Hermann von Wedderkop

Hermann von Wedderkop (1875–1956), also known as Weddo, was a German writer, translator and editor of the art magazine Der Querschnitt.

In 1907 he met the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim in Paris, who gave him his first artistic impulses and later recruited him for his gallery magazine Der Querschnitt.

On 1 September 1911, Wedderkop was appointed deputy chairman of the income tax assessment commission in Cologne and retired from the judiciary.

There, at La Hulpe, he met the writer Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn, who was ‘experimenting’ with cocaine as a hospital doctor at the time and thus incurred the displeasure of the administrative officer Wedderkop.

Benn later accused him of having an equally disavowing affair with the 20 years younger and later decidedly ‘anti-German’ young actress Yvonne George.

In the same year, he published the book ‘Deutsche Graphik des Westens’, in which he himself wrote texts on Otto von Wätjen and Rudolf Großmann.

As editor, Wedderkop succeeded in making Der Querschnitt into the leading German Zeitgeist magazine of the 1920s: open to the artistic avant-garde, such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger, and alongside to the heroes of boxing, ironically elitist and artistic photographs of male and female nudes.

Thea Sternheim's diaries also contain anti-Semitic stereotypes from Wedderkop, who accused Flechtheim of capitalist corruption and moral depravity, drawing a direct parallel with the Dreyfus affair.

In the justification signed by Joseph Goebbels on 7 June 1939, various pro-Jewish passages and a positive description of ‘gay and lesbian bars’ were cited, which made the travel guide completely unsuitable for the German generation.

Von Wedderkop suspected that his text ‘Some Thoughts on Humour’ (Einige Gedanken über Humor) in the Kölnische Zeitung could have been the reason for this and that there was a connection to the appearance of "Die drei Rulands" in January 1939 when ‘Die drei Stadtbauarchitekten’ performed at the "Kabarett der Komiker" and were subsequently expelled from the Reich Chamber of Culture by Goebbels, which was de facto equivalent to a lifelong professional ban.

After the end of the war, he translated the literary travel memoirs Et in Arcadia ego of the Italian art critic Emilio Cecchi into German.

More success came with his alternative travel books for Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Bonn (1928), Paris (1929), London and Rome (1930) and Oberitalien (1931), published by Piper Verlag in the series Was nicht im ″Baedeker″ steht.