By Vicki (Hedwig) Baum
Translated by Basil Creighton and Margot Bettauer Dembo
Introduction by Noah Isenberg

“[Told] with unusual skill and distinguished by an acute perception of minor detail.”—George Dangerfield, The Bookman

“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

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 best seller that retains all its verve and luster today. Among the guests of the hotel is Doctor 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, who may or may not be made for Gaigern, a sleek professional thief. 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 all their secrets and aspirations, come together and come alive in the pages of Baum’s delicious and disturbing masterpiece.

Paperback
288 pages
NYRB Classics 2016
Originally published in 1929
5 x 0.6 x 8 inches
ISBN 9781590179673
Fiction