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VICKI BAUM Edit Profile

also known as Hedwig Baum

writer

VICKI BAUM was an Austrian writer.

Background

Baum was born in Vienna on January 24, 1888.

Education

She was educated at a music school and made her first appearance as a harpist at the age of eleven. She played in various theater orchestras in Vienna for the next several years.

Career

At the age of eighteen she married a writer, but they soon separated and she moved to Germany, where she continued playing the harp and taught music. She met the conductor Richard Lert while playing for the Darmstadt orchestra, but when she married him in 1916, she gave up her musical career.

Always a compulsive writer, she published her first story under a pseudonym when she was fourteen. Her first book, "Falling Star", was published only after a friend accidentally discovered her manuscripts in 1920.

In 1921 she began working as an editor for the Ullstein publishing house. Some of her novels were later serialized in illustrated weeklies also published by Ullstein. In 1928, she published "Helen Willfür", this was followed in 1929 by "Menschen in Hotel" ("Grand Hotel"), which made her internationally famous.

"Grand Hotel" was staged as a play, first in Berlin and then all over Europe and the United States, published as a novel in English, and made into a successful film in the United States starring Greta Garbo.

She visited New York in 1931, planning to stay for two weeks and see the play, but instead decided to remain, bring her family over, and settle

in California.

In 1938 she became an American citizen. She continued to write in German, but with the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, her works were banned in Germany and began to be published in Amsterdam. Altogether she published twenty-five novels.

She is praised particularly for her intense emotional portrayals, which made her characters larger than life, and for her vibrant style, which presented a kaleidoscopic view of their interrelated lives.

Connections

husband:
Richard Lert