(The story takes place a few years after the First World W...)
The story takes place a few years after the First World War in the noble milieu on a farm in southwestern Germany. There lives Baron Moritz von Luttring with his wife Tina and his stepmother Eugenie. They receive a visit from Baron Konstantin von Schenius, who seduced Moritz's sister Steffie, after which she was divorced and now wants to marry her. The conservative Luttrings Schenius appears as a windy character with whom they would rather not be related. In a subplot Luttring wants to dismiss his estate manager, because the betrayed by his wife and thus lost his reputation among the employees. Luttring says that in the past a seducer "got his blade or the dog whip", but now one was "a hopeless sex" and could no longer say no. Luttring rejects Schenius advertising for the sister, because he could not provide for their maintenance, and he could not be employed for lack of work experience on Luttrings goods. Schenius avenges his rejection by seducing Luttring's wife Tina.
(Among books about flowers and gardening, The Passionate G...)
Among books about flowers and gardening, The Passionate Gardener is a rare and exemplary hybrid. Part essay, part handbook, part treatise, part quest, it is presented with the practiced eye of a naturalist, the disciplined understanding of a philosopher, and the inspiration of a poet.
Rudolf Borchardt was a German translator, writer, author and poet. His writings - both fictional and scholarly - are still being brought out in new editions.
Background
Rudolf Borchardt was born on June 9, 1877, in Königsberg, East Prussia (now Russian Federation). He was the son of Robert Martin, tea importer, and Rosa (Bernstein) Borchardt.
Borchardt’s early years seemed to presage a brilliant literary career. He grew up in a multilingual home, where Russian, French, and German were spoken by both parents.
Education
Borchardt's early education was handled by a private tutor, with whose help he eventually qualified to attend the French Gymnasium in Berlin. A succession of boarding schools followed, leading to his eventual enrollment at the University of Berlin (1895). There he commenced his studies in oriental and classical languages.
Borchardt feared that his thorough training in the German classics was regarded as provincial at Berlin, he soon transferred to Bonn and transferred again, two years later, to the University of Gottingen to study classical philology. In 1896, while still a student at Bonn, he published his first collection of poetry. More a scholar than an academic by nature, Borchardt left the university before completing his doctorate.
Intrigued by the writings of certain contemporary scholars, most notably Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Borchardt embarked upon a career as a freelance writer of poetry, seeking to develop a synthesis of original thought but cognizant of classical forms and sources. During this period, Borchardt began traveling beyond the borders of Germany, visiting Hofmannsthal in Switzerland in 1902. The results of that meeting upon Borchardt’s literary development were profound and led to Borchardt’s writing of a series of essays on the subject of his friend and mentor’s works. It also marked the beginning of Borchardt’s career as an orator, speaking on the subject of evolving poetic principles, largely influenced by Hofmannsthal’s own work. He gave a talk on Hofmannsthal at Gottingen later that year.
In 1903, Borchardt made his first journey to Italy, where he would settle for the next four years. There he began writing prose. These first fictional efforts were allegorical in style and strongly poetic in language. Borchardt interrupted his pleasant interlude in Italy to return to Germany for the publication of the book Hesperus, on which he had the collaborative assistance of Hofmannsthal and Rudolf Alexander Shroeder, who ran a journal called Insel. Military service for Germany during World War I also kept Borchardt tied to his home country. During the war, he served first as a soldier, later in the intelligence division, and gave speeches in which he advocated the imposition of Germanic order on all of European culture.
With the war’s end, Borchardt resumed his literary career. The death of a friend, Eberhard von Bodenhausen, inspired a new story, “The Meeting with the Dead Man,” another allegorical tale but one that quickly shifts to a dialog that explores the opposition of the living and the dead.
In 1921, Borchardt returned to Italy, driven out of Germany by the economic crash. 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: For Contemporary Tales (1929), which found a fairly large audience.
In the early 1930s, he wrote his only full-length novel. As the political situation in Germany worsened and the Weimar Republic grew ever weaker, Borchardt continued his political writings, many of which displayed strong fascist overtones.
His self-imposed exile in Italy could not make him safe, given the alliance between Hitler and the Mussolini regime. He managed to stay at least nominally at liberty until nearly the end of the war, but then his luck ran out. He and his family were ordered to return to Germany under armed guard. They managed to escape their Gestapo captors, but while in hiding in the Brenner Pass he succumbed to the exhaustion of his desperate flight and died on January 10, 1945.
For a long time, Borchardt’s writings were out of print, at first suppressed in Germany by the Nazi regime and then simply forgotten with the passage of time. However, there has been something of a renaissance in scholarly interest in his work.
During the 1930s, much of Borchardt's writings had strong fascist overtones, but ultimately became strongly anti-Nazi with the rise of the Third Reich.
He became an outspoken proponent for strong leadership - even dictatorship - an ultimately ironic position. With the rise of the Nazis and Hitler, Borchardt got his dictatorial leader - but as a prominent Jewish intellectual, he was a target of the Gestapo.
Views
Borchardt dealt with the age-old conflict between spirit and matter, between idealism and materialism, and he ultimately celebrated the poetic spirit.
Personality
Borchardt was an avid reader at a very young age. One of his first memories was having to stop reading in order to be shown to guests at one of the many parties given by his parents. He was also a fine, although not excellent, scholar.
Quotes from others about the person
“It is doubtful that his reputation as a fiction writer will continue to grow. His writings are as stubbornly idiosyncratic as their author. They may be read-only on their own terms.”
“The talk, of astounding erudition and eloquence for a man of twenty-four, was the beginning of Borchardt’s career as a public speaker. Borchardt’s later public talks drew large crowds enthralled by his charismatic speaking style.”
Connections
In 1906, Borchardt married Karoline Ehrmann, a painter, but they divorced, in 1919. Borchardt married Marie Luise Voigt the same year. The couple had four children.