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scrittrici dimenticate:Vicki Baum

Vicki Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family, the daughter of Hermann Baum and Mathilde Donat. She spent her childhood in bourgeois surroundings, as "the single child of a good family", but in her memoirs she has revealed that due family problems her childhood was not particularly happy. Baum's father was tyrannical and her mother had mental problems. At the age of eight Baum started to study the harp. Her first stories appeared in print when she was fourteen. Baum studied music six years at the conservatory and was educated as a harp player. Baum's first marriage to the Viennese journalist in 1914 Max Prels (1878-1926) was short lived. Some of Baum's stories, which she had written for herself, Prels published under his own name. However, he also opened her doors to the Viennese culture scene and later helped her to get the novel DER EINGANG ZUR BÜHNE (1920) published by Ullstein. Baum's first literary work, FRÜHE SCHATTEN. DAS ENDE EINER KINDHEIT, was published by Erich Reiss Publishing Company in Berlin in 1914 and reissued in 1919. After divorcing, Baum went to Germany, where she played the harp for three years in an orchestra and worked as teacher in the musical high school in Darmstadt.

During World War I Baum worked for a short time as a nurse. In 1916 she married the Viennese-born conductor Richard Lert (1885-1980) of the Darmstadt orchestra, who had been her best friend since childhood. Baum gave up music as a profession and accompanied her husband from one town to another. In 1926 she went to Berlin, where she worked as an editor for the publishing company Ullstein-Velag. Baum's novels were serialized in the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung.

"I want to be alone... I think I have never been so tired in my life." (Greta Garbo as Grusinskaya in Grand Hotel, 1932)

Baum's literary breakthrough novel, People in a Hotel (1929) made her one of Ullstein's leading authors. The story about a fading prima ballerina, shady nobleman, and other types who in one weekend pass through an elegant hotel, was told with an acute perception of minor detail. To gather material for the novel, Baum had taken a job as a parlourmaid in a hotel for six weeks. After the book came out, Baum dramatized the story for the Berlin stage. This play, under the direction of Gustav Gründgens, turned into a sensation and its English language adaptation by William Drake gained a huge success in New York in the early 1930s. Irving Thalberg, the famous MGM producer, got its synopsis in 1930. The role of Grusinskaya, an aging prima ballerina, seemed perfect for Greta Garbo. Joan Crawford was casted as the slut-stenographer, Flaemmchen. The last line of the picture was reserved for Dr. Otternschlag (Lewis Stone): "Grand Hotel. Always the same. People come, people go. Nothing ever happens." The gala opening of the film was held at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood. Grand Hotel won a Best Picture Oscar and later Crawford told the film was her first big chance. "They told me I wouldn't be able to hold my own with the big boys, against Garbo and the Barrymores. But I proved otherwise." In London moviegoers camped out on the pavement overnight outside the Palace Theatre so they could be the first to see the film.

"Adaptation of Vicki Baum's novel Menschen im Hotel is erratically acted by the male stars, but Garbo and especially Crawford, who was never more appealing, glow – as Hollywood stars once did." (from Guide for the Film Fanatic by Danny Peary, 1986)

STUD. CHEM. HELENE WILLFÜER (1928) portrayed in the character of Helene a New Woman type, a scientist, businesswoman, and an unmarried mother, who was rationalized, yet compassionate, but the other elements of the novel – an abortion, premarital sex, interracial love – shocked many readers. The book sold well and was adapted into a film Richard Oswald. In HELL IN FAUEMSEE (1930) Baum used the successful for mula of Grand Hotel. This time she collected a group of colourful people in a bathing establishment in Thüringen at the Alps. The protagonist, Urban Hell, is a poor but talented chemist, who works as swimming instructor, and becomes acquainted with an eccentric baroness, famous actress, and industrialist who has two beautiful daughters, May and Karla. After visiting Bali in 1935, Baum wrote LIEBE UND TOD AUF BALI (1937), about a family caught in the middle of the Puputan Badung War and massacre of 1906.

Following the rise of anti-Semitism, Baum emigrated in 1932 with her family to the United States. This second wave of emigration, with stars like Marlene Dietrich, directors such as Wilhelm Dieterle and Edgar G. Ulmer, and cameramen like Karl Freund, marked the end of the golden age of German filmmaking. After traveling around the country advertising her books and giving speeches at exclusive women's clubs, Baum settled in Los Angeles, where she was treated like a media star. Baum worked first under contract to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Within a few years, two of her stories were made into movies: I Give My Love (1934), producted by Universal Pictures and directed by Karl Freund, and The Night Is Young (1935), produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and directed by Dudley Murphy. From 1933, Baum's books were banned in Hitler's Germany, but some of them were published in German in exile publishing houses.

Baum often depicted powerful, self-reliant women caught up the social and economic turbulence of the 20th-century Europe or the US. Starting in 1941 with THE SHIP AND THE SHORE she wrote all her books in English, and produced a novel every two or three years. Her U.S. publisher promoted every book as "the new book by Vicki Baum, best-selling author of Grand Hotel". Due to this image-making, Baum began to feel that she was expected to produce only popular literatur. To break the mold, she wrote THE MUSTARD SEED (1953), critique of American way life. Her other later works include HOTEL BERLIN '43 (1944), set in the Nazi Germany, and THEME FOR BALLET (1958), which concerned the American career of a beautiful Viennese danseuse. Baum's books of memoir, IT WAS ALL QUITE DIFFERENT, appeared posthumously in 1964. Baum died of leukemia in Hollywood on August 29, 1960.