12 Facts About Rudolf Huch

Rudolf Huch was a Brazilian- born German jurist, essayist and author, primarily of satirical novels and short stories.

Rudolf Huch was born in Porto Alegre, but spent most of his childhood and indeed of his adult life in and around the Braunschweig region of Germany.

At the time of his birth his father, Richard Huch was running a wholesale importing business in Brazil which he had acquired following the death of an older brother.

However, when Rudolf Huch was approximately eighteen months old the family returned to Germany, and it was here, in Braunschweig, that the child grew up and attended school, while his father pursued his business career, trading in "colonial goods" from, in particular, Brazil.

The younger sister of Rudolf Huch, the author-historian Ricarda Octavia Huch, by whose career his own was always, to some extent, overshadowed, was born in Braunschweig in 1864.

Rudolf Huch remained in Braunschweig for some months, employed as a "Gerichtsassessor", but the bankruptcy of his father's business ruled out any immediate possibility of a career in the government justice service.

Rudolf Huch then relocated in 1888 to nearby Wolfenbuttel, where he lived until 1897, working as a lawyer and notary.

Rudolf Huch's work betrays an underlying pessimism and melancholy, possibly driven by a belief that as a writer he would always be overshadowed by more confident relatives who would leave their own larger footprints on literary history.

Rudolf Huch found wider prominence with his aphoristic volume "Mehr Goethe", published in 1899, which he described as "a high spirited cavalry charge against the diverse literary nonsenses of modern life".

Rudolf Huch railed against the nineteenth century revival of Naturalism and took delight in deriding its manifestations on the theatre stage.

Rudolf Huch himself was particularly conscious of his self-appointed role as an heir to Wilhelm Raabe, describing himself on at least one occasion as a "Romantiker von Geblut".

In October 1933 Rudolf Huch's was one of 87 signatures on the infamous proclamation of loyalty to Adolf Hitler from German writers, which appeared in the Vossische Zeitung.