ARD two-parter “The White House on the Rhine”: Hotel on the river of fate of the Germans

“The White House on the Rhine” tells the story of Hotel Dreesen. Chaplin was a guest here, Adenauer, Chamberlain, Hitler. In the television two-parter, they are the protagonists of a densely told family epic that reflects the times.

ESome time after the hotel heir Emil Dreesen (Jonathan Berlin) walked four hundred kilometers home with his war comrade Robert Harthaler (Jesse Albert) after the end of the First World War, he sits at night with his clarinet on the banks of the Rhine and follows the sounds of a trumpet. A Senegalese member of the French occupying army (Farba Dieng) plays, Emil’s sister Ulla (Pauline Rénevier) listens raptly.

Emil, full of revolutionary plans for the future but burdened with a war trauma, wants to learn the new type of music. It won’t happen any time soon. According to the trumpeter, jazz is not played like marching music. Then the goose-step rhythm is out of Emil’s head, it becomes free in the musical articulation. Both improvise with each other.

It’s going up. The peace is full of hope. The President of the Reich, Ebert, and the Lord Mayor of Cologne, Konrad Adenauer, are welcomed at the Rheinhotel Dreesen along with many other prominent guests. Chambermaid and communist Elsa (Henriette Confurius) organizes a strike if hotelier’s wife Maria Dreesen (Katharina Schüttler) does not put a stop to the abuse of the young employees. Women can no longer put up with everything. Fritz Dreesen (Benjamin Sadler) prefers to live backwards, moves in nationalist circles, to the displeasure of the senior boss, his Jewish mother Adelheid (Nicole Heesters).

They all embody the tensions of the 1920s and early 1930s. Ulla leans towards life reform and naturism, Fritz will later call Hitler a friend, Maria is Catholic-conservative – and Emil shows himself to be a survivor, first pacifistic and free-thinking, then opportunistic. Broken by experience on the battlefield, he is no good as a hero. But to the engine of not giving up. A shaky figure.

Time has passed since “Das Adlon” (2013) and “Das Sacher” (2016) were hits with the public as miniseries on television. Time in which narrative styles of historical family and company history have developed. Times when (medium-sized) patriarchs led their company through trials and tribulations on television with unflinching charisma will probably not come back. Nothing against actors like Mario Adorf (as a Lübeck marzipan manufacturer once “The Last Patriarch”). But in Julia von Heinz’s “Eldorado KaDeWe” series such a character is hard to imagine.

As a location, grand hotels are a special case of entrepreneurial family history. Here the passage of time is reflected in a manageable space, both in front of and behind the scenes. Family history meets event history, social history, economic history and biographies. Guests bring flair and drama, or, as in the case of “The White House on the Rhine”, also the intellectual dullness and criminal activities of the Nazi regime.