Book Club: Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

Professor Noah Isenberg will join the LBI Book Club in early December to discuss with us the novel Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum.

About Grand Hotel

To eavesdrop on real life, writer Vicki Baum began working in luxury hotels in Berlin. Grand Hotel was the outcome. Published in 1929, it became a global best-seller.

A wide variety of characters appear in the novel, among them a neurotic dancer whose best years are already behind her, and a baron who makes his living from performing reckless thefts. Fatally ill bookkeepers and besotted secretaries make appearances as well. An illustrious crowd of people come and go in the foyer of the hotel. It becomes their stage, as well as a reflection of society.

"Marvelous. Always something going on. One man goes to prison, another gets killed. One leaves, another comes. They carry off one man on a stretcher by the back stairs, and at the same moment another man hears he has a baby. Very interesting actually! But that's life!"

Grand Hotel became a massive success, with Vicki Baum's fame spanning to the United States. The novel was turned into a Broadway play as well as a Hollywood movie starring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford in 1932. That success led the author to settle in the US, emigrating just in the nick of time in 1932, one year before the Nazis seized power. They burned the Jewish author's books, scorning them as shallow, amoral, sensationalist novels. Apparently, it didn't concern them that just a few years before during the Weimar Republic, Vicki Baum's works were among the most widely read.

Hedwig Baum, the real name of the musician and author, was born in Vienna in 1888. She was one of the Weimar Republic's most significant authors. Baum had already immigrated to the United States when her books were burned by the Nazis in 1933. She published newspaper articles and essays, novels, short stories and plays in English. Many of her works were turned into films. She died in Los Angeles in 1960.

(Description taken from Deutsche Welle).

About Our Guest:

Noah Isenberg is the Charles Sapp Centennial Professor of Radio-Television-Film at the University of Texas at Austin and Executive Director of the university’s two study-away programs, UTLA (Los Angeles) and UTNY (New York City), where he’s based. Author of the Los Angeles Times bestseller We’ll Always Have ‘Casablanca’: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood’s Most Beloved Movie (W.W. Norton, 2017), his recent anthology Billy Wilder on Assignment (Princeton, 2021) was selected by Tom Stoppard as a TLS 2021 Book of the Year. He’s currently completing a cultural history of Some Like It Hot for Norton and writing a short interpretive biography of Wilder for the Yale Jewish Lives series.