Summer Reading Project, BookLikes Satellite

Last semester, when I worked with a World War II history class, I quickly learned how little the students knew about the interwar period in Germany. As far as they knew, it was World War I, Treaty of Versailles, Hitler, World War II. A few knew about the Weimar period, but no one had a really good idea of ordinary life at the time. Even though the professor frowned on fiction, I wish I could have snuck the students a few novels to help them understand. Grand Hotel, by Vicki Baum (translated by Basil Creighton), would be another terrific entry in my fictional arsenal. Grand Hotel offers linked portraits of five visitors to the Grand Hotel in Berlin in the late 1920s. Each struggles with their past lives and their hopes for and worries about the future. Through them, we get a cross section of German society, examined from a deeply human and apolitical perspective...

Read the rest of my review at A Bookish Type. I received a free copy of this book from Edelweiss for review consideration.