Hans Grimm
German writer (1875–1959)
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Through Writer, Nazism and Night of the Long Knives
Early life
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.
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Nazism
Grimm had been a sympathizer of the National Socialists since 1923. He was never a member of the NSDAP, but he openly campaigned in the Göttinger Tageblatt newspaper for Hitler's second ballot in the 1932 Reich presidential election. 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.
In a centenary address (Der verkannte Hans Grimm, Lippoldsberg 1975), designed to restore Grimm’s reputation, Klaus von Delft was able to cite letters of complaint from Grimm to the Nazi authorities on a number of subjects: the infringement of the right of confidentiality at the ballot box; the behaviour of the Hitler-Jugend and the Nazi student association; the coupling of foreign and domestic policy issues in the 1936 referendum on Hitler's rule; and criticism of Hitler’s presentation of the murders of the "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934 as due judicial process. It is, however, indicative of Grimm's stance that von Delft is not able to find or cite any criticism of National Socialist racial policy. In 1938 Grimm was threatened with imprisonment by Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels and withdrew from public life.
Despite everything, however, even after 1945 Grimm remained true to his political convictions. In a pamphlet Die Erzbischofsschrift. Antwort eines Deutschen, (1950), a response to a message from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the German people, Grimm described Germany's war of aggression as an attempt to defend "European Culture" against Communism and blames Great Britain for escalating a local conflict into a global war. He even justified the Holocaust on the basis of a warped reading of Deuteronomy 20:13, 16; the publication met with a storm of criticism in Germany and abroad. 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? (Why, whence, but whither?).
Later life
In the late 1930s, Grimm lived in Lippoldsberg (Wesertal) restoring a number of monastic buildings that were left over from World War I. Consolidating his interest in real estate after World War II, he finished buying the monasteries, which were essentially fixer-uppers. Nevertheless, he was far from being overwhelmed with repairing these monasteries. He actually found enough time after 1949 to devote to his numerous literary activities, publishing his Lippoldsberger Dichtertage (Lippoldsberg Writers' Congresses).
He died in 1959 in Lippoldsberg.