The Hotel Adlon

opened in October 1907 with the backing of Kaiser Wilhelm II at imperial Berlin’s most fashionable address: Unter den Linden 1. Hotelier Lorenz Adlon modeled his magnificent Adlon on modern American hotels. It attracted a mix of nobles, diplomats, spies, titans of industry, kings, film stars, and presidents. It was considered the place to stay; in fact, the kaiser routinely housed guests there instead of his old, drafty palace. Most of the original hotel burned down in 1945 when, some claim, Soviet soldiers drunk on looted wine torched it.

From the beginning, Americans clamored for cocktails at the hotel bar rather than for beer or wine. Because his German staff could not satisfy American thirsts, Lorenz Adlon traveled to New York and Chicago in 1911 to learn the secrets of cocktails. By the time Prohibition went into effect nine years later, the hotel’s bar had become a Mecca for heavy-drinking Americans. There, the staff, under the direction of Fred Bielmann, the learned head bartender from the mid-1920s until at least the mid-1930s, mixed Manhattans, Scofflaws, Golden and Claret Fizzes, Brandy Flips, and other American-style libations at all hours of the day—and for a fraction of the cost in the United States. Despite occasional counterfeit Hamburg spirits sneaking in, the liquors were high quality. See Manhattan Cocktail; fizz;, flip. Loitering journalists drank at the bar, traded gossip, and kept tabs on arriving notables such as Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, the king and queen of Siam, Albert Einstein, and Theodore Roosevelt. In 1930, the actress Lillian Harvey won the first “internationalen Cocktail-Konkurrenz” at the Adlon with her Hocus Pocus. See cocktail contests. In 1997, the Kempinski hotel group opened the hotel, finally rebuilt after the 1945 conflagration.

Grothe, Solveig. “Hotel Adlon: Deutschlands erste Adresse.” Der Spiegel, October 21, 2007. http://www.spiegel.de/einestages/100-jahre-hotel-adlon-a-948049.html (accessed February 17, 2021).

“Old Broadway in New Berlin.” New York Times, November 12, 1922.

“Wanted: Cocktail Mixer.” Evening World, January 28, 1911.

Zitzlsperger, Ulrike C. “Reading Across Cultures: Global Narratives, Hotels and Railway Stations.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences 9, no. 2 (June 2016): 193–211.

By: Matthew Rowley