Welcome to Görlitz/Görliwood: Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) and Stefan Zweig’s legacy

This essay analyzes Anderson’s film The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) in relation to Stefan Zweig. In the film, the Texan director has chosen an old department store in Görlitz, a small town in eastern Germany known as “Görliwood” for its popularity as a filming location, to stage the history of the imaginary hotel. This miniature world provides the semiotic backdrop against which the universal parable of evil triumphing over good is played out. Rather than a classic adaptation of a single text, the film should be considered a reinterpretation of several works by Zweig. The film’s protagonist comes to embody the writer’s idea of Central Europe erased by the Nazis. Although the protagonist is defeated by history, for the spectator he “wins” on an aesthetic and moral level. And yet, from today’s perspective his victory seems melancholic and insufficient: currently the leading political party in Görlitz is the far-right AFD.