In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

76 ARRAYS
spirit of rationality and systematization that governs the hotel [see Sobriety
vs. Exuberance] has also made it an impersonal and anonymous
place: "An implicit recommendation for my establishment is that it
continues to be the only German hotel without porters, thus solving the
tiresome problem of tips." As a building that contains its own intricate
world, the hotel is fascinating-"One of Berlin's landmarks!"-because
it pushes to the extreme the principle of autarky: "Its own electricity and
power plant of 920 horsepower. Its own waterworks with a pumping
capacity of 75,000 liters per hour. Complete self-sufficiency in all
branches of operation. Its own daily hotel newspaper, published for five
years ... Its own 5,000-volume library." Complexity and autarky make
the hotel as a system turn inward, and as an inward-turned system it
does not seem to be much concerned with its environment. But since
hotels and department stores are also emblems of the new sobriety, Adolf
Hitler can point to them when he complains about the lack of monumental
buildings in Berlin: "If Berlin were to meet the same fate as
ancient Rome, our descendants would one day have nothing more to
admire than a few Jewish-owned department stores and some hotels, as
the most colossal works of our age and as characteristic expressions of
our present culture" (Hitler, 291).
Instead of conveying a meaning to the outside world (as large buildings
often do), hotels and skyscrapers enter into structural liaisons with
even larger systems: "My valued guests enjoy the comfort and convenience
of the underground tunnel that connects the Anhalter train station
to the hotel." The systemic paradox of maximally closed systems achieving
maximal openness toward their environments (Luhmann and De
Giorgi, 30ff.) is one reason such large buildings can become dangerous
environments themselves. The internal movement of hotels, which elevators
set in motion and regulate, is as desubjectifying as the movement
characteristic of modern dances and new systems of production. [see
Assembly Lines, Dancing, Employees] This might finally explain why
passengers in hotel elevators become easy victims for thieves and other
criminals. Elevators are scarcely ever controlled by their passengers.
They depend on operators (whose gestures, in turn, depend on the
passengers' instructions) or, more frequently, on the continuous automatic
movement of the cars, which are pulled by an engine along a
quadrangular circuit consisting of two vertical shafts and two short
horizontal rails. The name for such elevators in continuous movement-