Lead Review (The Secret Hotel in Berlin)
- Book: The Secret Hotel in Berlin
- Location: Berlin
- Author: Catherine Hokin
Dual timeline mystery set in BERLIN
28th August 2024
The Secret Hotel in Berlin by Catherine Hokin, dual timeline mystery set in Berlin.
I recently went back to Berlin and of course I like to curate my reading around setting. So I picked up The Secret Hotel in Berlin by Catherine Hokin (and also added Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (TR: Michael Hofmann) which won the International Booker Prize 2024) and both novels proved to be set in different times in the history of the city during the 20th Century, which gave an expansive feel to my reading selection.
The Secret Hotel in Berlin was a very good read and it certainly felt well researched. My family originated in the city and we still have strong links to this day. It is very refreshing to see an intelligently presented and factually accurate backdrop to the unfolding events within the novel.
The first story is that of Lili, who is Jewish and she is living in Leipzig during the earlier part of the 20th Century. Her father is trampled and killed by mob, looking for trouble on the steps of her local synagogue. The reverberations of anti-Jewish sentiment are already being felt and with the death of her father, she inherits some money and decides to open a florist shop in Mitte in Berlin. She is soon wooed by Marius who happens to own the very grand Edel Hotel. The author at the end describes her interest in the fate of the grand old hotels in Berlin, which formed such an important part of the city pre-War. The Adlon, for example, which also inspired the novel, is still very much a feature of modern-day Berlin, although it has been rebuilt since WW2 – in fact it burned down just a few days after the end of the war and the last wing of the old building was demolished in 1961. The modern reconstruction still has the feel of historical grandeur, even in its modern manifestation.
In the run up to WW2, Lili keeps her provenance a secret, even once she is married but the pressure starts to mount as the Nazi party chooses to favour the hotel for its conviviality and discretion.
In 1990s Berlin, Lucy is tasked with finding a property for Compton Hotels, at a time when great properties were available for the taking – the Wall fell on 9 November 1989 and speculators were starting to look at availability in the Eastern Sector of the city.
“Lucy had stepped off the plane at Tegel Airport with her knowledge of Berlin wrapped round two fixed points: the Nazis and the Wall. It took her less than a day to realise that nothing about the city was that easily anchored. That history in Berlin was instead a shifting, rewritten, continuing process, with as many gaps as certainties in its telling”. In many respects that is still true today.
She alights on the Edel Hotel, the legalities are formalised and soon she is supervising its refurbishment. The architect, Adam, has his own reasons for working on the property and adds another level of interest to the story, forming a cohesive vehicle to bring historical context the narrative.
This is a truly well-woven and engaging story that is a must-read if you want to understand more about the city and its people. I loved reading this in situ because I could imagine the characters on the Karl Marx Allee, where Adam’s mother lived, who then moved to Marzahn (and if you want to get a deeper feel for that part of the city, I recommend Marzahn, Mon Amour by Katja Oskamp, TR: Jo Heinrich). The author really manages to dovetail the stories with skill and creativity.
(If I was being pernickety, I would amend the various “There’s…” when referring to plurals, ‘there are..’ would be correct; it is common parlance nowadays to write the former but it might have felt more era-correct in grammatical terms to use the latter).
Highly recommended and an exceptionally good novel to read in situ!.
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