About the Project

The international dissemination of works by Vienna-born author Vicki Baum (1888–1960) through magazines, books, stage productions, and films has sustained interest in her oeuvre beyond the traditional literary canon. Baum, of Jewish heritage, has seen her literary qualities rediscovered and increasingly recognized by literary scholars. This shift is partly attributable to a more critical stance toward the mechanisms of canonization – which had previously excluded successful female authors – and to a growing scholarly focus on mass and popular culture, particularly during the interwar period.

This development has facilitated a reassessment of Baum, who was long dismissed as merely a writer of popular fiction and not regarded as an author of “serious” literature. A key contributing factor for this has been the earlier editions of her texts, which often lacked paratexts or included newly translated ones. A comprehensive understanding of the multiplicity of possible readings of Baum’s works within her specific poetics – poetics that employ transmedial and intratextual references as well as autofictional and factual writing styles – calls for an edition that not only presents the texts but also situates them in their socio-historical, literary, media, and gender-specific contexts.

To address this lacuna, this six-volume edition aims to offer a widely accessible, reliable, annotated, and contextualized collection of selected works by Baum. The volumes present central prose texts that, with the exception of Menschen im Hotel, are no longer available, and for the first time, depict the thematic, narrative, and multilingual breadth of Baum’s works, variously written in Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood. The selection of texts includes: the early novella collection Die andern Tage (1922/31), dedicated to her patron Thomas Mann; the modern novels stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1928/29) and Menschen im Hotel. Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen (1929, including the previously unpublished first print of the 1930 theater version); the (self-)critical film novel Leben ohne Geheimnis (1932); the autobiographical and historical novel Marion lebt (Marion Alive, 1942); and the 1945 German debut of the critical capitalism and colonialism text Kautschuk (The Weeping Wood, 1943), in a new translation.