You dont want to check out of Vicki Baums ‘Grand

“Grand Hotel, you think. Most expensive hotel, you think. God knows what marvels you expect from a hotel like this. You will soon know all about it. The whole hotel is only a rotten pub. It is exactly the same with the whole of life. The whole of life is a rotten pub.”

Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel Grand Hotel is a cultural icon today. It was almost immediately translated by Basil Creighton into English and published in 1930 (and is still the translation that you are most likely to read). Grand Hotel makes no claim of modesty and very much seems to have been written to be performed. Baum adapted the novel into a play in 1930 but the novel has been most decisively preserved for posterity in its dazzling 1932 movie adaptation starring Hollywood legends like Joan Crawford and Greta Garbo. The multistar cast lent the novel the glamour it so richly deserved.

Nearly 100 years after its publication, the Grand Hotel formula – the crisscrossing paths of guests in a luxury hotel – has been recreated with commendable success many, many times, most notably in Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac, Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, Deborah Moggach’s The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and closer home, in Sankar’s Kolkata-based Chowringhee. This set-up has been a hit on the screens too, think Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel or Mike White’s HBO miniseries The White Lotus. Baum’s ingenuity will never go out of fashion.

Welcome to Grand Hotel

The novel is set in the post-World War One world of the Weimar era. It is the Berlin of the 1920s, and after the years of unrest and uncertainty, the city is slowly returning it what it used to be – stylish, cheery, and welcoming. Grand Hotel is synonymous with Berlin’s hospitality, and the luxury hotel welcomes anyone who can afford it. And through its opulent, revolving doors enter war survivors, a fading ballerina, a thuggish businessman, and a handsome thief. Still coveted, however, the hotel has seen better days, like many of its guests – the most striking of which is a porter who is revealed to be a highborn and a count, no less. The hard times have hit everyone, and in a way, Grand Hotel, offering a fresh start, equalises all men.

Though the novel isn’t formally divided into sections, Baum introduces her characters individually and devotes chapters to their lives and the circumstances of their stay at the hotel. We first meet Dr Otternshlag, a war veteran with a severely disfigured face. He is on his own and his loneliness is accentuated by waiting for phone calls that never come. He is at the hotel on what we today call a “staycation” – to simply relax after a lifetime of toil. Here he meets Otto Kringelein, who is terminally ill. Kringelein shakes off his timid nature by demanding a good room and spending freely with a staunch determination to enjoy his final days. With time, he comes to relish the finer things in life – caviar, beautiful women, perfumed rooms, and standing up for oneself.

And yet with all the important people passing through its door, Kringelein had not expected to run into his old boss (and company director) Herr Preysing. He is here for an important meeting – strapped for cash, his firm is not doing as well as he wants others to believe. Shocked by Kringelein’s transformation, whom he was not able to recognise at first, all of Preysing’s façades start to fall. As for Kringelein, he strikes up a friendship with Gaigen, a baron and a thief, who goes from room to room nicking whatever he can.

An enjoyable stay

The hotel is also hosting Grusinskaya, an ageing ballerina who, not too long ago, was a darling of critics and the audience. She’s in Berlin performing but every night fewer and fewer people come to watch her. She’s accompanied by her maid who fusses over her mistress with great devotion. Grusinskaya is physically and emotionally exhausted, and despite flattery, knows she’s no longer the star that she used to be. Played by Greta Garbo in the movie adaptation, Grusinskaya is perhaps the most recognisable character of the novel. The line “I want to be alone” has been immortalised in Garbo’s melancholic utterance.

Greta Garbo played Grusinskaya in the 1932 film adaptation of the novel.

Gaigen hides in Grusinskaya’s room hoping to steal her pearls but they’re discovered by the maid, leading to a funny encounter with the ballerina herself who is rather charmed by their smooth-talking ways.

In the meantime, Preysing is taken by a young secretary whom everyone calls Flämmchen. A young woman of considerable beauty, she wants to be a star and travel the world and in Preysing finds a suitable benefactor. However, the close presence of a changed Kringelein is bound to affect his old boss too, and when it is time to check out, both men find themselves strangers to their former selves.

Portrait of Vicki Baum by Max Fenichel, c. 1930.

Grand Hotel unfurls on a grand canvas as its guests flit through moments of brevity and joy which must have been hard to conjure even a few years ago. But as the dust of the war begins to settle and jubilation starts to fade, we see desperate attempts to ward off loneliness, obscurity, and even poverty.

Baum observes like a sharp-eyed socialite and writes with the gentleness of an empathic writer. Her greatest triumph lies in making the reader hear the sounds of the hotel and see the guests pottering about. The symphonic and visual clarity of the text is remarkable – making it destined for greatness not only with readers but also with cinephiles.