tree hut into a ballroom – and as you climb higher, you are successively downgraded. Unmade beds, recently abandoned card games and odd shoes seem to indicate that right at the top the poorest guests have left their traces.”

Hotel Savoy has a jazz or perhaps also a rock-and-roll structure. The story and the architectural history of the house and the novel by Joseph Roth form a kind of standard or riff on which the installation improvises. The building has become an echo room haunted by the ghosts of an eventful past. Whether they turn out to be angels or demons depends on you.

It would, of course, be better to take a look at this special hotel, rather than reading a description. But this is no longer possible. At the latest since theNew York Times published an article on theHotel Savoy it has been booked out till the end of its installation. And so it was a kind of anonymous accolade for me when yesterday on craigslist, the big New Yorker internet ads portal, the first ad appeared offering black-market prices (“will pay dearly”) for a ticket.

Stephan Wackwitz is the programme director of the Goethe-Institut in North America. Together with Dominic Huber he was instrumental in promoting the project “Hotel Savoy”.