Hotel Exile: Paris in the Shadow of War

Summary

From an award-winning historian, the story of World War II exiles and one famed Paris hotel.

Since its birth in 1910, the Hotel Lutetia has been a grand Paris institution, a meeting place for artists, intellectuals, musicians, and politicians. André Gide took his lunch here, James Joyce lived in one of its rooms, Picasso and Matisse were regular guests. But the hotel has a darker history, too—from the years before, during, and after the Second World War. In Hotel Exile, Jane Rogoyska evokes in novelistic prose the emotions, dilemmas, and fates of the hotel's patrons: from intellectuals and political activists fleeing Nazi Germany, to German counterintelligence officers who commandeered the hotel during the Occupation, to Holocaust survivors who sought refuge after the Liberation. A masterpiece of empathy and concision, Hotel Exile offers us a vision of the edges of a war, and of the three groups connected to a place, to one another, and to the dark ideology that dictated some of the twentieth century's most devastating events.