Tell me about Hotel Imperial.

The Hotel Imperial is on the fanciest street in Vienna, so the Ringstrassa,

and it's still one of the fanciest hotels in town and Vienna in

general's a place and this is true but now as well as then

Vienna had an aroma of conspiracy about it.

It was a place where there were a lot of down and outs,

Hitler among them.

And of course, for the aspiring journalist, this was the place to be this is where you could

pick up the latest hot gossip from the Romanian court which was full of all sorts of

intrigue and there was a mirror right above the bunkette where you could see who was coming in and figure

out whether they were going to come and try to pitch you a story.

It was like living in the middle of a detective novel

where you had to figure out what everyone's investment

was in the rumor or story that they were peddling.

I'm Delantheris and this is Atlas Obscura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today I'm talking to author and historian Deborah Cohen about her book

Last Call at Hotel Imperial, the reporters who took on a world at war. It's the

story of these foreign correspondence, the kind of classic reporter, little

pork pie hat notebook, who were in Europe at one of its most important moments, this

pre-World War II period. They talk to folks like Gandhi,

Mussolini, Hitler, before the major world events happened. And for Deborah,

...