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.

Baum was born in Vienna into a Jewish family. Her childhood was difficult: her father, Hermann, was a bank clerk who died when she was about 12, and her mother Mathilde (née Donath) suffered from mental illness. 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 name. They divorced, and in 1916, she married Richard Lert, a conductor and her best friend since their childhood days. They had two sons, Wolfgang (b. 1917) and Peter (b. 1921).

During World War I she worked for a short time as a nurse.

Baum took up boxing in the late 1920s. She trained with Turkish prizefighter Sabri Mahir at his Studio for Boxing and Physical Culture in Berlin. Although the studio was open to men and women, Baum writes in her memoir, It Was All Quite Different (1964), that only a few women (including Marlene Dietrich and Carola Neher) trained there: “I don’t know how the feminine element sneaked into those masculine realms, but in any case, only three or four of us were tough enough to go through with it.” Positioning herself as a “New Woman,” she asserted her independence in the traditionally male domain of boxing and challenged old gender categories. She writes that “Sabri put one limitation on women – no sparring in the ring, no black eyes, no bloody noses. Punching the ball was okay, though, to develop a pretty mean straight left, a quick one-two; a woman never knew when she might have to defend herself, right?” While training with Mahir, Baum mastered a rope-jumping routine that was designed for German heavyweight champion Franz Diener. She later credited her strong work ethic to the skills instilled in Mahir’s studio.

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