One night, too many years ago, I successfully battled my parents
to be allowed to stay up to finish watching a movie on TV that had me
completely mesmerized. I’ve never forgotten the world that film opened, but
it’s taken me decades to get around to reading the novel on which it was based: Austrian writer Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel (1929). Enthusiastic reception to the book by bloggers Jacqui, Caroline and Dorian, however, led me to pick it up at last.
The distance between my childhood fixation on the film and
my middle-aged encounter with the novel is more than temporal. Watching the
film again for the first time in all those years after finishing the novel,
however, I saw reasons for its having made such an impression: Greta Garbo’s
over-the-top melodramatic acting; a character so drunk he stumbles all over his
room then falls onto a bed and off of it, entwined entirely in a satin
bedspread; a scene exciting to a ten year old of a thief jumping from a high
balcony to another above a busy street. I recalled being especially transfixed
by the hotel’s revolving door.
This revolving door provides the organizing principle of
Baum’s novel, a simplistic one summed up in the novel’s final line: “The
revolving door turns and turns – and swings…and swings…and swings…” Elsewhere
Baum is more explicit; her omniscient narrator compares the Grand Hotel, “not
inaptly,” to “life in general.” The guests, coming and going, ensconced in their
separate rooms, inhabit separate solitudes. Yet the Grand Hotel serves as a
crossroads. The diverse guests make fleeting acquaintances and liaisons at
times intersecting the “downstairs” employees and breaching social codes that
govern the world outside. A porter’s wife has a child; at the same moment, a
murdered man is carried out of the hotel through the hotel’s ever turning,
revolving door.
Baum achieves her task - to make of this simple conceit
something interesting - by populating her novel with grand characters. Although
they give the impression of having begun life as stock figures, Baum adorns and
supplies enough complexity to keep the reader engaged with them: Grusinskaya, a
famous ballet diva well aware of her shelf-life; Baron Gaigern, a goodhearted
and debonair thief; Herr Preysing, a rotten-hearted provincial businessman
desperate to please a domineering father-in-law; and Flämmchen, an attractive
young typist intent on a career in film. Grand Hotel is most certainly a
novel with its eye on nascent Hollywood, where the Jewish Baum, invited there
to write the film’s script, would spend the last half of her life due to
Hitler’s rise. Serving as the center of the novel’s action is Kringelein, a
terminally-ill accountant determined to acquire a modicum of dignity after 27
years of servitude in Preysing’s factory and to live out his remaining days in the splendor in the Grand Hotel, and whose acute awareness of mortality shakes up
the rigidities of the social mores and upstairs/downstairs class dynamic that
govern the hotel’s guests and employees.
The ready-made setting and the explicitness of its operative
metaphor feel pat; the character development feels slightly additive. Still,
Baum’s strong writing sustained my interest. She throws into her narrative an
attempted jewel theft by Gaigern that serves to amplify suspense and gives the novel
a “Pink Panther”-esque caper element, milks Kringelein’s carpe diem moments for all they’re worth, and, astonishingly, even
manages to make Preysing’s drawn out business meetings engrossing. In addition,
in inventing the whole genre of the hotel novel, she cleverly uses a zoom
effect (perhaps also advertising the novel’s cinematic consciousness), in
giving her characters intense close-ups then pulling her camera back to reveal
not only their commonality, but also a hint of their temporal replication, as
new guests will arrive to replace the ones we’re allowed to see over the
action’s brief span of a few days, and who have themselves replaced previous
guests (a conceit presented literally in kindred spirit Jim Jarmusch’s film Mystery Train,
a “cheap motel” take on Baum’s “Grand Hotel” genre). Through Grusinskaya, Baum
also alludes to other hotels in other cities of the world – a universal
multitude of way-stations.
But it’s really the historical context and the small details
that count here. Like Katherine Ann Porter’s Ship of Fools, the confined
setting serves as a microcosm for issues of class, station and gender. Baum’s
Grand Hotel of 1920’s Berlin also slyly manifests the residual and still fresh
scars of the First World War. In one understated example, the one-armed
elevator operator is replaced by the subsequent shift’s one-armed elevator
operator. Baum also casts an eye on devastated Germany’s crippled efforts to
greet the future, as seen in a corrupt lie told by Preysing to save himself
from economic ruin. Floating through the novel like a symbol of Germany caught
between the past war’s wreckage and whatever the future may bring, is one other
curious figure, Doctor Otternschlag, who literally holds life and death in his
hands since he carries about morphine both for medical emergencies and for his
own anticipated suicide. He has two faces – also literally – as one side, neatly divided from the other, presents a ghastly war wound into which is fitted a glass eye. A cinephile may
make of that what he or she will.
Edmund Goulding’s 1932 film adaptation, seen now from my
middle-aged perspective, improves upon Baum’s novel by confining the action to the
hotel, whereas Baum wanders unnecessarily beyond its revolving door, for
example by putting Grusinskaya on stage and by having Gaigern take Kringelein
on a fast drive and up in a airplane. The film uses two clever visual devices to
convey this concentration, one a stunning image of the hotel’s cylindrical
atrium and the other an overhead panning shot of hotel switchboard operators
busily connecting guests to one another and to the outside world. But the film
lacks the subtlety of Baum’s characterization, and its rendition of the Baron’s
encounter with Grusinskaya, for example, comes off as downright clumsy compared to the psychological
elaborations present in Baum’s nuanced treatment.
As a vehicle for demonstrating its characters’ aspirations
and desires, heightened by the hotel’s lending of glamour to life, as well as
of their painful, sordid, corrupt fallibilities, Grand Hotel has its
charms as well as something beyond charm, a poignant and troubling glimpse of Europe between
the wars and of Berlin’s internationalism, a convocation of open-ended possibilities
before the sanitizing iron heel of the thirties would come along to quash them.
Little of all of that had been apparent to the ten year old watching the film,
nor, reading Baum’s novel as an adult, did I experience the kind of immersive
fascination I’d had way back when. Even so, one would be hard put to enter Baum’s
glimpse of glittering, complicated lives passing through her Grand Hotel without
experiencing a youthful yearning to be a part of its in and outs, ups and
downs, and myriad goings-on - as well as
a more mature and dark, intractable and too human sense that one has, like
it or not, already checked in.
