The word “hotel” is cognate with “hostel” and “hospital”, and for a few short years in the middle of the 20th century, one Paris establishment functioned as all three. Hôtel Lutetia sits on the city’s Left Bank and exudes a certain nonconformist swagger. Opened in 1910 and built in a style that bobbed between art nouveau and art deco, it soon attracted an artistic and bohemian crowd. Hemingway hung out there in the 1920s, as did Picasso, Matisse and André Gide. James Joyce, resident in the city for 20 years, wrote a chunk of Ulysses sitting at one of its tables.
In this outstanding book, which has been shortlisted for the Women’s prize for nonfiction, Jane Rogoyska reports that by the mid-1930s the Lutetia had become headquarters to German political dissidents fleeing Hitler. “The Lutetia Crowd”, as the Nazis disdainfully dubbed them, comprised the intellectual cream of the Weimar Republic. Heinrich Mann, novelist brother of the more famous Thomas, was the head of the organising committee that worked to bring down the Nazi regime from a distance. To this end, fake tomato-seed packets were sent into Germany containing a diatribe against the Third Reich and The Communist Manifesto was rebound into classic literature and pumped into the Fatherland.
When they weren’t tampering with tomato seeds, these former lawyers, academics and journalists spent their days tramping around the City of Light in increasingly shabby clothing, trying to persuade someone to give them a job, any job. Even this misery, though, was nothing compared with the hellish conditions that arrived with the occupation of Paris in 1940. Under Hitler’s Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog) initiative, any émigré or refugee could now be arrested without legal due process. Most of the Lutetia circle found themselves reclassified as stateless aliens, an utterly defenceless position. For those who were Jewish, there was every chance of being sent to concentration camps in the east.
Having set up the Lutetia as the focus of her book, Rogoyska then traces a number of individual stories. Some of these have been told many times before. There is Walter Benjamin, who spends all his days at the Bibliotheque Nationale perfecting his life’s work on The Arcades Project, a study of the street life of 19th-century Paris. Then there is Irène Némirovsky, the Ukraine-born author who is secretly writing Suite Française, a novel depicting the fear, desperation and moral compromises of ordinary citizens during the German invasion. Gisèle Freund, a young German photographer and a lesbian, has already taken the precaution of making a mariage blanc to a Frenchman in order to gain citizenship.
Mostly it doesn’t end well. Benjamin kills himself after failing to escape over the border into Spain and a significant part of his Arcades manuscript is lost. Némirovsky dies in Auschwitz, although her Suite Française will be published decades later to great acclaim. Freund lives to 91, having become one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century. The Lutetia, meanwhile, experiences its own nadir. The day after the Germans arrived, the hotel was designated as the headquarters of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence service. At its head was Adm Wilhelm Canaris, a fluent French speaker and connoisseur of fine wine, who routinely insisted on an extra room for his two beloved dachshunds. For the junior officers, being at the Lutetia, which retained its French staff and atmosphere of frictionless luxury, made them feel simultaneously sophisticated and self-conscious. When served artichoke at dinner, one man munched on the spiky bits and started to choke. The Lutetia’s chef was angrily summoned and accused of sabotage until one German, more sophisticated than the rest, explained to his spluttering colleague which bit of the artichoke was edible.
In the third and final part, Rogoyska’s book soars to great heights. After the Germans fled the Lutetia in disarray in August 1944, it was turned into a repatriation centre for the survivors of concentration camps. Following the liberations of spring 1945, buses and trainloads of emaciated figures, still wearing their striped uniforms, limped through the hotel’s grand wooden revolving door. Housed in bedrooms that until recently had been occupied by Admiral Canaris’s men, these survivors now received medical care, new clothing and nourishing food.
The Lutetia was not, as Rogoyska is careful to point out, a place of tearful reunions and happy endings. Many of the hotel’s latest guests would be returning to a world bereft of their loved ones. On the pavement outside the hotel, hundreds of tearful men and women held up photographs of relatives who had last been seen boarding a train heading east. Could the returnees tell them whether they recognised their son, their aunt, their husband from the camps? The people in the striped pyjamas barely looked. They knew that, even if by some fluke they could identify a face in the picture, there was little chance that person would ever walk through the Lutetia’s rotating door.
• Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War by Jane Rogoyska is published by Allen Lane (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
