The four years after World War I proved disastrous to the grand hotels of Berlin. There were threats from the left in the form of revolution, the January Uprising, and strikes, and there were threats from the right in the form of vandalism, looting, atrocity, and an unsuccessful coup d’état. Then there were the threats that originated neither on the right nor on the left: material and labor shortages, high crime, inflation, hyperinflation, and rising taxes. Between 1918 and 1923, hoteliers began blaming the left and the state for all these misfortunes – a tendency that pushed them into the camp of the anti-republican right, Weimar’s enemies. With the hyperinflation of 1923, an unmitigated disaster for Berlin’s grand hotels, that tendency became the rule. The republic, Berlin’s grand hoteliers had come to believe, was bad for business. Their efforts to manage the crisis of the postwar era, 1918–23, reveal the links between quotidian struggles and political decisions – decisions against the republic in favor of more authoritarian solutions to Germany’s problems.

Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of right-parties in the late Second Empire, including the German Fatherland Party, before moving to a more thorough analysis of the way in which the German Right reacted to Germany’s defeat in World War I and the revolutionary upheaval it left in its wake. It focuses in particular to unify the various factions of the German Right that had existed before World War I into a new political party, the German National People’s Party (DNVP), in preparation for the elections to the Weimar National Assembly and the Prussian Constitutional Assembly in January 1919. It also examines the reluctance with which the leaders of the German Conservative Party – in particular its parliamentary leader Count Kuno von Westarp – embraced the new party and the problem this posed for the DNVP’s future political development.