After the play became a hit, its English-language adaptation enjoyed success in New York in the early 1930s and was made into the blockbuster 1932 Academy Award-winning film, Grand Hotel, starring Greta Garbo, John Barrymore and Joan Crawford. Menschen im Hotel marked the beginning of the career of popular Austrian novelist Baum in 1929 and she dramatized her novel for the Berlin stage later in the same year.

Big-name cast replacements, including Cyd Charisse and Zina Bethune, helped the show become the first American musical since 1985's Big River to top 1,000 performances on Broadway.

The show's 1989 Broadway production garnered 12 Tony Award nominations, winning five, including best direction and choreography for Tommy Tune. Grand Hotel is a musical with a book by Luther Davis, music and lyrics by Robert Wright and George Forrest, and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston.īased on Vicki Baum's 1929 novel, its eponymous spin-off play, Menschen im Hotel (People in a Hotel), and the subsequent 1932 MGM feature film, the musical focuses on events taking place over the course of a weekend in an elegant hotel in 1928 Berlin and the intersecting stories of the eccentric guests of the hotel, including a fading prima ballerina a fatally ill Jewish bookkeeper, who wants to spend his final days living in luxury a young, handsome, but destitute Baron a cynical doctor an honest businessman gone bad, and a typist dreaming of Hollywood success. Jones, Carina & Weber, Christoph.1929 Vicki Baum novel and play, Menschen im Hotel (People in a Hotel) and film oai/?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=info:ark/67531/metadc86175 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) While 'Menschen in Hotel' breaks from tradition by challenging bourgeois social values, Flämmchen fails to completely break free from traditional definitions of women's roles, reflecting women's disillusionment with the difficult pursuit of emancipation. Flämmchen faces sexual discrimination that limits her ability to live and define herself independently, and she struggles with the sexualized, objectifying image of women present in modern urban society, which represents the female body as a commodity. To examine how Baum portrays women's pursuit of success and autonomy in the city, this paper analyzes the text according to feminist theory. During the Weimar Republic from 1918 to 1933, Germany's large cities appeared to offer women financial and professional independence outside traditional gender roles. Abstract: This paper discusses research on the urban experience of German women in the late Weimar Republic as portrayed in the character Flämmchen in Vicki Baum's 1929 novel 'Menschen im Hotel'.

Menschen im Hotel by Vicki Baum