Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  Similarly, the film critic and sociologist Siegfried Kracauer, who would publish an influential study on the cultural dispositions and social habits among white-collar workers the same year as Baum’s novel, wrote a short piece in the mid-1920s titled “Die Hotelhalle” (“The Hotel Lobby”). In it, he quotes from a popular Norwegian crime novel Death Enters the Hotel: “Once again it is confirmed that a large hotel is a world unto itself and that this world is like the rest of the large world. The guests here roam about in their light-hearted, careless summer existence without suspecting anything of the strange mysteries circulating among them.”

  Indeed, beneath the layers of frothy dialogue, Baum’s novel contains a core of intense sociological and even philosophical reflections, articulated poignantly by its narrator and embodied by its characters.

  The experiences people have in a large hotel do not constitute entire human destinies, full and completed. They are fragments merely, scraps, pieces. The people behind its doors may be unimportant or remarkable individuals. People on the way up or people on the way down the ladder of life. Prosperity and disaster may be separated by no more than the thickness of a wall. The revolving door turns, and what happens between arrival and departure is not an integral whole. Perhaps there is no such thing as a whole, completed destiny in the world, but only approximations, beginnings that come to no conclusion or conclusions that have no beginnings. Much that looks like Chance is after all really the Law of Cause and Effect. And much that goes on behind Life’s doors is not fixed like the pillars of a building nor preconceived like the structure of a symphony, nor calculable like the orbits of the stars. It is human, fleeting and more difficult to trace than cloud shadows that pass over a meadow. And anyone who attempts to give an account of what he has seen behind those doors runs the risk of balancing precariously on a tight rope between falsehood and truth. . . .

  In his otherwise authoritative guide to the period, Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider, the historian Peter Gay dismisses Baum’s books and articles written for Ullstein as “facile mediocrities.” A handful of critics writing during Baum’s Berlin years, mostly men, were quick to lump such work, unjustly, under the subordinate category of Trivialliteratur. Although the style she employs in Grand Hotel may not be quite as overtly modernist as that of some of her male counterparts—in terms of its formal ambitions, the novel has little in common with, say, Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, published the same year—it is still very much a Zeitroman, a novel of its age, and deeply imbued with the aesthetic currents of New Objectivity, that media-saturated, often unrelentingly realist mode of representation.

  By 1929, Baum found herself in good company, celebrated in the pages of the highbrow intellectual publication Die Literarische Welt—in a literary caricature alongside the prominent German writers Thomas Mann, Emil Ludwig, and Jakob Wassermann— while also featured in a highly popular advertisement for Alpina watches. Her status as a best-selling Ullstein author invited largely favorable comparisons to such male authors as Erich Maria Remarque, Hans Fallada, Erich Kästner, and Lion Feuchtwanger. As Baum herself once famously remarked, in a self-deprecating manner, “I am a first-rate second-rate author.”

  Soon after working on the Hollywood adaptation of her novel, while the Nazis began their ascent to power, Baum took up residence in Los Angeles, the city she called home until her death in 1960. She went on to write another dozen novels, including Hotel Shanghai (1939) and Hotel Berlin ’43 (1943), yet none was as successful, none as deeply woven into the fabric of twentieth-century fiction, as her Weimar-era best seller. To see Grand Hotel reissued in the country in which Baum was ultimately most anchored, and where in 1938 she became a naturalized citizen, some eighty-five years after its first release, is to see a long-deserved tribute to its author. Although the staggering success of the novel may have proved daunting—“It made me feel like a cat with a tin can tied to its tail,” she once quipped—it now has the chance of a new life in a new century. In 1953, Baum told a reporter from The New York Times, “I didn’t want always to be the girl who wrote Grand Hotel.” Today, however, it can be seen as a badge of honor.

  —NOAH ISENBERG

  GRAND HOTEL

  THE HALL porter was a little white about the gills as he came out of the No. 7 phone booth. He went to get his cap, which he had left on the radiator.

  “What was it?” asked the operator at the switchboard, earphones over his head and red and green plugs between his fingers.

  “They’ve suddenly taken my wife to the hospital. I don’t know what that means. She says it’s beginning. But, good heavens! It can’t have got that far already.”

  The operator was only half listening. He had a call to put through. “Well, don’t worry, Mr. Senf,” he said. “You’ll have a fine boy first thing in the morning—”

  “Thank you, anyway, for calling me to the phone here. I can’t go shouting about my private affairs over there at my desk. Duty is duty.”

  “Just so. And when the baby’s here I’ll ring through,” said the operator absentmindedly and carried on with his calls. The porter took his cap and went off on tiptoe. He did this unconsciously because his wife had been taken to the hospital and was about to have a child. As he crossed the passage, where the now quiet reading and writing rooms had half their lights switched off, he exhaled deeply and ran his fingers through his hair. He was surprised to find them wet, but there was no time to wash his hands. After all, the routine of the hotel could not be upset just because Hall Porter Senf’s wife was having a baby.

  The music from the Tearoom in the new building beat in syncopation from mirror to mirror along the walls. It was dinnertime and a smell of cooking was in the air, but behind the closed doors the large dining room was still silent and empty. The Chef, Mattoni, was setting out his cold buffet in the small white room. The porter felt a strange weakness in his knees and he stopped a moment in the doorway, arrested by the bright gleam of the colored lights behind the blocks of ice. In the corridor an electrician was kneeling on the floor, busy over some repair to the wires. Ever since they’d installed those powerful lights to illuminate the front of the hotel there was always something wrong with the overworked electrical system. The porter pulled himself together and went back to his post. Little Georgi meanwhile had taken charge. Georgi was the son of the proprietor of a large hotel business who wanted to see his son work his way up through the ranks. Senf, feeling somewhat oppressed, made his way straight across the Lobby, where there was now a good deal of movement. There the music of the jazz band from the Tearoom encountered that of the violins from the Winter Garden, and mingled with the thin murmur of the illuminated fountain as it fell into its imitation Venetian basin, the ring of glasses on tables, the creaking of wicker chairs and, lastly, the soft rustle of the furs and silks in which women were moving to and fro. The cool March air came in gusts through the revolving doors whenever the pageboy passed guests in or out.

  “All right,” said little Georgi in English as Senf finally dropped anchor at the porter’s desk. “Here’s the seven o’clock mail. Room 68 has been making a row because her chauffeur wasn’t there on the dot. Rather a hysterical lady, eh?”

  “Sixty-eight—that’s Grusinskaya,” said the hall porter, and began to sort the letters with his right hand. “That’s the dancer. We’re familiar with that—for eighteen years already. She gets jittery every night and makes a row before she goes on the stage.”

  A tall gentleman in the Lobby got up stiffly out of an easy chair and came with bent head towards the porter’s desk. He loitered for a bit round the Lobby before approaching the entrance hall. The impression he made was one of listlessness and boredom as he glanced at the magazines displayed on the little bookstall and lit a cigarette. Finally, however, he fetched up beside the porter and asked casually, “Any letters for me?”

  The porter knew his cue in this little comedy. He looked in pigeonhole No. 218 before he replied: “Not this time, Herr Doktor.” Whereup
on the tall gentleman slowly set himself in motion again. After coasting round to his chair he sank down into it stiff-legged, and then stared blindly out into the Lobby. His face, it must be said, consisted of one half only, in which the sharp and ascetic profile of a Jesuit was completed by an unusually well-shaped ear beneath the sparse gray hair on his temples. The other half of his face was not there. In place of it was a confused medley of seams and scars, crossing and overlapping, and among them was set a glass eye. “A souvenir from Flanders,” Doctor Otternschlag was accustomed to calling it when talking to himself.

  He sat there for a while surveying the gilded stucco capitals of the marble pillars, a sight he was heartily sick of, and staring his fill with unseeing eyes into the Lobby, which was now emptying fairly quickly as the theaters opened. Then he got up once more and stumped across with his marionette gait to the porter’s desk, where Mr. Senf, having put aside his private affairs, was now officiating with great zeal.

  “No one asked for me?” Doctor Otternschlag inquired as he glanced at the glazed mahogany board where the porter put notes and messages.

  “No one, Herr Doktor.”

  “Telegram?” asked Doctor Otternschlag after a moment. Mr. Senf obligingly looked once more in pigeonhole 218, though he knew very well there was nothing in it.

  “Not today, Herr Doktor,” and added, with a touch of human kindness, “Perhaps Herr Doktor would like to go to the theater. I have a stall for Grusinskaya—at the Theater des Westens.”

  “Grusinskaya? No thanks!” said Doctor Otternschlag and wandered off through the entrance hall and back round the Lobby to his chair. So Grusinskaya doesn’t sell out any more, he thought. Not surprised. I know I’ll never go to see her again. He settled down miserably in his chair.

  “That man’s enough to drive one crazy,” said the porter to little Georgi. “Everlastingly asking for letters. Every year for ten years he’s spent a month or two here, and not a letter has he ever had, and not even a dog has ever asked for him. And he sits around just the same and waits . . .”

  “Who’s waiting?” asked Rohna, the head reception clerk, from the reception desk nearby, sticking his bright red head up over the low glass partition. But the porter did not reply. He thought he had just heard his wife cry out, and he strained his ears. Then he had to dismiss his private cares again, and help little Georgi unravel some complicated train connections in Spanish for the Mexican gentleman in Room No. 117.

  Pageboy No. 24, with red cheeks and well-plastered hair, shot across from the elevator and called out excitedly—too loud for the dignity of the Lobby—“Baron Gaigern’s chauffeur!” Rohna raised an admonitory and repressive hand like a conductor. The porter passed on the order for the chauffeur by telephone. Georgi opened eyes of boyish expectation. There was a smell of lavender and expensive cigarettes, immediately followed by a man whose appearance was so striking that many heads turned to look at him. He was unusually tall and extremely well dressed, and his step was as elastic as a cat’s or a tennis champion’s. He wore a dark blue trench coat over his dinner jacket. This was scarcely correct perhaps, but it gave an attractively negligent air to his appearance. He patted pageboy No. 24 on his sleek head, stretched out his arm, without looking, over to the porter’s table for a handful of letters which he put straight into his pocket, taking out at the same time a pair of buckskin gloves. With a friendly nod to the head reception clerk he put on his dark felt hat, took out his cigarette case, and put a cigarette between his lips. The next moment he removed his hat and stood aside to allow two ladies to pass before him through the revolving door. It was Grusinskaya, a small slim figure in a fur coat followed by a vague and self-effacing being carrying two cases. When the dispatcher at the entrance had stowed these two in their car the engaging gentleman in the blue raincoat lit his cigarette, put his hand in his pocket for a coin to give pageboy No. 11, who was working the revolving door, and disappeared through its whirligig of reflected lights with the blissful air of a young fellow going out on a spree.

  As soon as the charming Baron Gaigern had forsaken the Lobby it became suddenly still, and the illuminated fountain could be heard falling into its Venetian basin with a cool and gentle murmur. The reason was that the Lobby was now empty, the jazz band in the Tearoom had stopped playing, the music in the dining room had not yet begun, and the Viennese Trio in the Winter Garden was taking a break. The sudden stillness was broken only by the agitated and persistent hooting of cars as they passed the hotel entrance and were lost again in the nightlife of the city. Within, however, the Lobby was as still as if Baron Gaigern had taken the music, the noise, and the murmur of voices away with him.

  Little Georgi jerked his head towards the revolving door and said: “He’s all right. Nothing wrong with him.” The hall porter shrugged with the air of a man who knows his fellow men. “Whether he’s all right remains to be seen. He’s a bit—I don’t know. He’s too much of the fine fellow for me. The front he puts on and the tips he gives. It seems a bit queer to me. And who travels nowadays to throw his money about, unless he’s a swindler? If I were Pilzheim I’d keep my eyes open.”

  Rohna, the head reception clerk, whose ears were always on the alert, looked up again over the glass partition. The blue-white skin of his head gleamed beneath his thin reddish hair. “That will do, Senf,” he said. “Gaigern’s all right. I know him. He was at school with my brother at Feldkirch. There’s no need to put Pilzheim on to him.” (Pilzheim was the detective employed by the Grand Hotel.)

  Senf saluted and was respectfully silent. Rohna knew what he was talking about. Rohna was a count himself, one of the Silesian Rohnas, an ex-officer, and a good fellow. Senf saluted once again, and Rohna’s greyhound face withdrew. It was now to be detected only as a shadow behind the frosted glass.

  Doctor Otternschlag in his corner at the back had sat almost erect as long as the Baron was to be seen in the Lobby. Now he was hunched together again, more forlorn than before. He raised his elbow to empty half a glass of cognac without even a glance at it as he did so. His thin tobacco-stained hands hung down between his parted knees as though they were encased in lead. He looked between his long patent-leather shoes at the carpet that everywhere covered the stairs, passages, and corridors of the Grand Hotel; he was sick of its straggling pattern of yellow pineapples mingled with brown foliage on a raspberry-red background. Everything was so dead. The Lobby was dead. Everyone had gone out to his business or pleasures or vices, and left him to sit there alone. The woman attendant in the cloakroom suddenly came into view across the deserted Lobby. She stood behind the empty racks in the entrance hall and combed back the thin hair on her old head with a black comb. The porter left his compartment and shot straight across with unseemly haste to the telephone room. He appeared to have something on his mind—this porter. Doctor Otternschlag looked for his cognac and found it gone. “Shall we go up and lie down for a bit?” he asked himself. A light flush came into his cheeks and disappeared again as though he had betrayed a little secret of his own. “Yes,” he replied to his own question, but he did not get up. Even for this he was too listless. He merely raised one yellow-stained finger. Rohna from the far side of the Lobby saw it and with a scarcely visible nod sent a pageboy to the doctor.

  “Cigarettes, newspapers,” Otternschlag said dully. The pageboy darted across to the cataleptic lady at the bookstall (Rohna looked with disfavor at this lively exhibition of youthful exuberance), and then Otternschlag took the papers and cigarettes that the pageboy had selected for him. When he paid, he put the money on the plate, not into the boy’s hand. He always set a distance between himself and others, though he was not aware of it. The half of his mouth that was still intact even smiled after a fashion as he unfolded the papers and began to read. He expected something of them that they never delivered, just as no letter, telegram or caller ever came; he was dismally alone, empty, cut off from life. Sometimes when he was alone he confided this fact to himself aloud. “It’s a ghastly business,” he oft
en muttered, gazing out at the stretches of raspberry-red carpet and shuddering at himself. “It’s ghastly. This is no life. No life at all. But where is there any life? Nothing happens. Nothing goes on. Boring. Old. Dead. Ghastly.” Every object around him was a sham. Whatever he took up turned to dust. The world was a crumbling affair not to be grasped or held. You fell from emptiness to emptiness. You carried about a sack of darkness inside you. Doctor Otternschlag lived in the uttermost loneliness—although the earth is full of people like him . . .

  He found nothing in the papers to satisfy him. A typhoon, an earthquake, some petty war between blacks and whites. Arson, murder, political strife. Nothing. Too little. Scandals, panic on the Stock Exchange, colossal fortunes lost. What did it matter to him? How could it affect him? Transoceanic flights, speed records, sensational headlines. Each page screamed louder than the last till finally you heard none of them. The noise and bustle nowadays made you blind and deaf and deadened all sensation. Pictures of nude women, of legs, breasts, hands, teeth, surged up before him. Doctor Otternschlag had had women in his earlier days. He still remembered it; but without emotion; the memory occasioned only a faint creeping chill down his spine. He let the papers fall in disorder from his tobacco-stained fingers onto the pineapple carpet—so boring and utterly meaningless were they. “No, nothing happens, nothing at all,” he muttered. He had once possessed a little Persian cat, called Gurbä. Ever since she forsook him for a common street tom, he had been obliged to carry on his dialogues with himself.