Hotel Esplanade was a luxury hotel with 400 rooms, which once stood on Berlin's busy transport and nightlife hub Potsdamer Platz. During its colorful and turbulent history it went from being one of the German capital's most luxurious and celebrated hotels to a bombed-out ruin lost in the wastelands alongside the Berlin Wall. A section of it still survives today, albeit as a fragment incorporated into the soaring modern complex of the Sony Center.[1] Wilhelm II is said to have spent many evenings at the hotel entertaining guests, although no women were allowed at these dining parties.[2] The hotel was visited in the 1920s by movie stars such as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo.[2]