Hans Grimm - Works

Works

Although Grimm’s South African sojourn lasted only fourteen years, from 1897 to 1911, it had a profound effect on him: with few minor exceptions all his literary work - several collections of short stories and novels - is set in Southern Africa. His most famous novel is Volk ohne Raum (1926). The programmatic title "A people without space" indicates Grimm's belief that Germany's problems, exacerbated by defeat in the First World War, were caused by its lack of space at home or in overseas colonies: individuals, and therefore the nation, were unable to develop to their fullest potential. The novel established him as one of Germany’s leading writers and demonstrated clearly his political sympathies with the political Right in Weimar Germany, and the title became a popular slogan of the National Socialist movement. The commercial success of this work – sales of the single volume edition amounted to 500,000 by 1943 - clearly shows the extent to which it struck a chord with German readers in the 1920s and 1930s.

From a strictly literary point of view - and leaving their ideological bias to one side - the most readable of Grimm's works are, however, his Novellen and short stories, in which the discipline imposed by restricted space forces him to abandon the discursive wordiness of Volk ohne Raum (1344 pages in the one-volume edition).