Hans Grimm

Hans Grimm (22 March 1875 – 29 September 1959 ) was a German writer. The title of his 1926 novel Volk ohne Raum became a political slogan of the expansionist Nazi Lebensraum concept.

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. His mother, Marie Grimm (1849–1911) was a daughter of the Austrian sparkling wine manufacturer Robert Schlumberger, ennobled von Goldeck in 1878.

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. Under pressure from his father, however, he left university in 1895 and went into business, working for a German company in Great Britain (in Nottingham and London), and then in the British-ruled Cape Colony (in Port Elizabeth and East London), where he also rented a small farm.

Although Grimm's South African sojourn lasted only fourteen years, from 1897 to 1911, 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. His most famous novel is Volk ohne Raum (1926). The programmatic title "A people without space" indicates Grimm's belief that Germany's problems, exacerbated by defeat in the First World War, were caused by its lack of space at home or in overseas colonies: individuals, and therefore the nation, were unable to develop to their fullest potential. The novel established him as one of Germany's leading writers and demonstrated clearly his political sympathies with the political Right in Weimar Germany, and the title became a popular slogan of the National Socialist movement. The commercial success of this work – sales of the single volume edition amounted to 500,000 by 1943 - clearly shows the extent to which it struck a chord with German readers in the 1920s and 1930s.

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