Grand Hotel by Vicki Baum

It's just a silly fairy tale that says hotel chambermaids spy through keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have no interest whatsoever in the people behind the keyholes. Hotel chambermaids have a lot to do and are tired out, and they are all a little disillusioned, and besides they are entirely occupied with their own affairs. Nobody bothers about anybody else in a big hotel. Everybody is alone with himself in this great pub that Doctor Otternschlag not inaptly compared with life in general. Everyone lives behind double doors and has no companion but his reflection in the mirror or his shadow on the wall. People brush past one another in the passages, say good morning or good evening in the Lounge, sometimes even enter into a brief conversation painfully raked together out of the barren topics of the day. A glance at another doesn't go as far up as the eyes. It stops at his clothes. Perhaps it happens that a dance in the Yellow Pavilion brings two bodies into contact. Perhaps someone steals out of his room into another's. That is all. Behind it lies an abyss of loneliness.

Remember hotels? They were strange places: little approximations of home, crowded with people. In the ones I remember best every room opened onto a hallway overlooking a tremendous corridor, so you could look down and see all the other guests walking about. They were designed to give you the impression that all kinds of human interactions might take place there, though they rarely did; for the most part, even if you dined in the restaurant or went to the overpriced bar, you ended up keeping to yourself.

Vicki Baum's Grand Hotel is a story about several strangers at Berlin's fanciest hotel who really do end up colliding, in a way, and changing each other's lives. There's Doctor Otternschlag, a World War I doctor whose face is half-ravaged by an enemy shell; Herr Preysing, a middle manager at a linen company desperate to salvage a big merger; Grusinskaya, a still-beautiful but sort of washed up ballet dancer whose inability to excite audiences drives her to thoughts of suicide; Baron Gaigern, a dashing burglar who has designs on Grusinskaya's pearls, and then herself; and Otto Kringelein, a low level functionary in Preysing's linen company who has just discovered he has only weeks to live, and has decided to cash in everything he owns and live his final moments in style.

Though the cynical, morose Otternschlag is the hotel's--and the novel's--conscience, it's Kringelein who is the novel's heart. Poor and working class, he's come to the Grand Hotel because he knows Preysing frequents it, and although he hates Preysing for what he represents, he also represents Kringelein's only model for what it means to really live: to spend money like a comfortable bureaucrat. First Otternschlag, then Gaigern try to show Kringelein a good time--although Gaigern has his designs on Kringelein's money--and little by little he does begin, at last, to live. He rides in a speeding automobile; he flies in a plane; he watches a boxing match--but most importantly, he finds the courage at last to tell of Preysing, the petit bourgeois manager who doesn't even recognize him in the hallway. The Grand Hotel is the dream of the fruits of labor, and only when it's been exposed can Kringelein actually seize what makes him live: a measure of independence from the soul-crushing constraints of capitalist exploitation.

Grand Hotel struck me as the obverse of Borumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England, which focuses on service industry workers, rather than consumers, in the same period of European history. Baum gives brief, but sharp, images of the various porters and chambermaids who live in constancy while the revolving doors of the hotel turn, but mostly it's interested in the possibility that the hotel presents for change. Each of her protagonists, she notes toward the end, leaves the hotel in a condition opposite to the one in which they entered--Grusinskaya rejuvenated, Preysing humiliated, Kringelein ennobled. On the other hand Doctor Otternschlag, who asks every day at the desk whether a letter has arrived for him, never leaves. But the Grand Hotel is a place where lives are transformed, and as such its an interesting symbol for the Weimar Republic in which its set, whose transformation--Baum couldn't have known when she wrote it--turned pretty sour indeed. Leaving that aside, the novel, like the hotel, is filled with captivating and empathetic human lives that play out their little dramas, and then depart.