The Revolving Door

Wires, Lobbies, and a Door That Only Knows How to Turn

I keep returning to one detail that never makes it into the plot summaries of Grand Hotel: the film begins with voices and not faces. A bank of telephone operators sits in a Berlin hotel, plugging cords into a switchboard, and before we see a single guest we hear their lives crossing through wires. The film ends on a revolving door, still turning, as people who arrived as strangers leave as something else. Some do not leave at all.

The door is only the most visible threshold in the picture. The telephone booth, the elevator, the bedroom, the lobby, even the train station waiting outside: almost every space in the Grand Hotel is a place where someone stands between one condition and the next.

On the night of November 18, 1932, Grand Hotel won the Academy’s award for Outstanding Production, what we would now call Best Picture, at a banquet held in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.¹ It had been nominated for nothing else. Its single nomination was the one it won.

There is something strangely fitting in that. A film about people passing through a building was honored as a whole, and not for any single performance or craft.

Five Lives and a Ledger of Rooms

The story began as Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel, written in late-Weimar Berlin, a society in which old hierarchies, money, and expectation were coming loose from one another.² According to the American Film Institute’s catalog, Baum drew on time spent working in Berlin hotels and on a real scandal involving a stenographer and an industrialist.³ From that material she built a few days in one lobby: an aging ballerina who fears the applause is ending, a charming baron who is secretly a jewel thief, an industrialist cutting a desperate deal, a young stenographer hired to type for him, and a bookkeeper named Kringelein who has just learned he is dying.

MGM’s Irving Thalberg saw that a whole marquee could be spent on one lobby. He gathered Greta Garbo, John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Wallace Beery under Edmund Goulding’s direction, and the film is often described as an early model of the all-star ensemble picture.⁴

Then consider who was watching. American unemployment in 1932 is estimated at roughly 23.6 percent, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics is careful to note that figures for those years are later reconstructions.⁵ These were people for whom a lease, a job, or a house could end on short notice. Many of them sat in the dark and watched a luxury hotel in which nobody, not even the wealthy, could keep hold of anything, and they may have recognized their own footing in it. The rooms were beautiful, and every guest was on the way out of them.

The House of Feasting, the House of Mourning

Scripture has a word for someone who checks into a place that is not his own. The psalmist applies it to himself:

“Hear my prayer, O LORD… for I am a stranger with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were.” (Psalm 39:12, KJV)

Ecclesiastes then makes an odd claim about where wisdom lives:

“It is better to go to the house of mourning, than to go to the house of feasting: for that is the end of all men; and the living will lay it to his heart.” (Ecclesiastes 7:2, KJV)

And the psalm attributed to Moses turns the observation into a petition:

“So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12, KJV)

The Man Who Said Nothing Ever Happens

The film’s most quoted line belongs to Dr. Otternschlag, the house physician, a man marked by the war who sits in the lobby and watches. “People come, people go. Nothing ever happens.” He says it at the opening and again at the close, and the film lets us decide how much of it is wisdom and how much is despair.

Here is what happens in the meantime. A man falls in love. A woman who fears she is finished is shown that she is not. A theft goes wrong, a deal is exposed, a man is killed, and another is taken away by the police. A stenographer and a dying bookkeeper leave together for Paris. Nothing ever happens, says the man in the lobby, in a building where almost everything does.

Otternschlag knows that everyone leaves; what he does not know is what that knowledge is for. He has mistaken the fact of transience for the meaning of it, and the mistake has hardened into a doctrine that excuses him from caring. Saying that life is brief can be a confession, or it can be an alibi.

Grusinskaya, Garbo’s ballerina, shows the alibi from the inside. She is tied to a glory that is already behind her, and she cannot inhabit the evening she is actually standing in. The Baron, Barrymore’s thief, comes to her room to steal her pearls and stays because, for a few hours, something true happens to him. He is killed for it. She leaves for the next city believing he is waiting for her at the station. Kringelein begins to live because someone told him he was dying; Grusinskaya has been dying under the lights for years, and nobody told her.

Kringelein is Otternschlag’s opposite, though not for the reason we might expect. In the previous installment we followed how Scripture treats the poor, and it is tempting to cast him as the poor man who sees what the comfortable cannot. The film is less tidy than that. He is hungry, a little ridiculous, and drunk on champagne for the first time in his life. What changes him is not poverty but a diagnosis: mortality has stripped away his illusion of permanence, and with it his habit of deferring his own life.

That is also where the film’s quiet argument about money sits. Preysing, the industrialist, has plenty of it, and he treats every relationship as a transaction. Kringelein, who has spent years underpaid in Preysing’s own firm, empties his savings on a room, a meal, an evening, and a few days of being treated as a person. Flaemmchen, the stenographer, reads the hotel differently again: to her a room is not a refuge but a possibility, and she is always watching for the next door that might open. Money, in this building, is a way of deciding who gets to be present in their own life.

Ecclesiastes does not celebrate the house of mourning because grief is noble; it celebrates it because a funeral interrupts our illusions about permanence. The phrase points to a real house where real mourners gather, and the point is not that sadness outranks joy.⁶ Robert Alter’s rendering of hevel as breath rather than the familiar “vanity” helps recover the sense: Qohelet keeps confronting the fleetingness of what people try to make permanent.⁷ On that reading he is not simply sneering at the feast. He is asking what changes when a person finally remembers that the feast has an end. The guests who remember tend to eat more slowly.

The psalmist’s word for himself carries a detail the film cannot supply. He is a stranger “with thee,” a guest of God, and no wanderer without an address. He does not call his life unreal because it is brief. He holds the lodging loosely because he knows where home is, and that is exactly why the lodging matters to him.

Psalm 90 asks for the step Otternschlag never takes. It does not ask us merely to know that our days are numbered; it asks us to become wise because of it. The hotel knows that every guest must leave; Ecclesiastes and Psalm 90 keep asking what that knowledge should do to us while we are still here. Admitting that we are finite cannot serve as an excuse for indifference, since the texts treat it as the beginning of paying attention.

The Grand Hotel is no tidy allegory for life, and the film is stronger for refusing to be one. It is a place where human transience is compressed enough to be seen.

What the Door Forgets

Return to the door from the opening. It turns for the thief, the dancer, the industrialist, and the dying clerk, and it turns again for whoever arrives next. It does not ask who came in, and it keeps no record of who went out.

The hotel moves on as though nothing had happened. Scripture refuses to treat a human life as nothing, and that refusal is quieter than it sounds: the psalmist calls himself a sojourner not to shrink his life but to weigh it. A sojourner is someone who lives well because he has stopped confusing the lodging with the home.

1. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “The 5th Academy Awards (1932),” Oscars.org.
2. Baum, Vicki. Menschen im Hotel (1929).
3. AFI Catalog of Feature Films, Grand Hotel (1932).
4. Film-historical surveys and National Film Registry essays on the film’s ensemble casting.
5. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Where can I find the unemployment rate for previous years?”
6. NET Bible study notes on Ecclesiastes 7:2.
7. Alter, Robert. The Wisdom Books (W. W. Norton, 2010).