A bestseller upon its first publication in 1929, Grand Hotel is prolific German author Vicki Baum's celebrated novel about the inhabitants of a grand hotel in 1920s Berlin. Grand Hotel is considered to be the book that introduced the "hotel novel" genre to readers.
Vicki Baum (1888-1960) was born in Vienna. One of the world's best-selling authors, she is credited with inventing the "hotel novel" genre with Grand Hotel. Basil Creighton (1886-1989) was a writer and prolific translator of German literature. Margot Bettauer Dembo has translated numerous works by German authors. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator's Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize in 2003. She lives in New York City. Noah Isenberg is Professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College-The New School for Liberal Arts. His most recent book is Edgar G. Ulmer: A Filmmaker at the Margins. He lives in New York City.
"The legacy of Baum's novel is not just the 1932 MGM film starring
John Barrymore and Greta Garbo (and the 1980s Broadway musical),
but all those star-stuffed movies and fat popular novels...in which
some institution or event serves as the setting for the
intersecting individual dramas. What distinguishes the book from
its plump progeny is not only its relatively modest length but the
delicacy of Baum's writing...The book is kin to both the stories of
Stefan Zweig and the films of Max Ophüls, both artists who
chronicled devastating loss but drew our eye to the exquisite
fluidity with which the most precious things slid through their
characters' elegant, manicured fingers.”
—Kirkus starred review
“Through the revolving doors of Grand Hotel pass multifarious stray
souls: some resigned to their drab fates, others searching eagerly
for life—all persuaded that it has somehow passed them by. We
meet them as they come under the practiced eye of the staff, expert
in Weimar Berlin’s taxonomies of class. Like George Grosz, Vicki
Baum renders human foibles at their most pathetic, despicable, and
comical, then turns her characters inside out, until we recognize
our own hopes and fears refracted in them.”
—Holly Brubach
“The author's strength is creating compelling characters with
sexual attitudes that feel contemporary. Grand Hotel prefigures
Downtown Abbey and Upstairs, Downstairs by examining multiple
characters from different classes (both guests and the hotel staff)
in a single-setting microcosm of society and lives up to its
reputation as a modern classic.”
—Kevin Howell, Shelf Awareness
“A spiritual motion picture of modern life, the characteristics,
the cross-currents of thought and emotion, of this new age.”
—J. B. Priestley
“[Told] with unusual skill and distinguished by an acute perception
of minor detail.”
—George Dangerfield, The Bookman
“One of the most perfectly constructed popular novels in modern
literature.”
—Frank N. Magill, editor of Masterplots, Revised Edition
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