Hotel Taube

Hotel Taube was the family’s home in Schruns, a sunny market town in Austria’s Vorarlberg, and an unusually sustaining base for a poor young family. Its warmth, inexpensive meals, and position in a mountain valley made it more than a place to stay: it supported a winter life of work, skiing, and shared routines, including Hemingway’s demanding revision of The Sun Also Rises.

Setting and Arrival

The journey to Schruns ran through Switzerland and the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch, then through Liechtenstein to Bludenz, where a branch railway followed a pebbly trout river through farms and forest. Schruns itself was a sunny market town of sawmills, stores, inns, and the year-round Hotel Taube, where the family lived. The route placed the hotel at the meeting point of a settled valley and the high mountain country beyond it.

The Taube’s surroundings offered access to mountain trails rather than mechanized resort transport. There were no ski lifts or funiculars from Schruns; logging and cattle trails climbed the separate valleys, and skiers ascended on seal skins attached beneath their skis. A practice slope lay behind the hotel, while slopes and routes farther up the valley led toward high huts and, eventually, across the Silvretta Mountains toward the Klosters area.

Rooms, Meals, and Affordability

The hotel’s rooms were large and comfortable, with big stoves, windows, and beds, well supplied with blankets and feather coverlets. The dining room and wood-planked public bar were heated and friendly. These practical comforts mattered in a place where winter cold shaped daily life: the maid shut the windows at first light and kindled a fire in the large porcelain stove, warming the room for breakfast.

The meals were simple and excellent. Breakfast could include fresh bread or toast, fruit preserves, large bowls of coffee, eggs, and ham. The pension cost about two dollars a day for all three family members, and as the Austrian schilling declined over time, their room and food became cheaper still. The account distinguishes this manageable expense from the severe inflation and poverty the family had experienced in Germany; at the Taube, a tight budget could still buy warmth, food, and a settled domestic routine.

Winter Life and Company

The family returned to Schruns around Thanksgiving and stayed until nearly Easter. Although the town was not high enough to guarantee resort skiing except in a heavy-snow winter, climbing remained a pleasure. The narrator describes setting a deliberately sustainable pace uphill: a steep, difficult climb to the Madlener-Haus became easier with repetition, until a load twice as heavy as the first could be carried up with ease. The mountain routine joined physical effort to the sense of competence gained through practice.

Life at the hotel also opened onto the town’s social world. The family borrowed books from Sylvia Beach for the winter and bowled with local residents in an alley beside the hotel’s summer garden. Once or twice a week, a poker game gathered in the dining room with its windows shuttered and door locked, since gambling was forbidden in Austria. The players included the hotelkeeper, Walther Lent of the Alpine ski school, a banker, the public prosecutor, and the captain of the Gendarmerie. When the captain heard the patrol outside, he raised a finger to his ear and the room fell silent until the two officers had passed. The episode makes the hotel’s conviviality inseparable from the small precautions required to maintain it.

Meals were events in this winter life. The family were often hungry, and they drank beer and young or year-old wines, especially the white wines. Dinner might bring jugged hare in red-wine sauce or venison with chestnut sauce; the more expensive red wine could cost as little as twenty cents a liter, and they packed it in kegs for the Madlener-Haus. Food, drink, books, games, and climbing made the inexpensive pension a center for both household routine and excursions beyond the valley.

Family, Work, and Significance

The hotel’s domestic warmth extended to Bumby and the family dog, Schnautz. The dog slept at the foot of the bed, loved ski trips, and rode on the narrator’s back or shoulder during downhill runs. He was also Bumby’s companion on walks, accompanying the child and nurse beside a small sleigh. The hotel thus anchors not only Hemingway’s work and mountain activity but a family life organized around shared space and the rhythms of the season.

Schruns was also a place of concentrated literary labor. In the winter of 1925–26, Hemingway undertook the most difficult rewriting of his life there: he transformed the first draft of The Sun Also Rises, written in a six-week sprint, into a novel. He could not recall which stories he wrote during the same stay, though several turned out well. The contrast is telling: the hotel’s ordinary comforts and repeated routines provided the setting for an unusually demanding act of revision.

The family loved both the Vorarlberg and Schruns, but the stay was temporary. When Hemingway returned from a successful trip, he found his wife and Bumby waiting by the station; he recalled their reunion and the time afterward as a period when he worked well and the family felt invulnerable. That feeling ended after they left the mountains and returned to Paris in late spring, when the other trouble began again. They never went back to the Vorarlberg. Hotel Taube consequently remains in the book as the center of a bounded season of warmth and productive work, remembered against the changes that followed.