Rudolf Borchardt

Rudolf Borchardt (9 June 1877, Königsberg, Prussia – 10 January 1945, Trins, Austria) was a German essayist, poet and cultural historian.

[1] Ernst Schmidt called Borchardt "one of the most problematic figures in early twentieth-century European cultural history" and "one of Germany's finest poets.

[4] In 1906 Borchardt married the painter Karoline Ehrmann in London and returned with her to Italy, from where, as a sought-after speaker, he went on numerous lecture tours to Germany until 1933.

[5] After the divorce from Karoline in 1919, Borchardt married Marie Luise Voigt in 1920, a niece of Rudolf Alexander Schröder, with whom he had been friends for a long time.

His literary output became more political and polemical, partly in order to make his income more secure, but he managed to produce a collection of stories, The Hopeless Race: Four Contemporary Tales (1929), which found a large audience across Europe.

Due to his Jewish heritage, Borchardt lived a withdrawn life in Italy from 1933, unable to visit loved ones in Germany.

For a long time Borchardt's writings were out of print, at first suppressed in Germany by the Nazi regime and then simply forgotten.