Hans Grimm

Hans Grimm was born in Wiesbaden, in the Prussian province of Hesse-Nassau, the son of Julius Grimm (1821–1911), a professor of law who retired early and devoted his time to private historical and literary studies and to political activity as a founder member of the National Liberal Party, which he represented in the Prussian Abgeordnetenhaus parliament, and also as a founder member of the German Colonial Society.

Shy and reclusive as a child, Hans Grimm showed an interest and aptitude for writing and in 1894 started to study Literature and French at the University of Lausanne.

Grimm's South African sojourn lasted fourteen years, from 1897 to 1911, and it had a profound effect on him: with few minor exceptions all his literary work — several collections of short stories and novels — is set in Southern Africa.

From a strictly literary point of view — and leaving their ideological bias to one side — the most readable of Grimm's works are, however, his Novellen and short stories, in which the discipline imposed by restricted space forces him to abandon the discursive wordiness of Volk ohne Raum (1344 pages in the one-volume edition).

Grimm believed that only they could restore German national dignity and economic and political stability, but his relationship with the Party — of which he never formally became a member — became increasingly strained, as he fell out of sympathy with the illegality of its methods.

[4] In 1954, having failed to gain a seat in the West German parliament for the extreme right-wing "Deutsche Reichspartei", he published a detailed defence of National Socialism under the title Warum, woher aber wohin?