Grand Hotel

A grand hotel in the center of 1920s Berlin serves as a microcosm of the modern world in Vicki Baum’s celebrated novel, a Weimar-era bestseller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Dr. Otternschlag, a World War I veteran whose face has been sliced in half by a shell. Day after day he emerges to read the paper in the lobby, discreetly inquiring at the desk if the letter he’s been awaiting for years has arrived. Then there is Grusinskaya, a great ballerina now fighting a losing battle not so much against age as against her fear of it, and Gaigern, a sleek professional thief, who may or may not be made for each other. Herr Preysing also checks in, the director of a family firm that isn’t as flourishing as it appears, who would never imagine that Kringelein, his underling, a timorous petty clerk he’s bullied for years, has also come to Berlin, determined to live at last now that he’s received a medical death sentence. All these characters and more, with their secret fears and hopes, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum’s delicious and disturbing masterpiece.

Vicki Baum (1888–1960) was born in Vienna, where she studied harp at the Vienna Academy for Music and the Performing Arts until marrying Max Prels, a journalist under whose name Baum’s first short stories were published. The marriage was short-lived, and in 1912 she moved to Darmstadt, where she married the conductor Richard Lert and began writing as a career. Her first novel,Early Shadows: The Story of a Childhood, was published in 1920, and she went on to write more than thirty novels, ultimately becoming one of the world’s bestselling authors. She is credited with inventing the “hotel novel” genre withGrand Hotel (first published as People in a Hotel), which became a Broadway hit in 1931.

Basil Creighton (1886–1989) was a writer and prolific translator of German authors. Among his translations are Hermann Hesse’sSteppenwolf, B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and Alma Mahler’sGustav Mahler: Memories and Letters.

Margot Bettauer Dembo has translated works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Odon von Horvath, Feridun Zaimoglu, Hermann Kant, and Anna Segher’s novelTransit, which is available from NYRB Classics. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films,The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall. She lives in New York City.

Noah Isenberg is a professor of culture and media at the Eugene Lang College of the New School for Liberal Arts, where he teaches film history, theory, and criticism and also serves as the director of screen studies. He is the author of several books on film, and the book review editor of Film Quarterly. Isenberg is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities.