In Kafka’s "America", Karl, the main character, leaves his suitcase on the ship he travelled on from Europe because he feels it belongs more to the ship than to himself. The emigrant’s suitcase is the symbol of a caesura, the watershed between past and present, between a non-place like the ship and the place of Karl’s destination. The transatlantic is the quintessential backdrop for any drama, the place where destinies may cross one another in a choral setting, a place without an ‘outside’, just like the Grand Hotel, where relationships are ruled by etiquette and people arriving from different paths come close for a moment, and then part ways again.
The Grand Hotel may look like an oasis, while the transatlantic as a floating island: the ship, just like the island, has been a powerful symbol from Homer down to Shakespeare and H.G. Wells because it witnesses the developments its passengers are subjected to.
The essay examines the images of the Grand Hotel and the transatlantic in works by Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus, Arnold Bennett, and Pascal Bruckner, as well as the image of the ship in Fellini’s films. The recurrence of images and figures (like that of the missing man) in the oeuvres by Kafka, Baricco, and Spielberg is discussed and investigated, as it moves between quotation and plagiarism.
