Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

Los personajes más fascinantes hacen girar la puerta del Grand Hotel. En sus habitaciones descansa la famosa Grusinskaia, una atormentada bailarina de ballet que vive sus últimos días de éxito; el arruinado barón Gaireng, que pretende a partes iguales a la caprichosa dama y a su valioso collar de perlas; Kringelein, un humilde contable para quien dilapidar de su dinero se convertirá, irónicamente, en una cuestión de vida o muerte y, por último, el pobre doctor Otternschlad, que calma la ausencia de correspondencia a su nombre con inyecciones de morfina. Todos ellos transitan el vestíbulo del Grand Hotel mientras un agitado Berlín se prepara para la segunda gran guerra.

Genres: Fiction, Classics, German Literature, Germany, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, 20th Century

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1929

About the author

Vicki Baum (penname of Hedwig Baum) was born in a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria. She moved to the United States in 1932 and when her books were banned in the Third Reich in 1938, she started publishing in English. She became an American citizen in 1938 and died in Los Angeles, in 1960.

Reviews

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cruel Berlin. Cruel loneliness.

Weimar Germany, March 1929, shortly before the economic crisis. Flipping in through the revolving doors, Austrian author Vicki Baum (1888 1960) draws the reader into the lobby of the ‘Grand Hotel’ – the archetype of which is so sumptuously conveyed in Wes Anderson’s ‘Grand Hotel Budapest’ – elegantly dressed guests, busy staff swirling around in an opulent décor of marble, stucco, mirrors, life music and entertainment. Against the backdrop of the vibrant city of Berlin - the speed of life and transport, noise, hedonism, gambling, dancing, seedy night life - Vicki Baum cleverly uses this ‘fantasy castle of the upper middle classes’ as a stage to bring together a group of random individuals who by random encounters will unintentionally find their lives intertwined in surprising ways: an aging prima donna, the Russian ballerina Gruszinskaya (inspired by Anna Pavlova), Kringelein, a downtrodden bookkeeper who is terminally ill and wants to get a taste of life in his last days, Doctor Ottenschlag, a war veteran whose face is horribly mutilated and is a morphinist, Baron von Gaigern, an impoverished aristocrat, Preysing, a textile factory director travelling for business reasons, trying to save his factory from bankruptcy and Flämmchen, a young woman dreaming of a film career, earning money by occasional secretary work and additional services and favours to wealthy men.

Intrigues, plotlines, fragments of life stories - too delicious to be revealed - get stirred into a dazzling cocktail. And yet. When the guest closes the door of the room, what do we know about his or her thoughts and needs in the dark hours of the night? What happens behind those doors? What is dream, what is reality? What do we find? Molested bodies, molested minds. Heartache. Loneliness reigns. Yearning for an embrace, human warmth, love. The need to exist in the eyes of others, a need which expresses itself in various forms – by craving for success and applause, or by wearing decent clothes for the first time in one’s life, by youth or psychical attractiveness, by hoping someone has left you a note or has asked for you.



For, long or short, Life is what you put into it. Two full days may be longer than forty empty years.

In her (posthumously published memoir It Was All Quite Different: The Memoirs of Vicki Baum Vicki Baum wrote she ‘wanted the hotel to be a symbol of life as such’ – and just like we imagine the superficial glances we cast on strangers happening to be at the same place speak volumes while we don’t know anything about their actual life, a particular life can seem frivolous at first sight but in reality is far harder to define and grasp. Life is an unfinished symphony until we die.

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall. The revolving door turns, and what happens between arrival and departure is not an integral whole. Perhaps there is no such thing as a whole, completed destiny in the world, but only approximations, beginnings that come to no conclusion or conclusions that have no beginnings. Much that looks like Chance is after all really the Law of Cause and Effect. And much that goes on behind Life's doors is not fixed like the pillars of a building nor preconceived like the structure of a symphony, nor calculable like the orbits of the stars. It is human, fleeting and more difficult to trace than cloud shadows that pass over a meadow. And anyone who attempts to give an account of what he has seen behind those doors runs the risk of balancing precariously on a tight rope between falsehood and truth . . .

Grand Hotel is finely constructed, and the characters – as much as they might seem types rather than fully-fleshed out individuals are vividly portrayed and come to live convincingly (because of the changing narrative perspective and not focussing into detail into an individual story, Baum is associated with the ‘neue Sachlicheit’, the then new objective principle in art of anti-individualism). The fragments of their lives depicted here gain in poignancy as one as a reader at present day is, unlike Baum at the moment of writing, sharply aware how fragile the whole constellation was and how it will crumble and fall apart once the Nazi regime takes over.

Grand Hotel is an amiable book, the prose frothy and elegant liked whipped cream on top of a Wiener coffee, one finds laughter, tears, love, tragedy and suspense in it, a good share of humour and an graceful empathy for the human condition which seem to reflect the more cheerful, good times at which the book was written. The novel hasn’t the audacity in style of some of Baum’s contemporaries – take Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or - when times get even more though - the acerbic pitch black Going to the Dogs: The Story of a Moralist by Eric Kästner – nor does Baum delve into the psychological complexity of her characters which was Stefan Zweig’s trademark when thinking of some of the stories he also wrote in a hotel setting (Die Frau und die Landschaft, Burning Secret). In the context of how things will change in Germany only shortly after, Grand Hotel makes an interesting contrast preceding Hans Fallada’s Little Man, What Now? which so poignantly depicts the impact of the economic crisis on ordinary people.

With some irony – ‘Grand Hotel’ at the time was criticised as ‘Trivialliteratur’ (and Peter Gay (in Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider) considered her work as no more than ‘facile mediocrities’) - Baum herself subtitled her novel as ‘a dime novel with undercurrents’ – and yes, some plot twists are pretty wild and a bit schmaltzy and the pacing isn’t entirely optimal, but as a whole it is suspenseful and entertaining and skilfully dosed with darkness and melancholy, charming this reader with philosophical undertones as slight as a feather boa.

'Great hotels have always been social ideas, flawless mirrors to the particular societies they service' Joan Didion wrote in The White Album (on the Royal Hawaiian Hotel at Waikiki beach) – I couldn’t imagine a more fitting literary illustration of this perceptive observation than Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel.

How I’d love to leave work for a month now to read Mythos Weimar: Zwischen Geist Und Macht…

(paintings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner)

[Roman Clodia · Rating 4 out of 5]

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces.

This was so different from what I expected: I'd thought it would be gossipy, glamorous, frothy, but actually it's weightier than that and has quite a strong melancholic, even elegiac, vibe.

The intertwined stories of a group of people brought together, randomly, in a luxury hotel is a bit of a cliché but Baum makes it work excellently, weaving the strands together to create unexpected relationships and variations in tonality, though there's a concentrated flavour of tragedy and sadness: a doctor damaged by his experiences in WW1; a fading prima ballerina confronting age; a terminally ill man who has decided to cash in his life savings and squander them, finally, on living.

But there are characters, too, putting up more of a fight against the cruelty of life: the handsome Baron; the beautiful, hungry Flämmchen who knows her price in the sexual marketplace - and it's perhaps significant that these two younger characters both find love and affection, a form of sanctuary and comfort. It's surely no coincidence that the Baron offers the aging ballerina catleyas (orchids), the same flowers that Proust's Swann and Odette use as a sexual code between themselves; or that Flämmchen reminded me acutely of Doris from The Artificial Silk Girl, another novel set in Weimar.

There is, perhaps, far too much time spent on Preysing, especially his business dealings, that offer a hint of the coming stock market crash but which slow down the narrative. But there are unexpected connections forged, not least the doctor's past history with the Baron.

By the end not all stories have a resolution, and there are some haunting images that close the book. The lobby doors keep revolving bringing new people and stories to the hotel...

[Meike · Rating 3 out of 5]

English: Grand Hotel
Female writers from the time of the Weimar Republic are currently getting rediscovered, and I'm here for it! Baum was a Jewish author born in Vienna in 1888, she trained as a concert harpist at the conservatory, got divorced, married a conductor and became a writer. In the 1920's, she rose to fame and became one of the major representatives of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a form of literary realism that conveyed social and political awareness in a matter-of-fact tone, while her work was also perceived as entertainment literature. Until 1932, Baum sold more than 500.000 copies in Germany alone; she fled the Nazis and supported the resistance to Hitler from her new home in Los Angeles, where she lived close to Thomas Mann. Baum's international breakthrough novel "Grand Hotel", first published in 1929, was turned into a Broadway production and into a movie starring Greta Garbo that won Best Picture at the Acadamy Awards in 1932.

As the (German) title bluntly states, the text revolves around people in a hotel: There is the aging ballerina Grusinskaja who struggles with the approaching end of her career; there is lonely veteran Dr. Otternschlag who is contemplating suicide; there is a young Baron whose family has lost its fortune and who now works as a thief; there is lowly white-collar worker Kringelein, who is terminally ill and came to the city and the grand hotel to experience the beautiful life; and there is Kringelein's boss Preysing, a businessman under pressure. As to be expected, their lives intersect at the hotel.

All these characters stand for typical societal phenomena, and Baum paints them with a great eye for small details, but alas, I think Rilke ruined me for a book like "Grand Hotel". The novel reads like an introduction to the city novel, a genre that lies at the heart of European literary modernity with stellar entries like Berlin Alexanderplatz, Ulysses, and, my favorite, Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Baum's book has all the classic ingredients, topics like speed, alienation, media, loneliness, work as exploitation, the city as a promise and a moloch, the critical observation of contemporary society. These themes prompted the Nazis to accuse Baum (like Döblin, Brecht and Kästner) of crafting Asphaltliteratur, i.e. rootless big city literature (of course it was Goebbels who came up with this crap). While other city novels take an experimental approach though, Baum makes sure to remain highly accessible (a goal Rilke couldn't care less about) by refraining form formal experimentation. While the classic city novel frequently works with fragments, ellipses, and different text forms to aesthetically reflect the fragmentation of the modern person, Baum sticks to more conservative narrative strategies, which, make no mistake, she does well, it's just not all too innovative.

There is no classic flaneur in the vein of Charles Baudelaire here, no character who roams the city; rather, the lives of the literary personnel culminate in the hotel, where strangers meet without really getting to know each other. Baum negotiates the themes of the city novel in a house that almost seems haunted: The grim city cannot be kept outside, the grand hotel is neither a safe space nor a glamourous haven for escapism. This house is part of the machine that is Berlin, and as we know from Döblin: This city feasts on its inhabitants. There is no fleeing from modernity, especially not in 1929 Germany, with the golden 20's coming to an end and the economic crisis already on the horizon. This falling world will fully collapse in 1933.

There is a melancholic beauty in Baum's text, even a fairy tale-like aspect as some twists appear unlikely, but make for a satisfying turn of events from a dramatic perspective (I'm obviously talking about German fairy tales, not Disney stuff). And to be fair: Baum herself stated that she is a first-rate writer of second-rate literature, meaning that she wanted to please the masses, that she wanted to write popular stories - and when it comes to entertainment literature, this is indeed top notch. Erich Kästner, Rainer Maria Rilke, or Alfred Döblin this is not, and it doesn't aim to be.

Btw: Baum's novels are currently re-issued in German, and the artwork is great.

[Teresa · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5

I’m reading some of the NYRB Classics written by women with an online group. (We started with The Hearing Trumpet.) I thought to skip this second of the schedule, as it didn’t seem like my thing. But I was pleasantly surprised by how engaging it was; how the insightful writing and superb characterizations swept me along.

As the story neared its denouement, though, I felt it became burdened by its themes. The writing turned heavier and more sensational — Death! Sex! — and it’s easy to see how the novel was turned into such a successful movie. Though I haven’t seen the movie yet, I already know that Garbo was perfect for Grusinskaya, even though she was way too young for the role, and that John Barrymore was way too old for Baron Gaigern: typical Hollywood.

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

GRAND HOTEL (1929) was a massive success when it was published: it became a bestseller, it sparked a new genre, it was turned into a Broadway play and adapted twice for Hollywood. It is a delightful, entertaining book which does not shy away from some mild social critique.

The novel is set in Berlin in the late 1920s. At the time, Berlin was an exciting city, cosmopolitan, noisy, full of lights and entertainment. The Grand Hotel is a reflection of Weimar society, and a microcosm of this enthralling city.

A wide variety of characters appear in the novel: an aged prima ballerina whose career is going downhill, a handsome playboy thief who is absolutely broke, a very sick, downtrodden bookkeeper who is trying to discover what life is really like, a doctor wounded in Flanders, where he lost half of his face, a callous businessman and a very attractive secretary seeking a good catch, among several others. Their paths will cross in this glamorous hotel and as a result there will be stories of theft, adultery, murder and improbable love.

GRAND HOTEL is not a modernist novel, like many of the contemporary fiction written at the time, but it is a highly readable, amusing book and one of the books featured in the DW German must reads list.

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The events that happen in a big hotel do not constitute entire human destinies complete and rounded off. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may signify much or little. They may be rising or falling in the scale of life. Prosperity and disaster may be parted by no more than the thickness of a wall.”

This one was good at the beginning, but a little slow going. It’s an ensemble piece, and it takes a bit to get comfortable with each of the many characters. But for me, the more Baum brought each of the characters to life, it progressed from good to very good, and now that I’m done, I have to put it in the great category. I’ve seen the film, which is superb but as usual, the book gives so much more, and some of the best parts are missing from the film. I recommend both.

I read this for its Weimar-era Berlin setting, which does give it a wonderful atmosphere, but the characters stole the show. And what a variety of characters come through the revolving doors of this Grand Hotel! There are those that seem on top of the world, like the ballerina Grusinskaya and the flashy gadabout Baron Felix von Gaigern. There are those at the bottom, like Dr. Otternschlag who was gravely injured in the war and keeps waiting for letters that never come, and the lowly Otto Kringelein, recently escaped from his meager existence as an impoverished clerk. Professionals come and go that appear above it all, like General Director Preysing and the secretary Flaemmchen. Their stay in the hotel will change them all, and therein lies the fun and the tragedy of this wonderful story.

I’m so happy to have discovered Vicki Baum. I appreciated a number of things about her style. First, her love scenes are beautifully done--so real but so touching. Second, apparently she began her career as a musician, and she incorporates music into her writing with a light but knowing touch. Third, the way she brings out specific details makes her scenes come alive in a way that went straight to my heart.

There is an underlying sadness to the story, and lots of characters having epiphanies of different kinds. I loved both aspects, and they converged to create a brilliantly haunting read.

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the reasons I like boarding house novels is that a lot of disparate people get thrown together by circumstances and make the best of it. The same is true of this one, although these people are thrown together for a much shorter span of time. Three days, to be exact, in a hotel in Berlin. It is March 1929, and the reader knows what lies ahead historically, which lends greater poignancy to the lives of the characters.
We have Grusinskaya, an aging ballerina no longer at the top of her game, Gaigern, a handsome charming jewel thief, and Dr. Otternschlag, who actually lives permanently at the hotel. He had half his face blown off in the war, and now just sits in the lobby, reading newspapers and watching the revolving door. Then there's Kringelein, a dying man who only has a few weeks to live, and wants to live as a rich man would and experience everything he's missed in his provincial life, using the last of his savings to do it. Herr Preysing is there, an unscrupulous business owner, and Flammchen, a 19 year old beauty who will do anything for money and pretty clothes. The hotel staff complete the picture, having seen most of these types before, and surprised by nothing.

We get to know each of these characters, all of whom are lonely and searching for something, but not sure of what. Some of them meet, share confidences and other things as well, good and bad things happen, lives are changed.

"Little Georgi, however, behind the mahogany desk was turning over a few simple and extremely banal thoughts. Marvelous the things you see in a big hotel like this, he was thinking. Marvelous. Always something going on."

"The revolving door turns and turns and turns."

[Cheryl · Rating 4 out of 5]

I pulled this old rebound book off the library's shelves just to see whether a novel this old would be interesting, and surprisingly it was. Interwoven stories of hotel denizens is a now-classic plot, but this 1920s German novel must have been one of the first. Good points: it was an authentic glimpse of Berlin at a time when the Gedaechtniskirche still gleamed white in the electric lights. The story remains fresh because Baum shows rather than tells what is happening: the sights, the smells, the rhythms of life in the hotel all work together to move the story forward. None of the characters is a stereotype--and when they encounter each other their lives veer off in unexpected directions. Grusinskaya the aging Russian dancer, Kringelein the provincial clerk with a bucket list, Otternschlag the wounded doctor, Gaigern the handsome impoverished nobleman, Preysing the industrialist, even page boy no. 18 Karl Nispe all are interesting studies of the human condition without hitting you over the head with a simplistic Moral of their stories. At the end of the book you really feel like you have been there in that hotel at that moment in time.

[Susan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel looks at life through the mirror of a Grand Hotel in Berlin, with all of the various inhabitants. There is the Hall Porter, who is concerned about his wife, having a difficult labour but determined that he has to be professional at work. The disfigured WWI veteran who watches the various comings and goings and the understanding that the hotel means different things to different people. For the weary ballerina, whose career is waning, the hotel is simply another room where she has to lay her head. For the dying clerk, it represents wealth, glamour and life. For the Baron, whose finances are struggling, it offers opportunities to steal and cheat his way out of trouble.

This then is the story of the varying characters meeting and of what wealth and success means to them. The business meetings, love affairs, performances and struggles. I found some of the characters more interesting than others, but, overall, felt this story was well done and the hotel worked well as a microcosm to explore society at that time, with the fears, upheavals and financial insecurity of Weimar Germany.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction, by Noah Isenberg

--Grand Hotel

[nettebuecherkiste · Rating 3 out of 5]

In einem Grand Hotel im Berlin der Zwanziger Jahre leben unterschiedlichste Gäste: ein versehrter, depressiver Arzt, eine alternde russische Primaballerina, der Generaldirektor einer Textilfirma, der ein gewagtes Spiel treibt, ein gutaussehender Baron, der alle Herzen für sich gewinnt, aber nicht das ist, was er zu sein scheint, ein Hilfsbuchhalter, der nur noch wenige Wochen zu leben hat und seine Ersparnisse draufhauen will, um noch zu erfahren, wie das gute Leben sich anfühlt. Anhand dieser Personenkonstellation kreiert Vicki Baum einen Bildausschnitt der Zwanzigerjahre in Berlin.

Ein Bildausschnitt, muss ich betonen. Trotz des Einsatzes typischer Bilder für das Berlin der Zwanzigerjahre, wie der noch intakten Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche, muss ich konstatieren, dass bei der Lektüre von Vicki Baums berühmten Roman aus dem Jahr 1929 bei mir weder ein rechtes Zwanzigerjahre-Feeling noch ein richtiges Berlin-Feeling aufkam.

Ähnlich verhält es sich mit den Protagonisten des Romans, ihre jeweilige Sichtweise schildert Vicki Baum durchaus eindringlich, dennoch bleiben sie merkwürdig zweidimensional, einzig der todkranke Kringelein wirkt plastischer angesichts seiner Situation, er ist zweifellos der interessanteste Charakter des Romans. Eine echte Verbindung konnte ich jedoch selbst zu ihm nicht herstellen, sodass ich gestehen muss, dass der Plot mich eher langweilte.

Sprachlich konnte Vicki Baum mich eher überzeugen, stellenweise ist die Sprache kraftvoll und starke Bilder:

„‚Es ist gar nicht so schlimm'“, sagte Kringelein. ‚Man braucht keine Angst zu haben, es ist nicht schlimm.‘ Und damit meint Kringelein nicht nur die teure Schneiderrechnung und nicht nur die Avusfahrt und nicht nur den Flug – sondern all dieses zusammen und dann noch, daß er bald sterben wird, wegsterben von der kleinen Welt, hinaussterben aus der großen Angst, hinaufsterben, wenn es geht, noch höher, als Maschinen fliegen können.“ (Seite 161 meiner Ausgabe)

Insgesamt ist dies ein sprachlich lesenswertes Buch, von dem man jedoch nicht allzu viel Atmosphäre erwarten sollte.

[Jin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ich hatte bereits einiges über das Buch gehört und hatte sehr hohe Erwartungen in eine wundervolle Welt (nämlich die von Berlin in den 20-er Jahre) einzusinken. Die Kulisse des Grand Hotels war fabelhaft und auch die Beschreibungen der diversen Charakteren vom damaligen Berlin hat mir auch gefallen. Leider fand ich die Geschichten selbst etwas schwach im Gegensatz zur Sprache und der Erzählweise. Man hätte irgendwie mehr aus dem kranken Buchhalter, dem Generaldirektor, der alternden Primadonna und den Hotelangestellten machen können. Eine Vielfalt von Charakteren war ja vorhanden.
Für ein Buch von 1929 ist es schon grandios, die Beschreibungen sind überzeugend und schaffen es eine lebhafte Welt zu zeichnen. Aber die Geschichten zwischen den Charakteren hätten etwas tiefgründiger sein können. Insgesamt würde ich dem Buch 3-4 Sterne geben, tendierend zu 3 Sternen.

** Dieses Buch wurde mir über NetGalley als E-Book zur Verfügung gestellt **

[TBV (on hiatus) · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The revolving door turns and turns and turns.”

Through the revolving doors of the Grand Hotel in Berlin many people come and go. According to Georgi behind the reception desk: “Marvelous the life you see in a big hotel like this, he was thinking. Marvelous. Always something going on.”

At present* some of the guests include:
- Doctor Otternschlag the severely scarred war veteran who never fails to ask whether there are any letters for him, and who never receives any.
- The ballet dancer Madame Grusinskaya, a diva who finds it difficult to come to terms with the fact that she is no longer as young as she once was: “Grusinskaya bent all her force to one aim, to be as she had been. And she did not realize that it was exactly this of which the world began to tire.” She who loves the “categorical imperative” has to face the stark reality of no more rapturous ovations.
- Kringelein, the clerk who escapes from his nagging skinflint of a wife with his remaining savings and plans to LIVE before dying from the disease that is killing him. Kringelein discovers that living with a death sentence brings a certain amount of liberty.
- Preysing, Kringelein's boss. Apparently a model of respectability, but is he really so respectable?
- Baron von Gaigern, charming thief.
- Flämmchen, the pretty and pragmatic stenographer who is prepared to do what it takes to achieve what she wants.

Everyone at the hotel is alone, and yet these characters all become connected in one way or another, and when they finally exit through the revolving door no one is the same as when they entered. Georgi can but marvel at the goings on.

“The revolving door turns and turns and turns.”

#####
The characterisation is excellent, and there are many quotable lines. Here are a few excerpts:

“There was a good deal of sleeplessness behind the locked double doors of the sleeping hotel."

"A hundred doors along one corridor and nobody knows a thing about his next-door neighbors. When you leave, another arrives and takes your bed. Finito.”

"Everybody is alone with himself in this great pub that Doctor Otternschlag not inaptly compared with life in general. Everyone lives behind double doors and has no companion but his reflection in the mirror or his shadow on the wall."

"Perhaps someone steals out of his room into another’s. That is all. Behind it lies an abyss of loneliness. Each in his own room is alone with his own ego and is little concerned with another’s. Even the honeymoon couple in Room No. 134 are separated by a vacancy of unspoken words as they lie in bed."

“"But,” he went on, “where is real life? I have not come on it yet. I have been to a casino, and here I am sitting in the most expensive hotel, but all the time I know it isn’t the real thing. All the time I have a suspicion that real, genuine actual life is going on somewhere else and is something quite different. When you don’t belong to it it’s not at all so easy to get into it, if you see what I mean?”
"Yes, but what’s your notion of life?” replied Doctor Otternschlag. “Does life even exist as you imagine it? The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you’re young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there—in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from. It is the same with life as it is with the butterfly collector and the swallowtail. As you see it flying away, it is wonderful. But as soon as it is caught, the colors are gone and the wings bashed.””

#####
The 1932 film Grand Hotel starred:
Greta Garbo as Grusinskaya
John Barrymore as Baron von Geigern
Joan Crawford as Flämmchen
Wallace Beery as Preysing
Lionel Barrymore as Kringelein
Lewis Stone as Dr Otternschlag


#####
*The present being during the Weimar Republic.

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wanted to read this book for quite some time but recently I stumbled upon it on my grandmas bookshelf. It's a copy from 1952 and therefore smells exactely like that. I borrowed it and truly enjoyed the read and the "time travel" to a Berlin Hotel during the jazz-age, despite the mouldy odour ;)

Vicky Baum has a nice writing style, I really appreciated the plenty neologisms which made me laugh from time to time. At some points it became almost philosophical and definitly critical in regards to the society during the roaring twenties (f.e moral decline, class differences and anonymity in the mass society of the 20th century).

The characters of the book are at the beginning in large part lonly and mentally as well as physically deformed. All of the main characters (except of the pitiable Doctor Otternschlag-the selftitled "living suicide") experience a change because everyone finds on their own way the joie de vivre with the increasing interweaving of the stories. True love, a lie, unexpected wealth or sensual pleasures are only some of the causes. But several characters are lying to themselves and some unexpected plot twists are changing their situation.

This novel is definitly worth a re-read and right now I am planning to watch the film version of the novel with the enchanting Greta Garbo!

[David Crumm · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a marvelously observed world!

I've loved "Grand Hotel" since I first saw the classic on a big screen at The Michigan Theater in Ann Arbor in 1973. I still remember the experience and I've watched the movie again every couple of years since then. That's why reading Vicki Baum's novel for the first time is such a magical experience.

The movie is so imprinted in my memories that I find the movie "running" in my mind as I read these pages, right down to the final scene with the world-weary and literally battle-scarred Doctor Otternschlag complaining that life is always the same. Nothing happens, he sighs, even though an entire world of melodramatic events has just cascaded through the hotel where he is staying. I'm a huge fan of Lewis Stone, who could range from a somber "heavy" in many films to heart-tuggingly warm in others. I think Stone achieves both in this film.

I can't recall such a vivid experience of a movie-in-my-mind while reading other books that were made into films with the possible exception of Larry McMurtry's "The Last Picture Show," which I read not too long ago after years of re-watching the classic film.

I don't want to spoil either the 1932 film, which I hope some readers of this review may be prompted to go watch, or this novel by explaining too much about the characters.

I will say that they range from a tragic nobleman, Baron Geigern (John Barrymore in his prime in the film) who has fallen on such hard times that becomes a cat burglar, to a world-weary ballet star, Grusinskaya (Greta Garbo in the movie), who is so exhausted that she just wants "to be alone." They are surrounded by other predators and victims, heroes and salt-of-the-earth survivors.

So, why even read the novel? My review probably is making a stronger case for the film than for Vicki Baum's original prose. And I have to say: Perhaps Ms. Baum would not have minded. After all, although she did begin her career working in Germany, she came to Hollywood to help with the production of the Oscar-winning film and eventually worked as a scriptwriter for MGM and Paramount. So, saying that the movie was as good as her book probably would have been welcome praise to her. She died in 1960.

The wonderful gift this novel gave me was an amplification of the beloved film. It was as if the edges of the screen moved back and I was able to step more fully into the action. There is background here that wasn't clear to me before reading the original. Now, perhaps, every other year, when I'm not watching the movie, I'll have to reread this novel.

One other gift of this specific edition is the crystal clarity and the smooth narrative flow of the translation by Basil Creighton with revisions by Margot Bettauer Dembo. They did wonderful work here!

[Markus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Menschen im Hotel,
published 1929
Vicki Baum (1888-1960)

“Grand Hotel," would be the name by which this work would have reached worldwide fame.
This is the name of the movie created after her novel.

If movies are the crown of entertainment, so this book is most of all a book of entertainment.
The witty, intricate construction of the following events have become a model of the kind.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Grand Hotel in Berlin was the most luxurious and expensive hotel in the country.

High society had made it a meeting point of their kind, the exclusive elite.

Regular guests would be the like of:

The Prima Ballerina Elisaweta Alexandrowna Grusinskaya, an ageing star of world-class ballet dancing, close to the end of her long career, still beautiful, but tired and lonely.

Then there is Felix Amadei Benvenuto Freiherr von Gaigern, young, idle, elegant, charming and irresistible to any lady he may encounter, and he seems to have no other occupation.

Mr Kringelein, out of place in this luxurious environment, is a retired bookkeeper, fatally ill and having scraped up all is savings, wants to encounter ‘real life’ before dying.

Dr Otternschlag, an invalid from one of the last wars, suffering from depression, just sits around in all the various lounges of the hotel, not doing anything but thinking about his suicide which he has prepared efficiently in a leather case in his room.

Among the crowd of businessmen, there is this unpleasant and rude Director Preysing,
He has come in a last desperate hope to negotiate a joint venture with some other sharks of this world to save his company from bankruptcy. The biggest liar will win the deal.

Flämmchen or ‘little flame' is the name of a beautiful young secretary, trying to make ends meet, she swims around the business crowd, ready to follow up on any job, short or long term, official or intimate, happy and full of love of life.

These are the principal actors of this story. People spending a few days at the hotel, turning a few pages of their life, and some even their last page.

They cross each other at the reception, the elevator, the smoking room and at dinner and breakfast, exchanging glances, nodding their heads and eventually have a little chat together.

For a few days, their destinies become entangled, mixed like a cocktail in a bowl, shook up and poured out.

To avoid any spoilers, I will leave it to my friends to discover the various outcomes.

All for the most enjoyable and entertaining reading pleasure.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although she described herself as "a first-rate second-rate author," Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel is actually quite a bit better than that. Baum managed to parlay the novel into a 1932 blockbuster starring Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, Wallace Beery and a host of supporting stars.

Baum tried to reprise her success with Grand Hotel by writing a number of other novels, but none of them quite hit the mark. Still, the one novel for which she is known has some nice characterizations:

The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.

The relationship in the book between Kringelein, Baron Geigern, and Flammchen is particularly interesting. In the film, Dr. Otternschlag is a relatively uninteresting character, whereas in the book he is a morphine addict to deal with the pain of having had half his face shot away in the war.

As a result of reading Grand Hotel, I should like to read more in the weeks to come about the Weimar Republic and its culture.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just a great, perfectly-formed novel. I'm a sucker for anything set in 1920s Germany in that weird, humming perfect space between World War I and those fucking Nazi guys. I'm also a sucker for stories that deftly eschew plot to take care of the characters and this is hard to do. Baum succeeds to an astonishing degree by focusing on a little gang of repulsive characters all of whom you will love to varying degrees by the troubling denouement.
There's the half-faced doctor who is permanently checked in, shooting up morphine and waiting for letters that will never come. The terminally ill clerk who abandons life and wife and heads to Berlin for some life-affirming debauchery. There's his boss, enamored with a shady deal and a lovely, shadier typist. There's the declining ballet beauty and the young cat burglar. Their entwined story, one of all sorts of thefts, welcome and unwelcome, is the backbone. Expect nothing out of this way, for it will throw you for a loop every time, further testament to its awesomeness.
I can't wait to watch the pre-Code film version!

[Sophie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sprachlich eine wahre Freude, aber von der Geschichte her eher mau. Einige der Figuren haben sehr interessante Geschichten, viele finden auf verschiedenste Art zusammen und resümieren ihr kaputtes Leben. Aber irgendwas fehlte. Habe das Buch mit schwindender Begeisterung gelesen, war auch kurz davor, es abzubrechen.
Furchtbar deprimierende Schicksale, die kein Happy End mehr zu erwarten haben.
2.5/5.0

[Troy Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars. I’m not sure why, but I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this book as much as I did. Baum’s writing is first class and once I got my head around who of all the members of the hotel were, I was hooked. Half a star off as some of the business negotiation scenes dragged a bit, but on the whole, this was fun!

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 4 out of 5]

In ihrer Autobiografie "Es war alles ganz anders" schreibt Vicki Baum über dieses Buch: "Schön, dachte ich bei mir, machen wir mal ein kleines Experiment. Nehmen wir mal die abgedroschensten Situationen, nehmen wir die abgedroschensten Figuren, stecken wir in jede ein Lichtlein, das sie von innen erhellt, durchsichtig macht, zu einem Menschen macht." Und das funktioniert auch. Es ist so erholsam, wenn Romanfiguren Menschen sein dürfen und nicht Schurken sein müssen.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

June 2016 NYRB Book Club Selection.


Baum's book is a slow start. It took me awhile to get into it. But then when you get to the ballerina and the thief, it is so beautiful. What is amazing, in some aspects, is how little things have changed.

[George K. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Το βιβλίο αυτό το έβρισκα συνέχεια μπροστά μου στα διάφορα βιβλιοσαφάρι των προηγούμενων χρόνων, αλλά για κάποιο λόγο νόμιζα ότι ανήκε στη λεγόμενη "γυναικεία" λογοτεχνία και το απέφευγα. Μετά κατάλαβα το λάθος μου, το αγόρασα (πριν δυο χρόνια αυτό) και τώρα αποφάσισα να το διαβάσω, γιατί είχα όρεξη για ένα μυθιστόρημα που να διαδραματίζεται στη Γερμανία, κατά την περίοδο της Δημοκρατίας της Βαϊμάρης. Λοιπόν, πρόκειται για ένα πραγματικά καταπληκτικό μυθιστόρημα, για ένα ιδιαίτερα ρεαλιστικό χρονικό της κοινωνίας εκείνης της περιόδου, με την όλη ιστορία να διαδραματίζεται ως επί το πλείστον στο ξενοδοχείο Γκραντ Οτέλ του Βερολίνου, αν και υπάρχουν διάσπαρτες κάποιες σκηνές έξω από αυτό, σε διάφορα μέρη της πόλης (ένα θέατρο, μια αρένα πυγμαχίας, ένα αεροδρόμιο, μια λεωφόρος κλπ). Στο βιβλίο υπάρχουν κάποιοι πρωταγωνιστές, κάποιοι χαρακτηριστικοί τύποι της τότε κοινωνίας, από τους οποίους παίρνουμε λίγο μάτι τόσο από τη διαμονή τους στο ξενοδοχείο και όλα όσα κάνουν σ' αυτό, όσο και από τη ζωή τους γενικότερα. Η Μπάουμ με οξυδέρκεια και μοναδικό ταλέντο καταφέρνει να σκιαγραφήσει αυτούς τους χαρακτήρες, αλλά και την ατμόσφαιρα ενός μεγάλου ξενοδοχείου της εποχής της, και προσωπικά κατάφερε να μου κρατήσει το ενδιαφέρον από την αρχή μέχρι το τέλος με όλα τα περιστατικά και το ιστορικό των χαρακτήρων, με τους οποίους πραγματικά δέθηκα. Δεν ξέρω, θα μου λείψουν αυτοί οι χαρακτήρες, θα μου λείψει η ατμόσφαιρα αυτού του ξενοδοχείου, θα μου λείψει αυτή η εποχή, που χάθηκε για πάντα στη λήθη. Αλλά, εντάξει, μπορώ κάλλιστα στο μέλλον να ξαναδιαβάσω το βιβλίο. Άνετα πέντε αστεράκια για μένα!

[James Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn't the kind of book I would have walked through a bookstore and selected. I knew of it but associated it with the 1932 Hollywood film and with the style of movies of the period one might say is stilted and long out of date. But the book came to me through my New York Review of Books subscription. I let it age on my shelf over a year before I dived into it. What I found is an engaging work of modernism written in naturalistic prose which vividly sketches characters as physical figures inhabiting their world as well as interior beings dealing with their emotions, needs, and motivations. In addition to the staff there's a disfigured war veteran, a bookkeeper from a small town far from Berlin, a businessman, a ballerina, and a man posing as a baron who intrudes into their lives hoping to take advantage. The hotel itself is seen as a kind of haven where the needs of these characters are realized, as opposed to the banality they know away from the hotel. Much is made of the revolving door, the way in and out of this blissful life. The hotel provides value and consequence and intimacy. There's a universalism about it so that the characters--guests and staff--experience the various ingredients of life, like birth and death, love both romantic and illicit, class distinctions, crime, art, and commerce. I believe the disfigured Dr. Otternschlag represents war. One imagines lives being lived in the Grand Hotel year after year in much the same way, people going in and out the revolving door. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by the novel.

[Norman Weiss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Es ist spürbar die Weimarer Republik, es ist Asphaltliteratur - Autos lassen das Hotel vibrieren, Scheinwerfer und Leuchtreklame erhellen die Räume - und es ist auch Berlin, natürlich. Aber Berlin ist eher Hintergrund, Umgebung. Im Zentrum steht das Hotel, seine Räume, die Mitarbeiter, die Gäste. Hier pumpt sozusagen das Herz des Romans, außerhalb liegende Vergnügungsstätten nehmen die Menschen immer nur zeitweise auf.

Kriegsfolgen, Geschwindigkeit, Masse und Spekulation sind Themen der Zeit, die prägnant mit den persönlichen Schicksalen von Liebe und Einsamkeit, Angst vor Alter, Tod oder finanziellem und gesellschaftlichem Ruin verflochten werden.

Mehr in meinem Blog unter: https://notizhefte.com/2022/12/11/vic...

[Serafina C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Immaginate di sedere nella hall di un grand hotel di Berlino 💭
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Siete seduti comodi nella vostra poltroncina di velluto, un Martini giace intatto sul tavolino di vetro accanto a voi. Siete ipnotizzati dal viavai di persone, dallo scalpiccìo dei passi frettolosi sul marmo della hall per raggiungere la reception. Ogni tanto qualcuno cattura la vostra attenzione: un accento sconosciuto, un tratto caratteristico del viso, un vestito luccicante...
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Il libro che ho finito oggi, Grand Hotel di Vicki Baum, condensa l’esperienza che vi ho appena raccontato. Quando si ama il people-watching, capita spesso di immaginare quali storie si nascondano dietro le persone che catturano la nostra attenzione. La Baum soddisfa questa nostra curiosità: prende sei personaggi che alloggiano al Grand Hotel, personaggi eccentrici e dalle strane idee, e piano piano ce li svela, intrecciando i fili delle loro vite in un reticolo perfetto.
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E sapete che vi dico? A me è piaciuto un sacco.
Gli incastri e il ritmo del racconto sono quelli dei vecchi film che in realtà non invecchiano mai. Ho preso in mano questo libro per caso e mi sono ritrovata davanti ad una storia bellissima, ricca, scenografica.
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Se vi va di fare un salto in quella Berlino degli anni ‘30 che sta a cavallo delle due guerre, comodamente seduti in poltrona ad osservare gli ospiti dell’hotel entrare e uscire dalla porta girevole in un turbinio incessante, questo è il libro che fa per voi.
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❝Gli avvenimenti che si svolgono in un grande albergo non costituiscono mai per intero dei destini umani completi e conclusi. Sono soltanto dei frammenti, dei brandelli, delle componenti; di là dagli usci chiusi ci sono delle persone, alcune insignificanti, altre notevoli; persone in ascesa e persone in declino; successi e catastrofi si trovano muro contro muro. La porta girevole ruota, e quel che accade fra un arrivo e una partenza non forma mai un tutto.❞

[Wyndy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I almost quit this novel at the 95-page mark because none of the characters were resonating with me but decided to push on a bit further, and I’m so happy I did. In the end, these characters, both the guests and the employees, of the Grand Hotel in 1920’s Berlin mattered to me: the aging prima ballerina, the destitute but free spirited “Baron,” the terminally ill bookkeeper, the war-scarred doctor, the callous factory manager, the worried hall porter, and the oh-so-beautiful 19-year-old looking for any and every way out of her poverty. I wanted their backstories and futures - how and why did they arrive at this place? where are they headed next? - and Baum eventually obliged. She did an excellent job weaving all these individuals into a cohesive story with a realistic ending. I believe any reader will find a trace of themself somewhere among the characters of the Grand Hotel. Its people are simply a cross section of our collective universe.

“The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall.” Or a fence.

[Literarischunterwegs · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leider konnte das Buch meine Erwartungen nicht erfüllen. Zumindest nicht, was den Plot angeht. Sprachlich fand ich es sehr kraftvoll, stark und tiefgehend.
Das Setting, ein Grandhotel im Berlin der 20er Jahre und die damit verbundene Darstellung der Atmosphäre eines Hotels, das Zusammentreffen so unterschiedlicher Charakteren und damit auch Schicksale empfand ich als eine sehr interessante und gelungene Idee.
Aber dennoch fehlte dem Buch etwas, denn nur eine gelungene Sprache ist für mich in einem Buch zu wenig, wenn die Geschichte zu wenig hergibt und sich deren Entwicklung dahinschleppt. Ein langweiliger Plot kann auf Dauer auch nicht durch eine noch so gute Sprache gestützt werden. Im Gegenteil, die Sprache wird dadurch eher noch nach unten gezogen und man denkt: Schade, was hätte diese Sprachkraft erst aus einem richtig guten Plot herauslösen können - vergleichbar mit Komplementärfarben, allerdings im umgekehrten Bezug zueinander.
Die Zusammenstellung der Charakteren empfand ich nicht sehr originell, sondern fast schon plakativ und klischeehaft - mag sein, dass dies aus heutiger Sicht so wirkt und damals eher einen anderen Stellenwert gehabt hat:
- eine alternde Diva
- ein Baron, der das Leben liebt und nicht das ist, was er vorgibt zu sein
- ein Hilfsbuchhalter, der vor dem Tode steht und nochmals die Luft der großen Welt schnuppern möchte
- ein Arzt, der in sich nur noch Ödnis empfindet und seine Zeit einsam in der Hotelhalle absitzt
- ein Geschäftsmann, der windige Geschäfte betreibt

Alle sind sie im selben Hotel und so kreuzen sich ihre Wege und Leben für eine kurze Zeit.
Jeder bringt sein eigenes Schicksal, wenn er durch die Drehtür das Hotel betritt und muss erkennen, dass er dies weder vor, noch im Hotel ablegen kann. All das ist von Gedankenansatz eine wie oben bereits erwähnte interessante und auch durchaus brisante Mischung. Man spürt als Leser auch, dass dies der Autorin durchaus bewusst ist, allerdings kamen die Zeichnungen der Figuren bei mir nicht in der Tiefe an, die es gebraucht hätte, um mich vollends an das Buch zu binden. So begann ich mich im Laufe des Lesens bei einigen Personen zu langenweilen und es interessierte mich nicht mehr, wie es mit ihnen weitergeht.
Wirklich sehr schade, denn Vicki Baum kann erzählen, sie kann kraftvolle und lebendige Szenerien entstehen lassen und Atmosphären schaffen, die eindringlich sind. Dort, wo sie dem Leser tiefere Einblicke in die Seele des Menschen gewährt, erhält man eine Ahnung davon, was hier möglich gewesen wäre.

[Cphe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Had read this many years ago and found it to be better with the second reading. The individual stories of people who reside/visit the Grand Hotel and their interactions. Poignant and darker in part than I remembered.

[Diana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Grand Hotel [1929/2016] – ★★★★★

Like Vera Caspary’s Laura and Luigi Bartolini’s Bicycle Thieves, Grand Hotel is yet another novel that is likely best known as its ecranisation – the 1932 Oscar-winning film Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford. And, indeed, the story is cinematic. Austria-born author Vicki Baum puts at its centre one of the most intriguing tourism inventions of the late nineteenth century – a grand hotel that, in its heyday, was the pinnacle of travelling luxury, providing all kinds of exclusive comforts for its rich clientele under one roof, creating “a home away from home”, and catering for each of their guests’ whims, rather than passively accepting them into the accommodation. Into this already intriguing institution, Baum puts the most diverse characters, from one capricious aging ballerina to a lowly bookkeeper suffering from an incurable illness who just so happens to find himself amidst all the luxury thanks to his life savings. Together, this cast of curious characters presents a microcosm of the Berlin society of the mid-to-late 1920s, a roller-coaster period of changes characterised by the questioning of moral norms and the gender roles shift. By juggling her colourful characters and their situations so skilfully in the novel, Baum delivers one of a kind, part tragic part comic exposé of lives lived.

So, there are in the hotel: Madam Grusinskaya, a famous ballerina, but already “past her prime” whose tickets no longer sell out; Dr. Otternschlag, a lonely, stuck-in-the-past doctor who was facially disfigured in World War I; Otto Kriengelein, a shabby, terminally ill bookkeeper from provinces, feeling out of place in this posh hotel, but who is determined to “seize one hour of crowded life before he died”; and businessman Preysing, who is in the hotel to conduct business. All of them, in one way or another, represent that segment of society and its ideals that the world has already moved on from. In some way, Grand Hotel is like a time citadel, where people are either stuck in time (Dr. Otternschlag) or want time to stop (Grusinskaya, Kriengelein). In particular, there is a vivid portrayal of Grusinskaya, an increasingly lonely, desperate woman of much culture and intelligence who no longer expects public adoration, but still craves love. Her prototype is everywhere in American fiction, too, see Sunset Boulevard [1950] and A Streetcar Named Desire [1947]. “No rest, no leisure, never a pause. And then, fame always brings loneliness. Success is as ice-cold and as lonely as the North Pole,” thinks Grusinskaya, a character who was actually modelled after Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova.

And, then, there is businessman and family man Preysing. Successful, but coming from provinces and slowly losing his steam in the competitive business world, he cannot make heads or tails of the new ways of doing business. Baum writes: “He offered the honest terms that a sound concern and an honest man had to offer. But that was not what people wanted nowadays. They wanted their hypothetical arrangements, their wild rumors, their manipulated booms with nothing behind any of it but hot air.” But, even Preysing will crumble under pressing times, turning from honesty to a swindle.

Fresh ideas are in the air, exemplified by two other guests of the hotel – young and dashing Baron Gaigern, and beautiful and stylish struggling secretary Flämmchen. These two are important to the story because they are the “disruptors” of the previous mode of life, representing the new society that Baum contrasts with the old one. Gaigern is a handsome, but talentless and thieving young man who has already cracked the code of the new German society – it no longer has time to probe people’s moral stances or nobility roots (even though Gaigern is a Baron, he is already “disgraced”). Instead, the society falls for slick personal presentation, dazzling entrances and exaggerated rhetoric. On the other hand, Flämmchen is Baum’s way to showcase the rise of the “New Woman” in German society in the mid-1920s. She was fiercely independent, at times sported short hair, smoked in public, and, as in the case with Flämmchen in the story, had no shame in bragging about her naked photo-shoots and desires to be in pictures, or putting herself in compromising arrangements.

“Yes, but what’s your notion of life?”… “Does life even exist as you imagine it? The real thing is always going on somewhere else. When you’re young you think it will come later. Later on you think it was earlier. When you are here, you think it is there—in India, in America, on Popocatepetl or somewhere. But when you get there, you find that life has doubled back and is quietly waiting here, here in the very place you ran away from. It is the same with life as it is with the butterfly collector and the swallowtail. As you see it flying away, it is wonderful. But as soon as it is caught, the colors are gone and the wings bashed.”

Baum/Creighton

At the heart of Baum’s story are the classes, their struggles, the erosion of class barriers, the “fall” of nobility and the rise of the cosmopolitan elite not tied to hereditary prestige or wealth. Bookkeeper Otto Kringelein gets his luxurious room in the hotel through many trials, and figuratively moves up a class overnight. This jump also echoes the changing German society, willing to welcome outsiders with enough money because the priority in every hard-pressed society becomes money and not one’s origin. In Berlin of 1925, traditions and rules could crumble overnight as titles and family prestige gave way to simple people with acquired wealth. Kringelein starts to rub shoulders with the wealthy for the very first time in his life, and Baum’s portrayal of this comical personage is full of curiosity, sympathy and emotional involvement. Dr. Otternschlag and Baron Gaigern show Kringelein the ropes in the new-to-him city, and he has his exciting adventure in Berlin. “For, long or short, Life is what you put into it. Two full days may be longer than forty empty years”.

In this story, there is bite and repose, excitement and contemplation. Part of the pleasure of reading Grand Hotel is that Baum is so invested in each of her characters. They rise under her pen not as simple caricatures, as is so common within the satirical genre, but as real, even if slightly eccentric, people who possess their own emotions, thoughts, histories, experiences, convictions, memories and regrets. Her skill in drawing us into the world of each with so limited a space is admirable.

Joy and sorrow collide in this story, as do wealth and poverty, age and youth, love and hatred, and optimism and pessimism. The hotel’s important business meetings, where “many a deal was rigged which afterwards shareholders had to make the best of”, take place next door to lovers’ secret rendezvous that give way to lifelong realisations. Regarding the latter, Baum dances around sexual relations in her prose. Nothing explicit is said, but parts of the novel are full of characters’ erotic longings. As each character, love has different shades in the novel, from casual flirtations and fleeting sexual tensions to otherworldly feelings of selfless “true love”: “their senses shared a mutual secret. He experienced something that has no name, not even the name of love, a homecoming after long homesickness”. And to put a cherry on her masterpiece of a literary cake, Baum wraps her satire in the excitement of a crescendoing thriller with the pathos here and there now reminiscent of Renoir’s The Rules of the Game [1939], which also has the theme of the most “lovable” person (virile male) in the story being “sacrificed” on the altar of bourgeois propriety.

🛎️ The intimacy of Grand Hotel, so chic and yet self-sufficient and all-encompassing, like an exclusive member’s club, gives this novel a warm, cosy feel, and Baum’s writing is enchanting: economical, yet deep, and her story – lightly satirical, and yet capable of penetrating the psyche of each of the characters in turn, people who are torn between ghastly realities and flights of fancy. Translated from the German by Basil Creighton, Grand Hotel is a beautiful novel full of surprising discoveries.