They’re Back!  Our Series of Flash Exhibits on Oscar Nominations for Best Picture

Each exhibit runs for 2 days only—stop by Library Special Collections to catch all of them---  they’ll be gone in a flash!

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Suddenly the world is talking again about the Viennese writer Stefan Zweig, whose work inspired Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel, a zany comedy, but also a nostalgic meditation on a pre-war Europe whose values of beauty and civilized tolerance were slipping away as Hitler rose to power.  Anderson drew inspiration from Zweig’s only novel, Beware of Pity, and his autobiography The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, in which the author mourns the end of that era.  Zweig was at the center of European intellectual life in the 1920s and early 1930s, with an impressive circle of friends that included writers, poets, composers, and thinkers like Freud, Einstein, Joyce, Rilke, Schnitzler, and Strauss.  Displayed here are Schnitzler’s signed copy of Zweig’s reminiscences of the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren, which Zweig had had privately printed for a group of his friends; and the 1916 first edition of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which Zweig later translated into Italian as a result of his friendship with Joyce. The hotel of Grand Budapest Hotel—the “real” star of the film—was modeled after one of the great old European hotels, the Grand hotel Pupp (renamed Hotel Moskva in 1950), located in the spa town of Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic, and pictured here in a travel pamphlet from the Susan Sontag library (Collection 892).    The albumen print of the Empire Hotel in Buxton, Derbyshire, one of the great English railway hotels, was taken by the Scottish photographer William Dobson Valentine, who signed his photos "J.V." in honor of his father, James Valentine, also a well-known photographer (Photograph Album Collection (Collection 94)).  Finally, from the Arts Library’s Artists’ Book Collections, we’ve borrowed Matthias Herrmann’s Hotel Diary, which expresses the artist’s own struggle with AIDS.  All of the photographs were shot in hotel rooms throughout the world, in cities like Dublin, Helsinki, Salzburg, Stockholm, Toronto, and Zurich.

By Jane Carpenter