Summary of Grand Hotel
Grand Hotel follows the lives of several guests staying at a luxury hotel in Berlin during the 1920s. The Russian ballerina Grusinskaya struggles with ageing, her fading fame and loneliness. Dr Otternschlag, a war veteran, also longs for companionship and tries to cope with his morphine addiction. The young and impoverished Baron von Gaigern leads a double life as a thief. Meanwhile, Otto Kringelein, a terminally ill bookkeeper, spends his savings on a room he can barely afford, determined to experience his remaining days in luxury. Shortly afterwards, his unscrupulous employer, Mr Preysing, checks into the hotel to negotiate a business deal and becomes involved with Flämmchen, a young typist who dreams of career in film. Over the course of a few days, the lives of these characters collide in a series of events involving romance, nightlife, crime, fraud and murder.
Reasons to read Grand Hotel
Grand Hotel remains the best-known novel by Austrian-American author and screenwriter Vicki Baum. It helped to establish the “hotel novel” and remains both a classic of European literature and a compelling portrait of Berlin in the 1920s. It should not be confused with Baum’s later novel Berlin Hotel, published in German as Hotel Berlin. In 1932, Grand Hotel was adapted into a Hollywood film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The novel also inspired a successful Broadway musical, first performed in 1989. In 2024, Der Spiegel included it in its selection of the 100 best German-language books published between 1924 and 2024.
Setting: Berlin – Kreuzberg (Germany)
Book set in Germany: Berlin (Kreuzberg). The fictional hotel is likely based on the former Hotel Excelsior, a luxury hotel opposite Anhalter Bahnhof. It was damaged during the Second World War and subsequently demolished.
Browse more books set in Berlin – Explore more books set in Germany
Original title: Menschen im Hotel
Year of publication: 1929
Nr of pages: 304
