[THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL] PT.1 Cultural Background

Except paying tribute to the masters, the whole film is full of metaphor. It’s too shallow simply categorising it as comedy, adventure or drama. It can be considered more of a documentary, art noir. It is a mixture of classic filming techniques left by Hitchcock, Rossellini, Chaplin and others. It captures the spiritual connotation of the decline of European civilisation, using the tone and style of literary and artistic.

To know more about the historical/cultural background of the film, we have to dive into Walter Benjamin’s and Stefan Zweig’s life.

GUSTAVE

ZWEIG

Let’s not talk about Zweig. The original author of the book . A few simple but vital features of him: he is an Austrian exile writer, a Jew, a defender of traditional European culture, persecuted by Nazi, and finally committed suicide in Brazil. The Budapest Hotel actually tells the autobiography of Zweig who left his declining spiritual home and died heartbroken.

Walter Benjamin, German, the most important philosopher, critic and ‘the last literati in Europe” of the twentieth century, was persecuted by Nazi and, finally committed suicide in Spain. In European liberal arts academia, he is always regarded as a ‘god’. In “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov, Orient und Occident” (1936), Benjamin lamented the demise of traditional storytelling technology. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” uses a four tier narrative structure, which can always presents as an immersive storytelling process. A story is inseparable from the teller and the listener, as well as their environment at the same time. This is a tribute to Benjamin’s thoughts.

In the 1930s, with the progress of industrialisation, world wars and the rise of Nazis, everything humanity declined rapidly. Rationalisation, centralisation, mordenization and fast food culture are on the rise. Europe, a land with profound cultural heritage, has been ravaged by iron hoofs, a rape of its spirituality. However, as tradition was lost and human nature indifferent. People are used to echoing the higher authority, they no longer taste literature and art carefully, let aloe thinking and exploring. This directly led to only a gorgeous speech can persuade countless fanatical believers to the battlefield, also deepened the sorrow of conscientious artist. The suicide of Benjamin and Zweig was a kind of martyrdom.

In the era of novels, newspapers, telephones, telegraphs and televisions, people’s relationships have been replaced by the media. People hide themselves behind the microphones, communication was reduced to only a necessary level. Compared with the way and environment in the old days, spreading myths, epics and fairy tales, the reality of storytelling has been changed. The process used required integrate the common experience of both teller and listener. In the Morden world, an isolated can mass-produced works without emotion. With the disappearance of practical care, the spiritual pillar of European culture collapsed.