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. ( )

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. ( )

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

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. ( )