She matriculated into a PhD program in history and received her doctorate in 1892 for a dissertation on "The neutrality of the Confederation during the Spanish War of Succession" (Die Neutralität der Eidgenossenschaft während des spanischen Erbfolgekrieges).

In this blossoming period utopian thinking and a striving for balance between reason and fantasy, mind and body, culminated in the idea that human perfectibility was a task for everyone.

Huch identifies late German Romanticism with a leaning towards simplistic folklore, myth and self-destructive tendencies.

While Huch focused on conjuring up images by describing contents, symbolism, colour and moods to invoke the world view of a historic period.

Her contemporary Toni Wolff identified Huch as medial historian who had the ability to “evoke historical situations and persons”.

[6] In 1914 Huch celebrated her fiftieth birthday, three weeks after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, her final volume of her trilogy on the Thirty Years' War had just been completed.

In it she chronicled Wallenstein's attempt to renew and unify Germany out of the Holy Roman Empire, which she termed a “degenerate and decadent” Reich.

[6] In her early autobiographical writings Huch had expressed a Lutheran faith combined with a Goethean view of history and the community.

Huch also examined the Medieval commune and charted the development of self-governing communities based on personal involvement and solidarity.

Huch had first examined the idea of self-reliant communities, which she contrasted to what she perceived as artificial modern societies, in her biography of Bakunin.

[6] When the Nazis seized power in 1933 and proclaimed the German Dritte Reich, she resigned in protest from the Prussian Academy of Arts.

Huch responded, saying that she will not forego her right to freedom of expression and asked Schillings whether her refusal to sign the declaration will inevitably lead to her exclusion from the academy.

Schillings argued that this could not be her wish, since she had in her writings clearly expressed nationalist views (although Huch’s nationalism was of the liberal variety).

Böhm was able to secure a teaching contract with Jena University, but in 1937 he and Huch were accused of sedition because the two had defended the intellectual capacities of Jews at a dinner party.

During World War II Böhm moved to Freiburg and later to Frankfurt, while Huch and her daughter remained in Jena.

[9] In March 1946, 13 years after her resignation from the Prussian Academy of Arts she published a public appeal in Germany's daily newspapers asking for help in compiling biographical information on those who had sacrificed their lives to resist the Nazi terror.

She reasoned that this ultimate sacrifice had helped all Germans to retain a grain of human dignity during a period of near boundless brutality.

[9] Professor Frank Trommler, University of Pennsylvania, in his study of the German literature elite during the Third Reich argues that Huch, along with Ernst Wiechert, Werner Bergengruen, Reinhold Schneider, Albrecht Haushofer and Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, took a courageous stand on issues such as the suppression of freedom, the fight against tyranny, the longing for privacy and the simple life.

Their reputation was grounded in their ability to articulate their opinions and in doing so authors like Huch shaped the political and cultural transformation in Germany after the demise of the Third Reich.

"[17] When Alfred Andersch assessed German literary output during the Nazi reign in 1947 he categorised Huch alongside Gerhart Hauptmann, Rudolf Alexander Schröder, Hans Carossa and Gertrud von Le Fort as older and established poets who had stayed in Germany and upheld a tradition of "bourgeois classicism".

Andersch counted the poets Stefan Andres, Horst Lange, Hans Leip, Martin Raschke and Eugen Gottlob Winkler among the younger generation who stayed in Germany and contributed to the resistance against Nazi authorities with their literary work.

[10] Ricarda Huch's collection Autumn Fire, translated by Timothy Adès and with an introduction by Karen Leeder, was published in November 2024 by Poetry Salzburg.