Vicki BaumReviews

The moral of the story, that "Life is what you put into it. Two full days may be longer than forty empty years" is very well told with a colorful cast of characters and good writing.

Grand Hotel takes place in interwar Berlin, following a cast of characters who are staying in, work at, or otherwise pass through the eponymous luxury hotel: a playboy baron who moonlights as a gentleman thief, an ageing and distraught ballerina, a disfigured war veteran doctor, and more. Vicki Baum does a great job at conjuring up the whirl of life in Weimar Berlin and, on the whole, of balancing the froth and the humorous observations with more elegiac moments. There are places where the pacing sags, and towards the last third of the novel some of the plot points got a bit too schmaltzy/pulpy for me. Still, a page-turner right towards the end.½

Interesting story of the peasant Pak and his family and friends, about the culture and religion of southern Bali just before the Dutch invaded and took the area. Very beautiful descriptions. I'd recommend it.

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Ich habe schon einige Romane gelesen, die in Hotels spielten und liebe es, wie dort unterschiedliche Menschen (Gäste und Personal) zusammengeführt werden, die häufig wenig mehr gemeinsam haben als die Tatsache, dass sie zu einem bestimmten Zeitpunkt im selben Hotel wohnen. Diesen wahrscheinlich ersten Roman dieses Genres mit seinen schillernden Figuren vor der Kulisse des Berlins in den 20erjahren habe ich mit großem Genuss gelesen.

Ich bin schon sehr gespannt darauf, weitere Bücher dieser Autorin für mich zu entdecken.

The Tale of Bali is Vicki Baum's most deeply felt and powerful novel, and it has every likelihood of becoming her most popular. Some of its scenes, such as the great burning at Tabanan, and the final charge of the Balinese against the Duch troops, are of genuinely epic quality; the book as a whole has the stature of a true work of art. "

Great vintage story - and what a movie it made!!

Based on her book "A Tale from Bali." Foreward by Nigel Barley.

The Powerful Account of a Holocaust in Paradis

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2907781.html

Base for the Oscar-winning film, which does not in fact stray very far from the book. Small differences: in the book, Flämmchen doesn’t appear until a quarter of the way through. We get much more insight into Preysing’s and Kringelein’s marriages. The brutal murder is carried out with a heavy ashtray rather than a telephone handset. The action does move outside the hotel now and then, notably to Grusinskaya’s theatre.

Big differences: the ages of several of the main characters. Grusinskaya, played by 27-year-old Greta Garbo on screen, is old enough to have an eight-year-old grandson in the book. The baron, played by 50-year-old John Barrymore, is in his twenties in the book. (As I said, their love affair is more unusual in the book than on screen; but great stories often involve unusual happenings.) 26-year-old Joan Crawford plays Flämmchen, who is explicitly nineteen in the book, though a very worldly wise nineteen:

"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."

The other change that was inevitable for a Hollywood film is to the appearance of Dr Otternschlag, played with mild scarring by Lewis Shine; compare the book’s chilling description:

"His face, it must be said, consisted of one half only, in which the sharp and ascetic profile of a Jesuit was completed by an unusually well-shaped ear beneath the sparse gray hair on his temples. The other half of his face was not there. In place of it was a confused medley of seams and scars, crossing and overlapping, and among them was set a glass eye. “A souvenir from Flanders,” Doctor Otternschlag was accustomed to calling it when talking to himself."

Otternschlag gets more to do in the book, and Flämmchen arrives late as noted above, but otherwise the main characters balance out much as they do on screen.

And it’s a good readable story, the first “hotel novel”; apparently a massive hit during its original serialisation (to the point that readers wrote in to protest the killing off of one character in a reaction reminiscent of Torchwood fans’ reaction to the death of Ianto), very firmly moored in the context of late 1920s Berlin, grappling with modernity, with unforeseen and unspeakable horror yet to come (for those of us who know the city now, it’s a bit chilling to have the still intact Gedächtniskirche as a major landmark). Everyone has their arc, and we like and sympathise with all of them, even Preysing to an extent. It’s not deep and meaningful, but it’s well done and very entertaining; and the film does it justice. My edition has a very good introduction by Noah Isenberg which added to my enjoyment.

Leben ohne Geheimnis [translated as Falling Star, literally: Life Without Secrets] is a novel by Vicki Baum.

Plot:
Oliver Dent is a Hollywood star who has just reached the height of his career, mostly because he's just that good-looking. He meets Donka Morescu, an actress who used to be one of the greats in the silent film era, but was dropped with the rise of sound film because her accent is simply too strong. Oliver and Donka fall very much in love, while Oliver's friend Aldens, a German, starts dating Francis who dreams of fame and Oliver. But in a world where every action is up for scrutiny by the press and every emotion is tainted by movies, living love can be very difficult indeed.

Leben ohne Geheimnis isn't a completely bad book, but I liked the idea of this story and the characters in it more than I liked the actual story and characters.

Read more on my blog: http://kalafudra.com/2017/03/18/leben-ohne-geheimnis-falling-star-vicki-baum/½

I had intended to read Danger from Deer for #Germanlit month – joyfully pulling it from the shelves – so intrigued by the title, I ignored the other two Vicki Baum novels I had tbr. After I had read about thirty pages (and was hooked) I began to question whether the novel had been written in German. The American setting, and something about the way it was written made it not seem at all like a novel in translation. I turned to Wikipedia – it seems that all of Vicki Baum’s post war novels were written in English. Oh, well I can’t therefore claim to have joined in GermanLit month after all – and won’t have time for anything else. The intention was there –perhaps next year.

The title which so intrigued me is taken from a sign that was apparently displayed in Bushy park.

“Danger from Deer
The public are warned that it is dangerous at all times to go close to these animals. The danger is especially great during the rutting season.”

It is difficult to imagine shy, gentle, soft eyed little deer as ever being dangerous. In Danger from Deer, Vicki Baum created a monstrous character, whose tiny stature and doe-eyed beauty belies her true nature.

Mrs Ann Ambros is a tiny, frail looking elderly lady, who around the end of the second world war, is aided by a porter as she steps up into a railway car in California. Aboard the train she is further aided by the family lawyer and his friend a Major Ryerson, as she impatiently awaits the arrival of her step-daughter Joy. Mrs Ambros and Joy are embarking upon a journey to meet Mrs Ambros’s son Charles, Joy’s adored half-brother, it’s a journey which will result in trouble for Charles, and once aboard the train Joy is quick to plead with her mother to change her plans.

We quickly get a sense of how things are for Joy, shackled to her manipulative mother – her best years behind her, at least one romance spoiled for her. Joy is determined that Charles’s life with his wife will not be similarly ruined by their mother’s spiteful interference. Later, with Ann claiming to be unable to sleep aboard the train, and claiming the attention she feels is her due, she and Joy go out onto the small gated viewing platform, as the train hurtles on its way. In a moment of frustrated madness Joy pushes her step-mother from the platform, before rushing inside to raise the alarm.

As Ann Ambros (seemingly indestructible) lies shaken and confused where she fell, she imagines she can hear her dead husband’s voice.

“A great thundering, roaring noise fell down from above and out of it the voice was calling:
‘Angelina! Angelina!’
‘Yes. Here I am,’ Mrs Ambros answered meekly and with great effort she opened her eyes. Even then she could only see a borderless great nothing spinning around her in crazy circles, as though she were being rolled away in a black barrel. Dizzily she contemplated that this black nothing wherein she was trundled along was probably what the magazines called the Outer Spaces and it made her dimly wonder how she had ever arrived here.”

Memories come rushing in – and we are taken back to the time when Ann aged fifteen met her husband Florian Ambros – destined to become a great violinist. He had called her Angelina – and the name stuck, from here on she is almost always referred to by the name bestowed on her by Florian. Ann, the youngest of the two Ballard sisters, is very aware of her own beauty, as soon as she meets Florian she becomes fixated upon him. She knows what she wants, and is very good at wheedling to get it. She also has a temper, and is capable of great rage, when things don’t go her way.

“The day Florian left San Francisco without so much as a goodbye for her, she had beaten their little dog. She was tossed about by such a rage of hurt and disappointment that she had to let it out somehow and so she beat up the dog.”

Things don’t always go Angelina’s (as I should call her) way. After all, she is still very young. Florian is desperate to buy The Empress; a precious Stradivarius, and the Ballard girls will come with a handsome settlement. Despite Angelina’s utter devotion, Florian married her older sister Maud. Maud, is good, caring and gentle, though her health is not as robust as her little sister’s. Angelina makes do with Clyde Hopper, a large, older wealthy man, she doesn’t love, and lives with him on a Hawaiian plantation – which she hates. Sadly, Angelina loses her child, while back in San Francisco Maud and Florian are blessed with their daughter Joy.

In time, obstacles are swept aside – Angelina still knows what she wants. She becomes Florian’s lover after helping to rescue three-year-old Joy from the San Francisco fire of 1906, and in time, finally his wife.

We then meet up with Joy again in a railway waiting room, as she waits, shaken and frightened by what she has done. A search party is under way, and Joy is convinced her mother is dead. Joy remembers her dear father with sad affection, her mother with frequent anger.

“The bitch, thought Joy, the mean, possessive bitch! Took me away from my real mother and made an exhibition of it and hurt her to the quick. Took me and took Father away from Maud, who was sick and could do no nothing but sit there and watch it with that quiet wistful smile of hers. And when Maud did not die fast enough, she took a hand in it and hastened the process a bit. I know the sort of slow poisons she has at her command, oh, don’t I know them!”

Throughout her life – Mrs Ambros, plots and schemes, when money is needed, she resorts to insurance fraud, and as Joy and later her own son Charles grow up, Angelina controls their life too, calling Joy ‘Daughter dearest.’

Joy can only wait anxiously, as the search party gets underway, terrified that she might be as insane as Angelina hinted that she might be, after all. Will Mrs Ambros be found, and what will happen to Joy if she is?

Danger from Deer was a marvellous read, very different to her much earlier work Grand Hotel which I read for #WITmonth, but hugely entertaining and in Mrs Ambros Baum created a wonderfully unforgettable character.½

Grand Hotel is set in the post World-War One world of the Weimar era. Berlin of the 1920’s, and here we meet a host of remarkably well drawn characters, who are explored in astute and searching detail.
Through the revolving doors of the Grand Hotel come all kinds; the war damaged, the dying, beautiful ageing ballerina, businessman, thief. The hotel exists to provide the very best of everything for their guests, and yet there is a feeling that like some of its guests, the hotel’s best days are in the past. The porter on the front desk is a count, putting his ancestry behind him to serve the guests of the Grand Hotel.
Doctor Otternshlag, is the first of the hotel residents who we meet, a veteran from the war, half his face destroyed by a shell, he sits in the hotel lounge viewing the same scene as the day before, reading the paper, as does every day. He asks the porter if there are any letters for him, a telegram perhaps or a message, there isn’t – there never is, no matter how many times he asks.
Having just received a fatal medical diagnosis Otto Kringelein has come to the Grand Hotel in order to live – if only for a few days, really live for the first time in his life. An unhappily married bookkeeper from Fredersdorf, Kringelein is about to experience all the good things that have so far passed him by, before it’s too late. Intent on spending his savings, and life insurance, after years of very careful living, Otto has wads of cash in his wallet for the first time. When presenting himself at the hotel on his first day, he looks shabby and ill, and is shown eventually to an inferior room. Quiet, unassuming Otto Kringelein going against the habits of a lifetime, demands a better room, and gets it. A room costing fifty marks a day, with a bathroom he can use whenever he likes.
“Kringelein, obstinate now that he has run amok, insisted that he required a superior and a beautiful and expensive room, at the very least a room like Preysing’s. He seemed to think the name of Preysing was a name to conjure with. He had not yet taken off his overcoat. His trembling hands clutched the old crumbling Fredersdorf sandwiches while he blinked his eyes and demanded an expensive room. He was exhausted and ill and ready to cry. For some weeks past he had begun to cry very easily for physical reasons connected with his health. Suddenly, just as he was about to give in, he won the day. He was given Room No. 70, a first floor suite with a sitting room and bath, fifty marks a day. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘with a bathroom? Does that mean that I can have a bath whenever I like?’ Count Rohna without a tremor said that was so. Kringelein moved in for the second time. “
Kringelein’s boss, company director Herr Preysing comes to the hotel for a vital business meeting, desperate to secure a deal for his family firm which is not doing as well as he pretends. Hoping to secure a merger between his firm and another Berlin firm, the deal hinges on a potential contract with a third Manchester firm. Preysing, who has bullied Kringelein for years doesn’t even recognise his employee at first, so full of his own importance, Kringelein so far outside his radar. Doctor Otternshlag takes pity on Kringelein, briefly extending the hand of friendship, even accompanying him to the ballet, before Kringelein is taken up by a more glamourous seeming figure. Gaigern, handsome, athletic, baron and professional thief, whose accomplice – in the guise of his chauffeur is settled into the servants’ quarters. Gaigern is a man who turns heads, presenting himself as an elegant, wealthy and very correct.
“There was a smell of lavender and expensive cigarettes, 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 patted pageboy No. 24 on his sleek head, stretched out his arm, without looking, over to the porter’s table for a handful of letters which he put straight into his pocket, taking out at the same time a pair of buckskin gloves.”
Grusinskaya is a fragile beauty, a famous ballerina fighting a battle with age. Her performances at the nearby theatre each evening playing to greatly reduced audiences, with no call for an encore. Her best days are behind her – and she knows, she’s is tired, the rigours of her art physically exhaust her. Accompanying her is her maid Suzette, to whom Grusinskaya says ‘Leave me alone’ the line which spoken by Greta Garbo became ‘I want to be alone’ in the film adaptation, and her very valuable pearls. Gaigern and his ‘chauffeur’ have their greedy eyes trained on the idea of those pearls. However, with the plans made, it is inevitable that not everything goes quite to plan. Finding out that Kringelein has money, presents him with a tempting alternative to his original purpose.
Meanwhile Preysing finds his head being turned by a young secretary generally known as Flämmchen or Falm the second (Flam the first being her elder sister). A beautiful young girl whose desire is only to make it into the movies somehow, longing for, glamour and the chance to travel. While Preysing is dissembling in business, lusting after a girl young enough to be his daughter, Kringelein is starting to live. Spending money on clothes, dancing, gambling attending a boxing match, racing through the streets of Berlin in a car, flying in an aeroplane, he learns about exhilaration. Both he and Herr Preysing will find themselves, and their lives considerably altered by the time they leave the hotel.
The lives and various concerns of these characters are woven together brilliantly by Vicki Baum, exploring their hopes, fears, secrets and regrets. There are shades of light and dark in this novel, moments of black comedy, and others of great poignancy. The life, atmosphere of a German hotel in the late 1920’s is brought to life with breath-taking clarity. Grand Hotel is a wonderful; immersive novel, which I am delighted to have discovered.

Vicki Baum was a Jewish author, born in 1888 in Vienna. Up until 1932, she was a very popular and successful German author, but in 1933 the Nazis targeted her and burnt her books. In 1932 she settled in the US, obtaining citizenship in 1938, and started writing in English in 1941. Mortgage on Life (ger: Verpfändetes Leben was published in English in 1946.

Mortgage on Life can be classified as a crime novel, although lovers of that genre may be disappointed, as the interest of the book is more on psychology than on mystery. The book is somewhat difficult to read because of the large number of characters and its structure of flash-backs through time.

The novel opens with a dramatic scene in which Betsy Poker shoots Marylynn, and turns herself in. Miss Poker is Marylynn's agent. Betsy discovered her and turned her into a super-star: the deal that was struck, a 50-50 profit share. Marylynn's success was built up from the ground: Miss Poker gave her life, and more. As Marylynn lies in hospital, three men flock to her bedside: they all once courted Marylynn with some success, but were all, eventually, rejected. Marylynn remains somewhat elusive; as much as the novel is mainly written from Miss Poker's point of view, Marylynn's point of view, her ideas and what she wants or may have wanted remains unclear. The rejection of the three men, and an apparent preference for a certain Jack, a simple guy from her hometown, is puzzling. For him, she wants to give up her career, as if this career is not something she had wanted...

When Vicky Baum moved to the US in 1932, she settled in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, to work on the motion picture script for Grand Hotel based on her novel Menschen im Hotel (eng: Grand Hotel). The stage adaptation was a Broadway hit, and it was filmed by MGM with Greta Garbo in 1932. This film takes particular precedence in Garbo's career as she became closely associated with a line from the script: "I want to be alone, I just want to be alone"

The connection and proximity to Hollywood must have given Vicky Baum access and opportunity to observe the life and careers of film stars. The Faustian bargain to success is a worthy theme for a novel, which seems remarkably unexplored. There are many rags-to-riches careers in Hollywood, in which happiness seems left out, somewhere

It seems Mortgage on Life could very well be inspired on the career of Greta Garbo, as an echo of the myth at the beginning of Garbo's career: I can make a star out of her. It is the power of the novel to call yet other film stars to mind, such as that other famous Marylynn who, incidentally started her career in 1946, and in that very year picked the name she did not like much: Marilyn.½

Baum was Austrian and Jewish. In 1929 she had great success with the book Grand Hotel and left Germany for Hollywood. Her parents remained in Germany and died there during WWII.

Hotel Berlin has been taken over by the National Socialists, a "half-official branch of the Government," occupied by Hitler's elite, including army generals, foreign industrialists and high-ranking members of the SS. There is no shortage of food and wine, although the rest of the country is starving.

Baum tells the stories of the residents of the Hotel Berlin: the general who has taken leave from the front; the actress who is a favourite of Hitler; the British writer who makes propaganda broadcasts; an SS man; a diplomat and, most importantly, the student, Richter, who has escaped the Gestapo on the way to his execution and is hiding in the Hotel Berlin.

Baum described herself as a "first-rate second-rate writer." The writing in Hotel Berlin is heavy-handed, the characters have little depth and are driven by the requirements of the plot, but none of this matters. Baum is writing in 1943 about the Germany of 1943 and she knows what she's talking about. She predicts the attempted assassination of Hitler; she describes the motivations of the professional soldiers, the ruthless quelling of dissent, and living conditions in Germany. How can she have known?

Well worth a look.

Lesser known but undeservedly forgotten work by the author of Grand Hotel, the film of which iconically starred Greta Garbo as the ballerina who wanted to be alone.

Baum, an exile, sets this novel in a bomb-torn Berlin which is losing the war although many characters are still trying to deny this fact. The large cast includes an awkwardly situated English writer, who has been pressured to give broadcasts for the government, an ambitious and initially ignorant young actress, a weathered prostitute with a tragic history, and a middle-aged Jewish woman desperate to ease her husband's suffering. (And also features the scarred and embittered doctor from the earlier novel.) While Baum's omniscient style of narration might initially be jarring to those used to contemporary trends, Baum writes with a powerful sense of vision and Hotel Berlin is more perceptive and thought-provoking than many current 'good reads'. An author due for rediscovery?

Although unfortunately out of print at the moment, it is still possible to obtain second-hand copies of Hotel Berlin. Mine was printed in 1946, on paper that conformed to the rationing laws -- contributing to a physical sense of reading a link to the times Baum was writing about.

After the success of Grand Hotel, in 1931 Baum and her family left Austria for the US, which probably saved their lives. Her father stayed behind and was killed. In 1937 Baum travelled to Shanghai, where she knew many people, and learned a great deal about China and its politics, and life in Shanghai.

Desperate Jews had fled Germany for the Shanghai international zone, where Jewish welfare groups found them accommodation and subsistence level employment. No papers were needed there: it was the one place in the world where stateless people could be assured of entry. Russians escaping the revolution also found their way to Shanghai.

Baum's novel traces the lives of nine people: a rickshaw driver, a Chinese gangster, a Russian adventuress, an aristrocratic English drunk, a Jewish doctor, a German musician, a Hawaiian-American man, an English nurse and a Japanese journalist. Their paths cross at the Shanghai Hotel on one day in 1937.

The book was melodramatic, as you would expect, but the characters were based on real people, and Baum knew a great deal about life in Shanghai in 1937. Shanghai '37 was first published in the US in 1939. It was fascinating.

Thoroughly silly soap opera. I've read it many times.

A book of stories, all related to the history of rubber. Who would have thought that rubber could be so interesting?

In 1929, Austrian novelist Vicki Baum found international success with the publication of Menschen im Hotel ("People at a Hotel"). The English translation, Grand Hotel became an American bestseller, a Broadway play and a film that won the 1932 Academy Award for Best Picture.

The Grand Hotel is the place to stay for anyone who wanted to be surrounded by luxury and high society in 1920’s Berlin. The guests that were at the hotel in March of 1929 were an interesting mix of misfits whose stories all collide together in a clever plot.

One of the central characters is Otto Kringelein, a bookkeeper who has travelled from the country to Berlin to live the high life for a week or two. After many years of bullying and penny pinching both at work and at home, Kringelein has come to the city with the knowledge that he has only a few weeks left to live. Backed by funds from his savings and life insurance policy, Kringelein is intent on experiencing life and everything it has to offer before his time is up. The first person he meets is Colonel-Doctor Otternschlag, who has lost half his face. "A souvenir of Flanders" says the ruined man.

Everyone at the Grand Hotel is enchanted by the friendly Baron Gaigern, but little do they know that he is actually a cat burglar. Aging Russian ballet dancer Grusinskaya realizes the lack of warmth and true love in her life has taken in toll, leaving this once great dancer somewhat vulnerable and fragile. Grusinskaya is the real reason for Baron Gaigern’s visit to the Grand.......he has his eye on her pearl necklace.

Another guest is Hermann Preysing, the general manager of a failing textile mill, who believes the long anticipated merger with a Boston company is off, spelling financial ruin. He brings along Flammchen, a stenographer with whom he is obsessed and plans to seduce. Unfortunately, Flammchen has fallen for the Baron.

The atmosphere and mood of the novel does take the reader into Berlin in the 1920's and is filled with fabulous characters. I didn't like it as much as I had hoped, but I believe that I just had some trouble with translated dialogue from ninety years ago.


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