She trained with Turkish prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his Studio for Boxing and Physical Culture in Berlin. Boxing īaum took up boxing in the late 1920s. They divorced in 1910, and in 1916, she married Richard Lert, a conductor. Her first, short-lived marriage, in 1906, was to Max Prels, an Austrian journalist who introduced her to the Viennese cultural scene some of her first short stories were published under his name. She later worked as a journalist for the magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, published by Ullstein-Verlag in Berlin. She went on to perform in Germany – in Kiel, Hannover, and Mannheim – in the years 1916–1923. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. Her father, described as 'a tyrannical, hypochondriac' man, was a bank clerk who was killed in 1942 in Novi Sad (present-day Serbia) by soldiers of the Hungarian occupation.

Her mother Mathilde (née Donath) suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 Broadway musical.īaum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. She is known for the novel Menschen im Hotel ('People at a Hotel', 1929 - published in English as Grand Hotel), one of her first international successes. Hedwig 'Vicki' Baum ( / b aʊ m/ Hebrew: ויקי באום Janu– August 29, 1960) was an Austrian writer. The Nazis forbade and burned works by Baum, who was both Jewish and an advocate for the modern woman.Commemorative tablet for Vicki Baum, unveiled in 1989 at the site of the house she lived in at Königsallee 45, Berlin. Her writing often depicts powerful, self-reliant women caught up in the social and economic turbulence of the twentieth century.

She continued her successful career, including working on the acclaimed film Grand Hotel, based on her 1929 novel Menschen im Hotel. Increasingly uncomfortable with rising fascism and antisemitism, Baum left for the United States in 1932. Her writings reflected the modernism characteristic of Weimar-era literature, and embraced the ideals of independence and liberation for women. Vicki Baum (1888-1960), a best-selling author in Austria and Germany, was born into a middle-class Jewish family in Vienna.

Vicki Baum, 1929 Which of Vicki Baum's Works were Burned?Īll works published before May 1933 Who was Vicki Baum? They are at home on the sports field and in the laboratories they work a lot and do not make a lot of fuss over those emotions that meant so much to us in the old days because they proliferated half-hidden, suppressed and forbidden. Are healthy and happy, with no hysteria, no anemia, no nerves and sentimentalities.

Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum