Otto Walterspiel

Behind every celebrated chef stands someone who keeps the books, and for almost half a century that person was Otto Walterspiel. The younger brother of Alfred Walterspiel, he was the organiser and businessman of the partnership that ran Munich’s Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten from 1926, steering it through depression, dictatorship, war and reconstruction.

From architecture to the table

Otto Walterspiel was born in 1884, three years after Alfred, into a winegrowing family from Steinbach near Baden-Baden. He began studying architecture but broke off his studies to take charge of the commercial and organisational side of the family’s restaurant business, leaving the kitchen to his brother. It was a division of labour that would last for the rest of their working lives. In 1910 the brothers took over Hiller, a celebrated gourmet restaurant in Berlin, from Lorenz Adlon, founder of the Hotel Adlon. The war ruined the venture: Hiller closed in 1917. In 1922 Otto and Alfred moved to Munich and opened the Restaurant Walterspiel on Fürstenstraße, the springboard for their greatest undertaking.

Steering a palace

In 1926 the brothers bought from the city of Munich a majority stake in the Hotel AG, owner of the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten, opened in 1858 on King Maximilian II’s new avenue. Alfred’s cooking made the name; Otto’s task was to keep the company afloat. The Great Depression hit hard, and in 1932 the company went through insolvency and composition proceedings, its share capital cut from two million to 300,000 Reichsmarks.

According to the Neue Deutsche Biographie, the rescue had the backing of Hitler and Göring, and the 3.2 million Reichsmark credit was raised by selling works of art to foreign buyers, some of them classed as degenerate. In 1940 the company became Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten GmbH. Four years later, air raids burned out all but the Maximilianstraße wing.

Reconstruction and family ties

After the war the brothers obtained permission to rebuild, and the hotel reopened, according to the Neue Deutsche Biographie with 190 rooms. Otto led it with Alfred and Alfred’s son Georg until 1958; Alfred stayed on until 1960. Otto died in 1974, four years after the family sold the hotel to an investor group led by Kempinski. His sons carried the story on. Otto Heinrich Walterspiel, born in 1927, worked at BASF from 1954 and headed Kali und Salz from 1975 to 1991, and in 2012 published Ein offenes Haus, a memoir of growing up inside the Vier Jahreszeiten. His younger son Karl Theodor sat on the Kempinski board from 1968 to 1995, a quiet thread linking the family to the house it had once owned.

Sources Neue Deutsche Biographie 27 (2020), family article “Walterspiel” (Richard Winkler) · Wikipedia (DE), “Alfred Walterspiel” · Gustav Mahler Foundation, “Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten (Munich)”