Vicki Baum: Ausgewählte Werke. Kommentierte Ausgabe. Bd. 4: Leben ohne Geheimnis

Abstract

In her novel “Leben ohne Geheimnis” (Engl.: “Falling Star”), published by Ullstein in 1932, Vicki Baum takes up current topics and discourses in the transition phase from silent movies to so-called “talkies”: film as a new mass product, the beginnings of 'celebrity culture', the self-marketing of stars with the exploitation of their private lives for PR purposes, the culture industry with its fan culture. She presents Hollywood – which she got to know when she was involved in the production of the film adaption of her novel “Menschen im Hotel” (Engl.: “Grand Hotel”) – as “Sehnsuchtstopos” (“topos of longing”) in which her characters act in various stages of disillusionment, and confronts them with the film production companies‘ capitalist greed for profit; she shows that sexual exploitation was already omnipresent in the film industry around 1930. Using cinematic narrative techniques, she demonstrates how the characters behave in the game of appearance and reality, how they lose old identities and form new ones as emigrants.