Grand Hotel: The Classic 1931 Translation by Basil Creighton

Vicki Baum’s classic novel Grand Hotel, first published in 1929, gives a sharp but compassionate snapshot of life in the Berlin of interwar Germany, viewed through the interlocking lives of several colorful characters over a couple of days.

Grand Hotel follows the interactions of Grusinskaya, an acclaimed but aging and discontented Russian ballerina; Dr. Otternschlag, a physician disfigured in World War I who is tired of life; the charming and lively rogue Baron Geigern; Kringelein, a provincial bookkeeper, doomed to die in a few weeks, who wishes for a taste of real life in the meantime; and Preysing, a factory owner visiting Berlin to enact a business deal that is at risk of going sour.

As these characters encounter one another “in this great pub that Dr. Otternschlag not inaptly compared with life in general,” they interact in startling ways that transform not only their fates but their characters.

“The events that happen in a big hotel do not constitute entire human destinies complete and rounded off, writes Baum. “They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may signify much or little. They may be rising or falling in the scale of life. Prosperity and disaster may be parted by no more than the thickness of a wall. . . . Much that looks like Chance is really Fate.”

Vicki Baum (1882–1960) was an Austrian writer who became one of the world’s best-selling authors. She emigrated to the United States in 1932, where she worked as a scriptwriter for Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Grand Hotel, a commercial success from the start, was adapted into several genres, including a 1931 stage adaptation that became the biggest Broadway hit in thirty years. It was made into an eponymous movie starring Greta Garbo and Joan Crawford that won the 1933 Academy Award for Best Picture.

This edition reprints the acclaimed 1931 translation by Basil Creighton.