Good point. The Grand Budapest Hotel is a retelling of events where the author is recounting his experience with Zero, which is within the book that the person at the beginning (and end) of the movie is reading. It's at the least a third-hand narrative, which could explain a couple of things I noticed: the first being that older zero and younger zero look almost nothing alike, and the second being that the hotel lobby in the story is much much larger and grander than that of the lobby when he's recounting his story to the author. It could be that a lot of other things in this movie aren't exactly as they seem either. I wanted to expand on this just a bit to say that the above could be a play towards how we view events past, and the effects of putting on "rose-tinted" glasses when discussing the past. It could also question the reliability of the narrative as a whole.
Yeah. It's becoming more and more apparent scientifically that memory is unreliable (a surprise to no one). I've noticed that in certain groups of friends, certain events (legendary only to us) have taken on their own kind of mythology as time has gone on. I'm not saying this is an original observation or anything, just that I'm starting to understand how much narrative and memory alter history, even personal histories and that it's something that everyone does to one degree or another.