Vicki Baum

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Max Fenichel : Vicki Baum (around 1930)
Vicki Baum (portrayed by Emil Stumpp , 1930)

Vicki Baum , also Vicky Baum , actually Hedwig Baum (born January 24, 1888 in Vienna , † August 29, 1960 in Los Angeles , California , United States ) was an Austrian musician ( harpist ) expatriated from the German Reich and one of the most successful writers of the Weimar Republic . She emigrated to the USA as early as 1932 and took American citizenship.

Life

The daughter of the Jewish government official Hermann Baum and his wife Mathilde, b. Donath, attended the pedagogy and trained as a harpist at the Conservatory of the Society of Friends of Music from 1898 to 1904 . After an engagement in the symphony orchestra of the Wiener Konzertverein, she came to Darmstadt as a harpist in 1913 , where she worked as a grand ducal court and chamber musician. Later she was musically active in Kiel (1916/17), Hanover (1917–1923) and Mannheim .

Berlin memorial plaque for Vicki Baum in Berlin-Grunewald , Königsallee 45

Vicki Baum was married to the writer and journalist Max Prels (born July 28, 1878) from 1909 to 1913. From 1914 she began to write on the side, initially incognito.

In 1916 Baum married the conductor Richard Lert . The marriage resulted in the sons Wolfgang (* 1917, † 2009) and Peter (* 1921, † 2012).

After the birth of their first son Wolfgang in Kiel in 1917, the family moved to Hanover that same year , where Lert worked as the first conductor and head of the opera at the municipal theaters . The family initially lived at Dieterrichsstrasse 11 in Hanover's Mitte district , from 1921 to 1923 on the ground floor of what was then Podbielskistraße 335 (today: number 53) in List .

In 1919 Baum published her first work, Early Shadows, as "Vicki Baum" . From 1926 to 1931 she was a publishing clerk and magazine editor in Berlin for Ullstein .

“You see, I'm an editor at Ullstein-Verlag. The Ullsteins also descend from Jews. But in Germany we don't make a big fuss about whether a house is descended from Jews. These are purely religious questions. I'm not religious, so I don't consider myself a Jew - nor have I ever been seen as such. "

- Vicki Baum

With her novel Stud. Chem. She became known to Helene Willfüer in 1928. The success of her other works is explained by the topicality of the problems they deal with and the precise descriptions of the milieu. Her novels can be described as exciting entertainment literature, but are also considered to be an important contribution to the New Objectivity . She wrote the script herself for the adaptation of her novel Hell in Frauensee as The Three Women from Urban Hell . Her dramatization of the novel People in the Hotel was premiered on January 26, 1930 in the Theater am Nollendorfplatz .

Vicki Baum was regarded by the Nazis as a “Jewish asphalt writer” and was heavily discriminated against. In an anti-Semitic inflammatory pamphlet in 1932, the Nazi cultural politician Hans Hauptmann criticized the "shallow, amoral sensational novels that the" Jew Vicki Baum-Levy "used to write". Baum's books fell victim to the book burning in Germany in 1933 . On May 5, 1933, her works were placed on a "stake" at the University of Rostock. After she was expatriated in 1938, she acquired American citizenship that year and published other works in English.

After the play "People in the Hotel" was translated into English, it was performed on Broadway in New York . Because these performances were successful, Vicki Baum became very well known in the United States. In 1931 she accepted the invitation to take part in the film adaptation of her most famous novel People in the Hotel (as " Grand Hotel ") directed by Edmund Goulding with Greta Garbo in Hollywood . In 1932 she moved to California, probably also out of clairvoyance about political developments in Germany. With fees for film adaptations and script participation, Vicki Baum was able to afford an elegant villa in Pacific Palisades ( 1461 Amalfi Drive ). She lived here near the great emigrants Thomas Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger .

In 1949 Vicki Baum traveled to Europe: Portugal, France, Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, but not Germany and Austria. She died in Los Angeles in 1960. Her numerous novels, many of which have been made into films and translated into several languages, are still published today.

In addition to her novels, Vicki Baum also wrote short stories and dramas as well as numerous columnist texts for over 35 different newspapers and magazines , which were first published in book form in January 2018.

Honors

In 1983 there was a twenty-minute television documentary by Gisela Reich on Süddeutscher Rundfunk with the title "Vicki Baum - A first-class writer of the second order". The title uses a self-deprecating twist from Vicki Baum's memoir, which is entitled " Everything was very different" .

In 1999 in Vienna in the 4th district on Wiedner Hauptstrasse between their houses No. 36 and 38, the confluence of Waaggasse, which forms a small square, was named Vicki-Baum-Platz .

Since 2009 there is a " Vicki-Baum-Straße " in Berlin-Rummelsburg

Works (selection)

  • 1914: Early shadows. The end of a childhood . Novel. Publishing house Erich Reiss, Berlin.
  • 1920: The entrance to the stage. Ullstein, Berlin.
  • 1921: The dances of Ina Raffay.
  • 1922: The other days . Novellas. German publishing house, Berlin.
  • 1922: Boys travel. A cheerful story for young people
  • 1923: The world without sin
  • 1924: Ulle the dwarf . Novel. German publishing house, Berlin
  • 1926: dance break
  • 1927: Hell in Frauensee. A cheerful novel of love and hunger. Ullstein, Berlin.
  • 1927: Feme . Novel. Ullstein, Berlin.
  • 1928: Stud. Chem. Helene Willfuer . Novel. Ullstein, Berlin.
  • 1929: People in the hotel. A colportage novel with backgrounds. Ullstein, Berlin. (see people in the hotel )
  • 1930: Incident in Lohwinkel.
  • 1930: miniatures
  • 1930: Grand Hotel . Translation by Basil Creighton, Bles, London. Theater version of people in the hotel. 1929.
  • 1931: Pariser Platz 13
  • 1932: life without a secret
  • 1935: The multiplication table / rendezvous in Paris
  • 1936: Doris Hart's career
  • 1937: Love and Death on Bali (Love and death on Bali) . New edition Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-462-03122-8 (Contrary to the title, it is not about the love story, but rather a novel-like description of the ritual life of a Balinese village and its destruction by Dutch colonizers at the beginning of the last century).
  • 1937: The big sell-off. Querido, Amsterdam 1937
  • 1939: Hotel Shanghai (Shanghai '37)
  • 1939: The big break
  • 1940: The Ship and the shores / It began on board
  • 1941: Marion lives / Marion / Marion Alive
  • 1943: Kautschuk / Cahuchu, stream of tears (The weeping wood)
  • 1943: Hotel Berlin / There was a hotel here
  • 1944: Beyond this Journey / flight of fate (German edition Amsterdam 1947)
  • 1946: Mortgage on Life / Pfändetes Leben (German first edition 1958)
  • 1949: Clarinda
  • 1951: Danger from Deer / Before deer is warned (German edition Berlin 1960)
  • 1953: Crystal in the clay (The Mustard Seed)
  • 1956: Flood and Flame (Written on water)
  • 1957: The Golden Shoes (Theme for Ballet)
  • 1962: It was all very different (memoir)
  • 2013: happiness in the distance. Stories for hollywood. Übers. Gesine Schröder . Edited by Wolfgang Jacobsen , Heike Klapdor. Structure, Berlin 2013
  • 2018: macaroni at dusk. Feature sections. Edited and with a foreword by Veronika Hofeneder. Edition Atelier , Vienna 2018

Film adaptations

literature

Web links

Commons : Vicki Baum  - collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Vicki Baum  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Memorial plaque for Vicki Baum. berlin.de
  2. ^ Virginia L. Clark: Wolfgang Lert dies, leaves TSV, national legacy. Retrieved November 13, 2019 .
  3. ↑ yourdressage: YourDressage.org American Dressage Legends: Peter Lert. May 2, 2019, Retrieved November 13, 2019 (American English).
  4. ^ Corinna Heins, Anne Jäger: Women in the List / ... Vicky Baum, author (1888–1960) , In: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter , New Series, Vol. 60 (2006), pp. 251–254; here: p. 252
  5. ↑ Interview with the Jewish Times , May 1, 1931. Quoted from H. Broder : Jüdischer Kalender 2009–2010 . August 30th / 20th Elul
  6. ↑ Quoted in Stefanie Steinaecker: A little lower than the Angels - Vicki Baum and Gina Kaus: Writing between adaptation and claim . University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg 2011. p. 40. Also as an online text.
  7. ↑ Werner Röder u. a. (Ed.): Biographical manual of German-speaking emigration after 1933 , Munich 1983, vol. 1 ( German Biographical Archive (DBA) part: 2, file number: 0077).
  8. ^ Concord: Deutsch: 1461 Amalfi Drive Pacific Palisades, former home of Vicki Baum. November 11, 2014, accessed November 13, 2019 .
  9. ↑ Macaroni in the twilight. Features information on publication on the publisher's website
  10. ↑ [1]
personal data
SURNAME Tree, Vicki
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Baum, Vicky; Baum, Hedwig (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian harpist and writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 24, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna , Austria-Hungary
DATE OF DEATH August 29, 1960
Place of death Los Angeles , California , United States