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:
“Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man’s training begins, its probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“The further through life I drift
The more obvious it becomes that I am lacking in thrift.”
—Ogden Nash (1902–1971)
“By an application of the theory of relativity to the taste of readers, to-day in Germany I am called a German man of science, and in England I am represented as a Swiss Jew. If I come to be regarded as a bête noire the descriptions will be reversed, and I shall become a Swiss Jew for the Germans and a German man of science for the English!”
—Albert Einstein (1879–1955)
“In times like ours, where the growing complexity of life leaves us barely the time to read the newspapers, where the map of Europe has endured profound rearrangements and is perhaps on the brink of enduring yet others, where so many threatening and new problems appear everywhere, you will admit it may be demanded of a writer that he be more than a fine wit who makes us forget in idle and byzantine discussions on the merits of pure form ...”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)