Elvis’ Antics Got Him Booted From His 1st Apartment in Germany 

In 1958, Elvis Presley left the Brooklyn Army Terminal for West Germany. He finished his army training and would reside in Germany for the next two years. Elvis wanted to be a normal soldier despite his celebrity status, though he did opt to live off base. The family members and friends who traveled with him found their initial lodgings a bit odd. It didn’t matter much, though; before long, their antics had gotten them evicted. 

Elvis and his entourage had to leave their first living situation in Germany

When Elvis first arrived in Germany, he stayed with his father, grandmother, and two friends in quarters at a hotel. 

“Well, Vernon [Presley] organized this place to stay in Bad Nauheim. It was a hotel. Now I have read stories saying that this hotel was a luxury hotel. Well, it wasn’t,” his friend Red West said, per the book Elvis: What Happened? by Steve Dunleavy. “It was called the Grunewald Hotel, and as soon as I saw it, I knew it really wasn’t the place for us to stay. It was a sort of outpatients’ hotel for heart-attack victims.”

According to West, most of the hotel’s residents did not appreciate the fact that Elvis and his friends “never stopped playing games.” They played with water guns, had shaving cream fights, and wrestled at all hours. Eventually, they took it too far. In the middle of a shaving cream fight, Elvis locked himself in a bedroom, so West attempted to smoke him out.

“Well, you guessed it, it caused a little fire,” West said. “Nothing serious, I don’t think, but there was a lot of smoke coming out of the windows, and Elvis and I are dying laughing as we try to put this damn thing out. Suddenly Herr Schmidt, the manager, appeared on the scene. He was one very pissed off German hotel manager.”

This was the final straw for Schmidt, who had been fielding complaints from other residents since the Presley party moved in.

“No matter how bad our German was, we got the drift of Herr Schmidt’s strangled shouts,” West said. “He said one word in English very good and that word was out.”

Elvis’ group enjoyed their second home in Germany more

The group then moved to a nearby five-bedroom home, for which they paid an exorbitant $800 a month. Per the book Elvis Day by Day by Ernst Jorgensen and Peter Guralnick, their landlady Frau Pieper continued to live in the house with them. Though they found her presence a bit overbearing, they preferred this house to the hotel.

“It was like a big family and we enjoyed ourselves,” West said, adding, “It was a pretty tight group, even with Frau Pieper hovering in the background.”

He mostly enjoyed his time in the country

Though Elvis had some frustrations about being in the army, he enjoyed Germany. He felt he could connect well with German people.

“All of us, particularly Elvis, liked the Germans,” West said. “They weren’t Southerners, but they were kind of straight people who were very honest and looked you right in the face when they talked to you.”

He left the country in 1960.