For all its urban hustle and trappings of big city life, Berlin at the turn of the century still lacked a key adornment of most major metropolises: first-class hotels that could attract the wealthiest international travelers. The Kaiserhof, which had so impressed Wilhelm I upon its opening in 1875, was already out of date by 1900, and more recently built hotels like the Central at the Friedrichstrasse Station and the Bristol on Unter den Linden were not up to world standards. What the German capital needed was a grand hostelry on the order of Paris’s Ritz, Rome’s Excelsior, or London’s Savoy, but more modern, in keeping with Berlin’s obsession with technological innovation.
In the first years of the new century a former carpenter’s apprentice from Mainz named Lorenz Adlon set out to repair this deficiency. He had made a fortune in the restaurant business by operating a food concession at the Industrial Exposition of 1896 and by launching Berlin’s first genuine French restaurant, the Red Terraces at the Zoo Gardens. Yet such successes had not satisfied this self-made man’s lust for wealth and fame; he dreamed of becoming Berlin’s own Caesar Ritz. In 1904 he had found an appropriately noble address for his planned undertaking, Nr. 1 Unter den Linden, next door to the British Embassy. On the site stood a small palace owned by Count Redern, who was anxious to sell the property in order to pay some gambling debts. But there was a problem with the deal. The Redern Palace had been built by Schinkel and was classed as an historical monument, which protected it from demolition. Luckily for Adlon, Berlin had never been the kind of town to let history stand in the way of progress. Moreover, Kaiser Wilhelm, who knew the entrepreneur, fully shared his dream of bringing a world-class hotel to the German capital. His Majesty and the city fathers saw to it that the legal obstacles impeding the sale and demolition of the Redern Palace were quickly cleared away. “Thank God the old box is finally being torn down,” the kaiser is reported to have said. “The thing was a disgrace, blighted my entire Linden. Adlon has promised me to build something more beautiful. My residential city has to become a modern metropolis, don’t you think?” As a further act of assistance, the kaiser persuaded the British Embassy to sell part of its garden to create a larger building site.
Lorenz Adlon had promised to build a tour de force of functional magnificence, and this is precisely what he achieved. When the Hotel Adlon opened on October 23, 1907, Berlin’s newspapers gushed over suites that were “half-museum, half-living room,” bathrooms outfitted with the latest plumbing, and a vast central hall featuring a bust of the kaiser in the style of a Roman emperor. Like no other building in Berlin, the Adlon evoked the pride and power of the new German empire. As one journalist commented, upon entering its stately conference rooms one could easily visualize diplomats redrawing the map of Europe and captains of industry shaping the economic destiny of the world.
