Vicki Baum

Hedwig "Vicki" Baum (; Hebrew: ויקי באום‎; January 24, 1888 – August 29, 1960) was an Austrian writer. 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. It was made into a 1932 film and a 1989 broadway musical. 2Education and personal life Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her mother Mathilde (née Donath) suffered from mental illness, and died of breast cancer when Vicki was still a child 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. She began her artistic career as a musician playing the harp. She studied at the Vienna Conservatory and played in the Vienna Concert Society. She went on to perform in Germany – in Kiel, Hannover, and Mannheim – in the years 1916–1923. She later worked as a journalist for the magazine Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung, published by Ullstein-Verlag in Berlin.Baum was married twice. Her first, short-lived marriage, in 1914, 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 nam