by Tatjana Rese based on the novel by Vicki Baum
The hotel is the transit point where it seems possible to check out of one's own life and become a different, hopefully better version of oneself.
"Menschen im Hotel" sheds light on the fate of a handful of people who meet by chance in a grand hotel in Berlin at the end of the 1920s. Six people, six lives in limbo, six lonely people dreaming of yesterday or tomorrow. Only in the present are they unhoused.
They are scarred by life, disappointed, hopeful, at a turning point - and form a panorama of Berlin society a good 100 years ago.
In addition to the sickly accountant Kringelein, the characters include a gentleman criminal, an ageing dancer who travels in pursuit of her former triumph, a general manager whose company is on the brink of collapse - a satirical cabinet of horrors of disoriented interwar types who have only one thing in common: money. Everyone tries to profit from everyone else.
They all meet in 1920s Berlin and try to save their lives in a hotel on the eve of a world catastrophe of which they have no idea. Nervous, flighty people in a nervous, flighty time that is perhaps not so dissimilar to our own.
