Six Characters of Hotel W.

Six displays distributed throughout the BAU tell the fictional stories of radically different characters orbiting one of the Graz grand hotels in the autumn of 1945: an enigmatic, matronly receptionist; a pragmatic and urbane British officer; a Holocaust survivor involved in revenge plans; a termite-loving fugitive Nazi rocket scientist; a former partisan and Surrealist; and a dancer and communist.

Back then, the imaginary hotel was a key transit zone in the violent aftermath of World War II, opening escape doors in opposite directions. The BAU itself being a metaphor for contradictory cohabitations, these characters now live there as ghosts, fleshed out by writers with ingenious literary forgeries.

Tomer Dotan-Dreyfus (1987, Haifa, Israel) is a writer and translator. His debut novel Birobidschan (Voland & Quist, 2023) was longlisted for the German Book Prize. His new book, Keinheimisch (Ullstein), is out in September 2025. He lives in Berlin.

Erich Klein (1961, Altenburg, Austria) is a journalist and translator. His publications include Die Russen in Wien: Die Befreiung Österreichs (Falter Verlag, 1995), and he was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literary Criticism in 2013. He lives in Vienna.

Miklavž Komelj (1973, Kranj, Slovenia) is a writer, art historian, translator, and painter. For his work, he has received the Jenko Prize, the Prešeren Foundation Prize, and the Rožanc Prize, among others. He lives in Ljubljana.

Madame Nielsen is an artist, author, and singer. Her most recent publications in German are Porträts von den Deutschen und anderen Lebewesen (Matthes & Seitz, 2025) and the novel Mein Leben unter den Großen (Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2024).

Maria Stepanova (1972, Moscow, Russia) is a poet, essayist, and journalist. In addition to the Bolshaya Kniga Prize and the Prix du Meilleur Livre étranger, she received the Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding in 2023. She lives in Berlin.

Ilija Trojanow (1965, Sofia, Bulgaria) is a writer and translator. His latest publications include Das Buch der Macht (Die Andere Bibliothek, 2025) and the novel Tausend und ein Morgen (S. Fischer, 2022). He lives in Vienna.