Can Spirit of Old Hotel Give Berlin New Life?

Talking to retired Kellermeister Lothar Wrosch, the grit, traffic and pardon-our-dust signs of modern Berlin slip out of mind and you can almost hear the clopping of horses’ hooves and feel the cool, damp air of a turn-of-the-century wine cellar.

Wrosch spent his youth tending the vintages in the vast cave of the Hotel Adlon, between-the-wars Berlin’s answer to the Ritz or the Plaza, and he is proud to tell of it.

To this day, he has kept his dogeared wine lists. He can sketch a floor plan of the Keller and is prepared to let a visitor in on the secrets of caring for wine in the days before wooden casks gave way to glass bottles and steel tanks: Remove the sediment by dissolving a sturgeon’s bladder in the barrel; get rid of a burgundy’s bite by whipping in egg whites.

“We even treated wine illnesses,” he recalls, smiling. “We were the wine doctors.”

It is these seemingly roseate, innocent days that Berlin would like to recreate as it prepares to become, once again, the seat of the German government. Too much horror has unfolded here since Wrosch tended his wine barrels beneath the city--the coming of the Nazis, the Gotterdammerung of ’44 and ‘45, the Communist East German regime, even the misery provoked by today’s mass unemployment.

All this unhappiness has left this city of 3.5 million with an unattractive aspect and a massive identity problem: Even today, some 52-year-old bullet holes are still unrepaired in its buildings, and the overall feel of many neighborhoods is of wartime destruction that was fixed without much money or national pride.

But now that Berlin has the chance to reinvent itself, its planners hope to exorcise the ghosts of the past and make it a normal capital. This summer, the city is said to have 10,000 construction sites, including the one downtown billed as the largest in Europe. The rebuilding--including a huge new train station, new chancellery and a face lift for the historic Reichstag, or seat of Parliament--is bringing about $19 billion worth of construction money to the city each year.

And the question confronts each architect and planner: What era to turn to for inspiration? Certainly not the street-fighting 1930s nor the 1940s of swastikas and air raids, nor the 1960s of the Berlin Wall.

But what about Berlin of the late teens and early 1920s, when women in sweeping skirts and hats as big as angel food cakes turned Unter den Linden into Europe’s gaudiest catwalk? When the collapse of the Prussian autocracy gave way to the Weimar Republic’s multi-fronted revolution in art and architecture, music and night life? The Berlin of experimental cabarets and Albert Einstein, of transvestite balls and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe?

It’s the obvious answer: a return to the days of Wrosch’s Hotel Adlon.

The great hotel survived the wartime bombardment of this city only to be burned to the ground in 1945.

But now it is being rebuilt, and Berliners are pinning their hopes on the chance that it will help bring back some of what was lost when the fatherland separated itself from the civilized world.

The new hotel isn’t finished yet, but it is one of the first of the many edifices going up to open for tours, so it has aroused intense local curiosity, pride and hope. Already, thousands of city folk are pouring through the hotel, happy to have guides direct their attention to the frescoed ceilings and busts of the kaiser, wondering whether the building can seed Berlin with some of the spirit the city lost when its most estimable men and women were either murdered in quantity or driven into exile.

So, Herr Doktor Wrosch, is it possible? Can the complex bouquet of old Berlin be recaptured in a deluxe new building? Can old wine be put in a new bottle?

“Nein!” says the elderly but energetic Kellermeister. “There could never be another family like the Adlons. They were something special.”

That’s so. The founder of the original Hotel Adlon, Lorenz Adlon, was one of those one-in-a-million self-made types, a character out of a German version of Horatio Alger.

Started Out ‘Dirt Poor’

“He came from a dirt-poor family,” says Percy Adlon, his great-grandson and today a filmmaker living in Los Angeles. Through an apprenticeship as a cabinetmaker--for a firm that built interiors for luxury ocean liners--the canny Lorenz Adlon acquired a sixth sense for the tastes of the super-rich and a knack for catering to them.

He started small, buying a tent and setting it up at sporting events, selling beer and wurst. Eventually he saved enough to buy a restaurant in the Netherlands and later, one in Berlin, where one night he had the good luck to serve Kaiser Wilhelm I’s son, the crown prince.

Adlon made much of this fleeting imperial connection: Once the prince had come to the throne, the ambitious restaurateur ambushed him while he was out riding his horse in the park. Could Lorenz Adlon beg an audience with His Royal Highness?

And once inside the palace, Adlon made his pitch: Bankroll a hotel that would put Berlin on the map, the most modern, most luxurious hotel in the world, a hotel with hot and cold running water, with electric signal lights instead of annoying, clanging bell pulls. A hotel that would bring to dowdy Berlin the glamour of Paris and St. Petersburg.

“Berlin at the time was just a lousy military center, not a true capital,” says Percy Adlon. The kaiser, in fact, didn’t even have running water in his own palace. But he did have his pride, and Lorenz Adlon had pricked it.

Hot and Cold Water

“The kaiser was a man of progress, and when Lorenz told him about the hot and cold running water and all these amenities, this really caught his attention,” Adlon says. At last, he would have a decent place to put up state guests.

So taken was Kaiser Wilhelm II with the Adlon plan that he not only put up the equivalent of about $250 million at today’s exchange rate to build it but also ordered the demolition of a villa on the designated site, a minor architectural treasure that had been under historic preservation protection.

In 1907, up went the Hotel Adlon, at the west end of Unter den Linden, on Pariser Platz, the plaza graced by the Brandenburg Gate. “I wouldn’t say it was beautiful, but it was rich,” says Percy Adlon, who is best known in America not as a hotelier’s great-grandson but as the director of “Baghdad Cafe.”

And in the heady atmosphere that was wartime-era and Weimar Berlin, the founder’s formula for success worked: The Hotel Adlon became both an engine of the city’s social and artistic revolutions and a stage upon which they were played.

Einstein stayed there. Marlene Dietrich linked up with “The Blue Angel” director Josef von Sternberg there. Enrico Caruso lost his voice there but was browbeaten by the hotel doctor into performing “Rigoletto” anyway. Chef de cuisine Georges Auguste Escoffier taught Britain’s King Edward VII the secret of a perfect bouillabaisse there. (Wave garlic ever so briefly in the steam over the pot, then add a spoonful of absinthe.)

Theodore Roosevelt showed up and demanded antelope steak. Charlie Chaplin’s pants fell down in the lobby.

Berliners even claim that it was at the Hotel Adlon that the art of being a gigolo was honed to perfection: After World War I, its salons became haunts for unemployed nobles and demobilized army officers with nothing to do, and Hedda Adlon, the founder’s clever daughter-in-law, put these down-on-their-luck aristocrats to work making nice with the wallflowers at tea dances.

“These VIPs were only human beings,” says Heinz Riedler, an 83-year-old former Adlon waiter, who spent three months training to serve their plates nevertheless.

There was plenty to learn, he says, proud all these years later of mastering such obligatory arts as the bearing of fully loaded trays on his shoulder or wearing a tuxedo in hot weather without sweating.

“The eyes of the guests have to like the dinner, not just their stomachs,” he says.

For Kellermeister Wrosch, what counted was the personal touch that only a determined family businessman could provide.

“Lorenz Adlon designed the whole facility, and he must really have had vision,” he says, recalling that Adlon cleverly installed a lobby fountain that doubled as hardware for an irrigation system for the wooden wine casks beneath. “Wine needs peace in order to improve, and in that wine cellar, this was possible.”

During the Third Reich, the hotel was a preferred mise en scene for top Nazis; Adolf Hitler’s chancellery and Gestapo headquarters were just a few goose steps down the street. The suites facing Pariser Platz were booked the night the Nazis celebrated Hitler’s coming to power with a torchlight parade through the Brandenburg Gate. Famed journalist-historian William L. Shirer filed his war correspondence from the hotel. A Chinese gong--not an unsettling siren--was sounded to alert guests when it was time to flee to the air-raid shelter.

All this was lost in the spring of 1945, when Red Army grunts took Berlin and went on a drinking spree in the Adlon’s cellar. “The Russians came in and thought they were in heaven with all this wine around,” Wrosch says. “They didn’t need a bottle. They could just lie under the barrels, with their mouths open under the taps.”

The hotel’s best champagnes were kept in wooden crates, Wrosch says, packed in shredded wood excelsior. The Soviet soldiers threw the shreddings this way and that as they lunged for the magnums. Then somebody dropped a cigarette butt onto this tinderbox and the whole hotel--the tapestries, the fountains, the Chinese gong, the velvet curtains, the hand-carved curlicues of Cuban mahogany--was gone.

For 50 years, the land on Pariser Platz stood emptyand dead. East Berlin’s “death strip” of tank traps, attack dogs and guard towers snaked by next door. Hedda Adlon vowed in her memoirs that she would one day rebuild the hotel but never when Berlin remained a divided city.

Breaching the Wall

Then, in 1989, the Berlin Wall was breached. Soon, East and West were reunited. Afterward, the Parliament voted to return to Berlin. The rush began to rebuild the scarred city.

Although Hedda Adlon didn’t live to see it happen, an investment group called Fundus Fonds Verwaltungen was put together to finance the rebuilding of the Adlon. And the Kempinski hotel chain took out a 20-year lease. Coincidentally, the project will cost about $250 million this time, just as in the kaiser’s day. The six-story building will have 337 guest rooms and suites, plus a ballroom and not one but two Wintergarten--an accessory that is both chic and de rigueur in Berlin’s climate.

No attempt was made to duplicate the old hotel’s bombastic decor, but the new facade echoes the old, and inside, the attention to detail is unsparing. Modern amenities include “allergy rooms” and bulletproof windows. Although construction continues, the hotel has begun taking guests on a “guinea pig” basis, and the German president will cut the ribbon when the last umlauts are dotted in August.

Meanwhile, the idea has taken hold here that perhaps the old Adlon magic will work again and the hotel will help make Berlin a true European capital, in the grandest sense. Enthusiastic Berliners have been moved to send in old ashtrays and silverware, filched more than half a century before.

But will the sleeping princess come back to life? Can a chain-owned hotel help Germany’s once and future capital solve its personality crisis?

No problem, says Percy Adlon.

“Until now, there were these two desperate towns, West Berlin and East Berlin,” he says. “Both are still a little . . . off, so to say. This is such an unusual chance, that a world capital gets a new face--like a new Manhattan skyline--because of this terrible political situation. Pariser Platz is kind of the stage for that, and the Adlon is like the runway. Everybody who wants to see or be seen will go there. There would really have to be terrible management, terrible food, terrible service for this not to be the place for people to go to show off.”

And you, Herr Riedler?

“No!” argues the elderly former waiter. “It may be a very luxurious hotel, but they will really have a very hard time recreating the flair of old Berlin. Business and home are two different things.”