Vicki Baum: Annotated Edition of Selected Works

The Vienna-born Jewish author Vicki Baum (18881960) achieved international celebrity. Her texts have appeared in magazines and as books and have become world-famous through theatre performances and films. The constant interest in Baums work has meanwhile led to literary studies also rediscovering and increasingly appreciating the qualities of her writings. A changed attitude towards the mechanisms of failed canonisation, which affected successful women writers in particular, as well as an increased interest in the mass and popular culture of the interwar period, have contributed to this development. Additionally, this also led to a revaluation of Baum who had been discredited for a long time as a mere entertaining, light fiction author. The editions of her texts with frequently missing or newly translated titles and subtitles played an important role here. To recognise the various reception possibilities of Baums works in their allusions as well as their specific ways of writing between reality and fiction, we need an edition which not only presents her works without a commentary, but which also places it in its socio-historical, literary, medial and gender-specific contexts. The aim of the project is to produce a generally accessible, reliable, annotated, and contextualised, initially 6-volume edition of selected works by Baum to fill this gap. The volumes present central prose texts, which are, with one exception, no longer available, and which are the first to illustrate the thematic, narrative, multilingual range of Baums work as she moved between Vienna, Berlin, and Hollywood: the early works, including the collection of novellas dedicated to her early mentor, Thomas Mann, Die andern Tage (1922/31), the modern novels with the Ullstein Publishing House, stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1928) and Menschen im Hotel. Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen (1929), the (self-)critical film novel Leben ohne Geheimnis (1932), the autobiographical novel Marion lebt (1942) as well as the anti-fascist and globalisation critical raw material text Kautschuk. Roman in 15 Erzählungen (1943/45). In accordance with current publishing practice and at the same time a novelty for Baums texts, this Open Access edition to be produced by the Wallstein Publishing House will be conceived as a hybrid edition. This means that in addition to the commentary sections of the printed volumes, further (more comprehensive and multimedial) documents on the creation, reception and adaptation of the respective texts will be available in digital form on an Internet platform. Dr. Veronika Hofeneder (Vienna) and PD Dr. Julia Bertschik (Berlin), both of whom are proven experts on Baum and have already presented ground-breaking individual editions of Baum, will be the main contributors to this project.

The international dissemination of texts by the Jewish Viennese star author Vicki Baum (1888-1960) via magazines, books, stage and film has lead to the fact that interest in her work has survived outside the literary canon; it has also meant that the literary quality of her writing has been rediscovered and meanwhile increasingly appreciated. A changed, institution-critical attitude towards mechanisms of failed canonisation, which successful women writers were particularly subject to, as well as an increased interest in the functioning of mass and popular culture, especially in the interwar period, have contributed to this development. Additionally, this also lead to a revaluation of Baum who had been discredited for a long time as a 'mere' entertaining, light fiction author. The editions of her texts, with frequently missing or newly translated paratexts played a major role here. To recognize the various reception possibilities of Baum's works in their specific poetics of transmedial and intratextual allusions, as well as autofictional and factual writing, we need an edition which not only presents her works without a commentary but which also places it in its socio-historical, literary, medial and gender-specific contexts. The aim of the project was therefore to produce a generally accessible, reliable, annotated and contextualized, initially 6-volume edition of selected works by Vicki Baum to fill this gap. The volumes present central prose texts, which are, with one exception, no longer available, and which are the first to illustrate the thematic, narrative, multilingual range of Baum's work as she moved between Vienna, Berlin and Hollywood: the early collection of novellas dedicated to her mentor, Thomas Mann, "Die andern Tage" (1922/31), the modern novels with the Ullstein Publishing House, "stud. chem. Helene Willfüer" (1928/29) and "Menschen im Hotel. Ein Kolportageroman mit Hintergründen" (1929, supplemented by the first print of Baum's theatrical version from 1930), the (self-)critical film novel "Leben ohne Geheimnis" (1932), the autobiographically based novel "Marion lebt" (Marion Alive 1942) as well as the capitalism and colonialism critical raw material text "Kautschuk" (The Weeping Wood 1943) in a new translation. In accordance with current publishing practice and at the same time a novelty for Baum's texts, this edition produced by the Wallstein Publishing House in August 2025 (https://www.wallstein-verlag.de/9783835358614-ausgewaehlte-werke.html) presents at the same time and in addition to the Open Access commentary sections of the printed volumes (with the respective texts in the versions of their first book prints), further (more comprehensive and multimedial) documents on the creation, reception and adaptation of the respective texts in digital form on the Open Access Internet platform https://vicki-baum-digital.univie.ac.at.