Grand Hotel Read online

  VICKI BAUM (1888–1960) was born into an affluent Jewish family in Vienna. Her childhood was dominated by a depressed mother and an authoritarian, hypochondriac father, who discouraged her early forays into literature. She studied harp at the Vienna Academy for Music and the Performing Arts and left home at eighteen to marry Max Prels, a journalist under whose name her first short stories were published. In 1916, after the dissolution of her first marriage, she married the conductor Richard Lert and launched her literary career, eventually writing nearly a book a year while working as an editor at the German publishing house Ullstein. Her first major success came in 1920 with the publication of her second novel, Once in Vienna. She spent several months in New York and Hollywood during the making of the film adaptation of Grand Hotel—which starred Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford and went on to win the 1933 Oscar for Best Film—and, before Hitler’s rise to power, resettled in Los Angeles, where she continued to publish novels while also working as a screenwriter for Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her memoir, It Was All Quite Different, was published posthumously.

  BASIL CREIGHTON (1886–1989) translated many notable works of German literature, including Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Alma Mahler’s Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.

  MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO has translated works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, and Feridun Zaimoglu, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo has also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films: The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall. Her translation of Transit by Anna Seghers was published by NYRB Classics in 2013.

  NOAH ISENBERG is a professor of culture and media at the New School, where he also serves as the director of screen studies. He is the author of several books on film, a regular contributor to Bookforum, The Nation, and the Times Literary Supplement, and the book review editor of Film Quarterly. Isenberg is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and the recipient of a 2015 NEH Public Scholar award.

  GRAND HOTEL

  VICKI BAUM

  Translated from the German by

  BASIL CREIGHTON

  with revisions by

  MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO

  Introduction by

  NOAH ISENBERG

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1929 by Valentina Lert and Peter S. Lert

  Translation copyright, 1930–1931 by Doubleday, Doran & Co.; copyright renewed © 1957–1958; revised translation © 2016

  Introduction copyright © 2016 by Noah Isenberg

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in German as Menschen im Hotel.

  Cover image: George Grosz, Street in Berlin, 1922–1923; © Estate of George Grosz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; photograph courtesy of Ligier Piotr/National Museum, Warsaw

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Baum, Vicki, 1888–1960, author | Creighton, Basil, translator.

  Title: Grand hotel / Vicki Baum ; translated by Basil Creighton ; revised by Margot Bettauer Dembo ; introduction by Noah Isenberg.

  Other titles: Menschen im Hotel. English

  Description: New York : NYRB Classics, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015037856 (print) | LCCN 2015040996 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590179673 (paperback) | ISBN 9781590179680 (epub) Subjects: |

  BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Literary. | FICTION / Historical. | GSAFD: Psychological fiction | Historical fiction

  Classification: LCC PT2603.A815 M413 2016 (print) | LCC PT2603.A815 (ebook) | DDC 833/.912—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015037856

  ISBN 978-1-59017-968-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  GRAND HOTEL

  *

  *

  *

  *

  *

  *

  *

  *

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE preface to her posthumously published memoirs, It Was All Quite Different, written in 1960, the last year of her life, Viennese-born writer Vicki Baum begins with a reckoning of sorts:

  You can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success. For thirty years I’ve been a walking example of this truism. People are apt to forgive and forget a flop because they care little about things that aren’t in the papers or on television, and a book that fails dies silently enough. But a success, moth-eaten as it may be, will pop up among old movies or as a hideous musical or in a new film version, or in a Japanese, a Hebrew, a Hindu translation—and there you are.

  The success to which Baum is referring is the book you now hold in your hands, her international best seller Grand Hotel. Originally published as Menschen im Hotel in Berlin in 1929, the novel had been serialized over several months that spring in the enormously popular glossy Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung. It was quickly adapted to the stage, co-written by Baum, where it opened in January 1930 to rave reviews and an extended run at the Theater am Nollendorfplatz under the direction of Max Reinhardt and his star pupil Gustaf Gründgens (who would play the leather-clad gangster boss in Fritz Lang’s M the following year).

  Although Grand Hotel was Baum’s tenth novel, it was the first to be translated into English, by the talented Basil Creighton. When it was published in the United Kingdom in 1930, it earned a new round of impassioned accolades from both critics (“brilliant” and “especially poignant to the present day”) and the public. After an English-language stage adaptation made a major splash on Broadway, Doubleday released the American edition in early February 1931. It spent several weeks at the top of the Publishers Weekly best-seller list and sold 95,000 copies in the first six months. Baum soon relocated to Hollywood, where she assisted in adapting her story to the screen at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; the credit sequence of the film features her prominent byline beneath the title. In 1932, she attended the glitzy premiere in Times Square, escorted by none other than Noël Coward. Directed by Edmund Goulding and starring Greta Garbo, the Barrymore brothers, and Joan Crawford, the film earned the studio the Oscar for Best Picture that year. Translations of the novel (into Czech, Finnish, Latvian, Slovenian, and Icelandic, among many other foreign languages), cinematic remakes (Robert Z. Leonard’s Week-End at the Waldorf in 1945 and Gottfried Reinhardt’s Menschen im Hotel in 1959), and countless homages, riffs, and rip-offs soon followed.

  For such a spectacularly successful novel, Grand Hotel had a rather humble beginning. Baum, who was born in Vienna in 1888, the only child of an upper-middle-class Jewish couple, first conceived of the story as a young girl, jotting down sketches in her notebook while on a family trip (she had published her first story in a Viennese satirical magazine called Die Muskete at the age of fourteen). Originally trained as a classical harpist at Vienna’s Academy of Music, the teenaged Baum was invited by her aunt and uncle to perform at a public concert held in their hometown of Lundenburg (today Břeclav), an Austro-Hungarian hamlet near the Moravian border. During her three-day visit, the big-city girl got her first taste of life in the provinces, observing the
different characters in her midst. One of the members of the chorus that accompanied Baum’s performance, a trembling little man with “an enormous Nietzsche mustache” and a browbeating wife known as Fräulein Sauerkatz, provided the outline for Otto Kringelein, the ailing, downtrodden bookkeeper who arrives in Berlin on a mission to squeeze as much as he can out of his final days of life.

  Years later, after Baum landed a full-time job as a writer and editor at Ullstein Verlag, one of the largest publishers in Europe in the 1920s, newspaper headlines about a hotel-room tussle between a cat burglar and an out-of-town businessman caught her attention. They planted the seeds of the dashing but morally compromised Baron Gaigern and the callous, greedy General Manager Preysing, both of whom found their places, right next to Kringelein, in the old notebook that she still carried with her. Around this time, Baum went to see the ballet in Berlin and came home with an image of Elisaveta Alexandrovna Grusinskaya seared into her mind. Baum had witnessed onstage, as she later recounted, the “fading” Russian prima ballerina Anna Pavlova, leaving the theater “with an infinitely melancholy impression, a half-empty house, an audience that, under the influence of Mary Wigman, had grown tired of ballet, and yet there was the luminous glow of a great, a born, dancer.” Soon she had assembled her dramatis personae, including the shell-shocked Doctor Otternschlag, the dutiful porter Mr. Senf, the saucy stenographer Flämmchen, and the others. (“I am a slow thinker,” Baum once said of herself, “but a fast writer.”) As she commented many years after the book’s publication, “the wooden puppets grew flesh, arteries, veins, nerves. I pulled them together in a hotel where their ways might cross.”

  One of Baum’s greatest achievements with Grand Hotel is precisely that: bringing her readers into a complex, multi-perspectival world—in this case a luxurious, pulsating, yet vaguely tragic first-class hotel—in which they can eavesdrop on the conversations, and on the lives, of the finely observed people (or Menschen of the original title) that she presents. Readers became so attached to the characters that when the novel was initially serialized in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, whose circulation at the time topped two million, they wrote letters of protest after a certain unnamed character (no spoilers here) gets killed off late in the story.

  Perhaps another reason for the novel’s instant success was the way in which it spoke to Weimar society—and to the world at large—at a moment in time when masses of people were wrestling with the forces of modernity. The characters reflect that ongoing tug-of-war between the new and the old. Doctor Otternschlag stands as one of the tens of thousands of war cripples and psychologically scarred soldiers that returned home after the Great War—so memorably captured in the evocative cycle of war paintings completed by Otto Dix earlier that same decade—who continued to haunt Germany throughout the Weimar years. Generally numb to the world, missing half of his face (“A souvenir from Flanders”), and often in a morphine-induced slumber, he lingers at the reception desk looking for messages and new reasons to continue his tortured existence. “He always set a distance between himself and others,” writes Baum early on, “though he was not aware of it . . . he was dismally alone, empty, cut off from life.” When not searching in vain for errant communiqués, he’s overheard muttering his refrain: “Always the same. Nothing happens.”

  The supreme diva Madame Grusinskaya, too, is a formerly grand, now decaying figure from the past—much like the misplaced portraits of Bismarck hanging above the hotel beds—her fan base seemingly dwindling by the day. And like Otternschlag, she self-medicates with Veronal to inure herself to the pains of the world, summed up in her woeful mantra: “Oh, the cruel public. Cruel Berlin. Cruel loneliness.” When Kringelein goes to see her dance on the fifth of her nightly performances in Berlin, the theater is nearly empty. “Leave me alone,” she begs her French assistant Suzette (anticipating Garbo’s most famous line in the film adaptation, “I want to be alone”), “I am not well. I can’t go on again.” In her life as an international ballerina, she moves ceaselessly between her suite in Berlin and its counterparts at the Hotel Imperial in Prague, the Bristol in Vienna, and other grand hotels from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, “an endless perspective of hotel bedrooms with double doors and running water and the indefinable odor of restlessness and homelessness.” Yet behind the veneer of elegance and the glossy sheen of the hotel’s deco interiors, there “lies an abyss of loneliness.”

  Snapping back to life—or, rather, discovering it for the first time—the narrative counterbalance to Otternschlag and Grusinskaya is Kringelein, who finds himself in a “mysterious state of intoxication,” which he can recall having experienced only once before, when he played hooky from school as a young boy in Fredersdorf. “He felt again, here in the bar of Berlin’s most expensive hotel, the same intoxication, a sense of exuberant plenty as well as of anxiety and alarm, the faint threat haunting the wicked joy of wrongdoing, the excitement of an escapade. It all came back to him as he sat there between one and two in the morning.” Having left behind his former life of “very restricted circumstances” for good, Kringelein can now catch a late show at one of Berlin’s picture palaces or go window-shopping along the Kaiserdamm; he can drink rounds of the “Louisiana flip” cocktail du jour at the hotel bar, dance to jazz for the first time, go to a boxing match and for an adrenaline-charged drive through the city’s boulevards with Baron Gaigern. He no longer needs to report to his wife or to his former boss. He eventually learns a sad truth, indeed: “Only with money can you begin to be a decent human being.”

  •

  The Berlin of the late 1920s, in Baum’s portrayal, is an exhilarating city, buoyed by resplendent neon lights, hidden amusement parlors, jazz clubs, casinos, and all manner of distraction. The city has a distinct life of its own, like another character among the human beings who circulate within it. “There was that indefinable smell of Berlin in March,” writes Baum, “gasoline fumes mingled with the dampness of the Tiergarten.” A few pages later: “Berlin [is] brilliantly lighted, noisy, and teeming.” Like the microcosm of the hotel, the city is also a thoroughly cosmopolitan world where many languages are spoken and where many paths collide. There are flickers of Walter Ruttmann’s 1927 film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City in Grand Hotel, as the novel allows the city to speak and readers to listen in on it.

  While working at Ullstein, Baum wrote frequently for the company’s publications, including Die Dame, another popular Weimar glossy aimed at the burgeoning class of urban, independent women readers. In one such piece, “Leute von heute” (“People of Today”), published in 1927, she introduces readers to a seeming progenitor of Flämmchen, a character she calls Ypsi, after a film diva and in lieu of her “vulgar” birth name Caroline Schomaker. Ypsi is, in Baum’s somewhat satirical rendering, a big-city girl, a “very modern woman whom you have certainly seen a thousand times, at premieres, races, boxing matches, and celebrities’ funerals.” With her bobbed hair, plucked eyebrows, small hats, and job as a copyist—not to mention her weakness for cocaine and adultery—she aspires to originality but instead ends up reproducing the cultural trends of the day: “She flips through magazines, stares intently at social dramas in the cinema, and becomes feverish as the stars parade the newest models on the stage at premieres; she dashes to fashion teas and conducts long, deep discussions with the tender, ephebic young man who is her tailor.”

  The nineteen-year-old Flämmchen shares some of these fantasies with Ypsi, expressing to Preysing her greatest hope to break into movies. Perhaps as a protective shell, or perhaps more genuinely, she harbors a notable variety of hardened, urban cynicism. “True love?” she asks Baron Gaigern, incredulously, late in the novel. “There’s no such thing.” Later still, when engaging in an adulterous affair with the much older Preysing, she remarks of their sexual encounters matter-of-factly, “It felt like having a tooth filled by a singularly incompetent dentist.” These of course were desperate times, with the Great Depression bearing down on Germany and the world, and as such,
they called for desperate measures. “Flämmchen had no exaggerated opinion of herself. She knew her price. Twenty marks for a photograph in the nude. A hundred and forty marks for a month’s office work. Fifteen pfennig per page for typing with one carbon copy. A little fur coat costing two hundred and forty marks for a week as somebody’s mistress.”

  As for Baron Gaigern, he’s a handsome thief with a heart of gold, a faux-aristocratic playboy with expensive taste and no money of his own. “There was a smell of lavender and expensive cigarettes,” comments the omniscient narrator the moment Gaigern is introduced, “immediately followed by a man whose appearance was so striking that many heads turned to look at him. He was unusually tall and extremely well dressed, and his step was as elastic as a cat’s or a tennis champion’s. He wore a dark blue trench coat over his dinner jacket. This was scarcely correct perhaps, but it gave an attractively negligent air to his appearance.” He charms all whom he encounters, including Kringelein, whose total makeover he orchestrates while instructing him in joie de vivre. Yet over and over, given the chance to steal, Gaigern’s outsize superego, or maybe his overgrown heart, gets in the way. After sneaking in to Grusinskaya’s room to snatch her pearls, he peers out from behind the curtains and sees the dancer fully disrobed. Captivated by her beauty, he falls in love and instantly scraps his larcenous plans. Similarly, after Kringelein collects his winnings at the gambling table and falls unconscious from his excesses, Gaigern cannot bring himself to prey on his new friend.

  Baum was certainly not the only Weimar-era writer or intellectual preoccupied with the hidden social life of the hotel nor, as Wes Anderson’s 2014 cinematic homage Grand Budapest Hotel shows, was it a preoccupation confined strictly to that era. The filmmaker Billy Wilder, who like Baum came of age in Habsburg Vienna, did a formative stint as a journalist in Weimar Berlin. One of his finest, most memorable pieces, published as a four-part investigative series in the Berliner Zeitung just a year or so before Menschen im Hotel, was on his experiences as a taxi dancer in the ballroom of the posh Eden Hotel. Wilder later helped hatch the idea, as a budding screen-writer, for the acclaimed silent film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday, 1930), whose focus on young, urban types and their affairs in the German capital—not to mention its very title—owes something to Baum’s precedent. In 1944, by then working at Paramount, Wilder even expressed his fleeting hope to be involved in a remake of the film. (Indeed, his casting of Gloria Swanson as the aging screen diva in Sunset Boulevard, in 1950, shares more than a few affinities with Baum’s Russian diva Grusinskaya.)