Vicki Baum

See also: Baum
Commemorative tablet for Vicki Baum, unveiled in 1989 at the site of the house she lived in at Königsallee 45, Berlin.

Hedwig (Vicki) Baum (Hebrew: ויקי באום‎‎; January 24, 1888 – August 29, 1960) was an Austrian writer. She is known for Menschen im Hotel ("People at a Hotel", 1929 - also known as "Grand Hotel"), one of her first international successes. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 broadway musical.

Life and career

Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in an orchestra in Germany for three years. She later worked as a journalist for the magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, published by Ullstein-Verlag in Berlin. She was married twice: first, from 1914, to Max Prels, an Austrian journalist who introduced her to the Viennese cultural scene; and, from 1916, to Richard Lert, a conductor and her best friend since their childhood days. Richard was the brother of stage director Ernst Lert. During World War I she worked for a short time as a nurse.

Baum took up boxing in the late 1920s. She trained with Turkish prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his Studio for Boxing and Physical Culture in Berlin. Although the studio was open to men and women, Baum writes in her memoir, It Was All Quite Different (1964), that only a few women (including Marlene Dietrich and Carola Neher) trained there: “I don’t know how the feminine element sneaked into those masculine realms, but in any case, only three or four of us were tough enough to go through with it.”[1] Positioning herself as a “New Woman,” she asserted her independence in the traditionally male domain of boxing and challenged old gender categories. She writes that “Sabri put one limitation on women – no sparring in the ring, no black eyes, no bloody noses. Punching the ball was okay, though, to develop a pretty mean straight left, a quick one-two; a woman never knew when she might have to defend herself, right?”[2] While training with Mahir, Baum mastered a rope jumping routine that was designed for German heavyweight champion Franz Diener. She later credited her strong work ethic to the skills instilled in Mahir’s studio.[3]

Baum began writing in her teens. Her first book, Frühe Schatten, was published when she was 31. She is most famous for her 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel which was made into an Academy Award winning film, Grand Hotel. She emigrated to the United States with her family after being invited to write the screenplay for the film. Her literary works were banned in the Third Reich. She became an American citizen in 1938. Her memoir, It Was All Quite Different, was published posthumously in 1964. She wrote more than 50 novels, and at least ten were adapted as motion pictures in Hollywood. Her post-World War II works were written in English, rather than in German.

Baum visited Bali in 1935 and became close friends with Walter Spies. With historical and cultural input from Spies, she wrote Love and Death in Bali (Liebe und Tod auf Bali, A Tale from Bali) which was published in (1937) and later republished in English as "Love and Death in Bali". The book was about a family that was caught in the massacre in Bali in 1906 at the fall of the last independent kingdom in Bali to the Dutch.

Vicki Baum died of leukemia in Hollywood, California, in 1960.

Vicki Baum is considered one of the first modern bestselling authors, and her books are reputed to be among the first examples of contemporary mainstream literature.

Works

Dicta

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Baum qtd. in Gammel, Irene. “Lacing up the Gloves: Women, Boxing and Modernity.” Cultural and Social History 9.3 (2012), 372.
  2. ↑ Baum qtd. in Gammel, 375.
  3. ↑ Gammel, 373

References

External links

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