Background
Hans Grimm was born in Wiesbaden on 22 March 1875, the son of a former university professor who was also a founding member of the Colonial League (Kolonialverein).
Hans Grimm was born in Wiesbaden on 22 March 1875, the son of a former university professor who was also a founding member of the Colonial League (Kolonialverein).
At the age of twenty he decided to try his own hand at world trade and went to England to learn the export business. Leaving London in 1896 for the Cape Colony, he spent the next fourteen years in South Africa and German South-West Africa, mostly as an independent merchant. This experience decisively moulded his political outlook, his emotional attitudes and his preoccupation with Germany's colonial aspirations.
For Grimm, the theme of lebensraum was inextricably linked with overseas colonies and was the only panacea for Germany's social problems and political ills.
Grimm sought to propagandize this Nazi message abroad in his two speeches, Amerikanische Rede (1936) and Englische Rede (1938), depicting Germany, England and the USA as the future world triumvirate and apex of the Nordic race, destined to throw back the challenge of Vermassung (mass-mindedness) and Bolshevism. Grimm distrusted the revolutionary radicalism in the Nazi movement and was at one time threatened by Goebbels with arrest and committal to a concentration camp (a threat that never materialized), but this did not prevent him after the war from comprehensively whitewashing Adolf Hitler and Nazism.
In answer to a message broadcast to the German people on 29 November 1945 by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Grimm wrote his ultra-nationalist apologia Die Erzbischofschrift- Antworteines Deutschen (Engl. trs. Answer of a German).
In a series of speeches in different cities of Schleswig-Holstein, Grimm continued in the early 1950s to display his enthusiasm for National Socialist ideals, until the Federal authorities eventually banned him from addressing public meetings. He died unrepentant at his ancient homestead in Lippoldsberg an der Weser on 27 September 1959.
(Grimm elaborated his earlier assertions, presenting Hitle...)
1954(Grimm's ultra-nationalist apologia, where the author atta...)
(the political novel which later became obligatory reading...)
1927Amerikanische Rede
1936Though he never joined the Nazi Party, Grimm’s world-view once crystallized showed the same patterns of thought as official Nazi ideology. He agreed with Hitler's elitism and his call for German racial purity, and described National Socialism as ‘the second German Reformation', a ‘grandiose’ attempt at completing Luther’s work through a return to true Nordic being.
He claimed that Nazism in its early years had brought great benefits to Europe; that it had ‘saved the awakening German people and along with them the tightly packed Central European masses from the great desertion to communism, and that means from total mass-mindedness’. Moreover Grimm found nothing to reproach Nazism for in the pre-1939 period ‘except for the Rohm affair and the night of the Jew-baiting’, and he even blamed warmongering Britain for the outbreak of World War II. According to Grimm, British ‘anti-Teutonism’ was the moral equivalent of German anti-semitism and, since 1895, British policy had been based solely on the slogan Germania est delenda (Germany must be destroyed). The British failure to understand National Socialism had been a ‘tremendous disaster for Europe’. It was superstitious fear of Germany which had led England to wage preventive wars and oppose the ‘good European' Adolf Hitler, who only wished to protect the continent against the menace from the East.
Grimm, who saw himself as the German Rudyard Kipling (while lacking his universal appeal), had struck a literary goldmine in this largely autobiographical and virulently anti-British account of a German settler’s life in British South Africa at the turn of the century. In this classic of‘blood and soil' literature, which was chosen by Hitler's Germany to represent the entire German world of letters at the Chicago World Exhibition of 1936 (no other German work was displayed there), Grimm gave full expression to his obsession with colonial imperialism, with the ‘white man’s burden' and his love-hate resentment towards England.
Quotations:
'The cleanest, most decent, most honest, most efficient and most industrious . . . white nation on earth lives w ithin too narrow frontiers.’
Volk ohne Raum, Hans Grimm