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  • Die Karrieren der Vicki Baum: Eine Biographie
  • Lawrence Rainey
Die Karrieren der Vicki Baum: Eine Biographie. Nicole Nottelmann. Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2007. Pp. 442. €22.95 (cloth).

In the English-speaking world, Vicki Baum is remembered for a single novel, written in German, that was first published in June, 1929, Menschen im Hotel (People in a Hotel). A little over a year later in September, 1930, it was translated by Basil Creighton into English under the title Grand Hotel. But between these two events there had occurred a third: Baum herself adapted the novel into a play that premiered in Berlin at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz on 16 January, 1930, one that became a spectacular success. Rights to performances in other languages were soon being sold, and a Broadway production duly opened on 13 November the same year, one that would run for 459 performances and become the big hit of 1931. Yet even that was not the end of it. The Hollywood studio MGM, which had co-financed the Broadway production, was also turning the play into a blockbuster film that would star Greta Garbo, John and Lionel Barrymore, Joan Crawford, and Walter Beery. It premiered in Los Angeles on 29 April, 1932, and soon became the cinematic hit of the year, also going on to win two Oscars, one for Best Picture and another for Best Actor (Beery). Grand Hotel had turned into an international and multimedia hit on a scale previously unimaginable, one that had taken everyone by surprise, not least Vicki Baum. When she arrived in New York for the first time in April, 1931, just as the Broadway play was in the middle of its run and rumors about the upcoming film were rife, she was forty-two years old and hardly able to speak more than a few words of English. Yet less than a year later she would move herself and her family to Los Angeles, where she would begin a new life as an American and take up work as a screenwriter for MGM.

Baum’s stint as a screenwriter lasted only a few years, but in the decades to follow she produced another dozen or so novels. Although they were reviewed respectfully and nearly always reached the bestseller lists, none ever matched the success of Grand Hotel. In effect she has always been known as the author of that one work, at least in the English-speaking world. In Germany, her reputation has stood a bit higher, if only because the novel that she wrote immediately before Grand Hotel, chem. stud. Helene Willfüer, or Helene (as it became in its 1933 translation), has been viewed as a perfect example of a popular novel about the “new woman,” one who pursues a career, is undeterred when she becomes pregnant, and goes on to achieve independent success. But in other respects German culture, which draws a sharp and fairly rigid divide between literature and popular fiction (Unterhaltungsliteratur, or “entertainment literature”), has been little disposed to taking Baum very seriously. As a result she has been a curious piece of period decor, a figure plainly important to one era and yet stubbornly mysterious to others that have followed. That may be about to change with the publication of Nicole Nottelmann’s biography of Baum, the first, full-length biography of her to appear in any language and one that will surely be the definitive account for many years to come.

Nottelmann, who earlier wrote a discerning account of recurrent plot and thematic structures found in Baum’s principal novels, has written a book that encompasses both the wide range of Baum’s achievements and the remarkable intensity of a life that was lived to the full. Baum, the only child of a middle-class Jewish family, was born in Vienna in 1888. Her father rose through a series of executive positions with an import/export firm, while her mother suffered through a series of psychosomatic ailments that left her an invalid. Vicki’s first career was musical, rather than literary. She became a professional harpist and enjoyed enough success to give concert performances in Frankfurt and Berlin. But her...

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