Frederick Philip Grove - Early Life in Germany & Europe

Early Life in Germany & Europe

He was born Felix Paul Greve in Radomno, West Prussia, but was brought up in Hamburg where he graduated with the "Abitur" from the famous Gymnasium Johanneum in 1898. After studying Classical Languages & Archaeology in Bonn, he became a prolific translator of World Literature and a minor literary figure in Stefan George's group, the George-Kreis, around 1900. During his year in Munich, he courted Karl Wolfskehl, and briefly shared an address with Thomas Mann at the Pension Gisels in Aug./Sept. 1902.
In early 1903, he "eloped" with Else Endell, wife of his friend August Endell, the well-known Jugendstil architect, to Palermo. He was imprisoned in Bonn in 1903-04 for having defrauded another friend, Herman Kilian, whose Anglo-German ancestry he would later appropriate for himself in his Canadian autobiographies.
From 1904 to early 1906, when he returned to Berlin, he lived with Else in voluntary exile, first in Wollerau, Switzerland, then in Paris-Plage, France, from where paid H. G. Wells a few visits in his Sandhurst villa just across the Channel.

Read more about this topic:  Frederick Philip Grove

Famous quotes containing the words early, life, germany and/or europe:

    Even today . . . experts, usually male, tell women how to be mothers and warn them that they should not have children if they have any intention of leaving their side in their early years. . . . Children don’t need parents’ full-time attendance or attention at any stage of their development. Many people will help take care of their needs, depending on who their parents are and how they chose to fulfill their roles.
    Stella Chess (20th century)

    For me, the principal fact of life is the free mind. For good and evil, man is a free creative spirit. This produces the very queer world we live in, a world in continuous creation and therefore continuous change and insecurity. A perpetually new and lively world, but a dangerous one, full of tragedy and injustice. A world in everlasting conflict between the new idea and the old allegiances, new arts and new inventions against the old establishment.
    Joyce Cary (1888–1957)

    If my theory of relativity is proven correct, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
    Albert Einstein (1879–1955)

    Well then! Wagner was a revolutionary—he fled the Germans.... As an artist one has no home in Europe outside Paris: the délicatesse in all five artistic senses that is presupposed by Wagner’s art, the fingers for nuances, the psychological morbidity are found only in Paris. Nowhere else is this passion in questions of form to be found, this seriousness in mise en scène—which is Parisian seriousness par excellence.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)