Ricarda Huch

Ricarda Huch by Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski

Ricarda Huch (German: [huχ]; July 18, 1864 – November 17, 1947) was a pioneering German intellectual. Trained as an historian, and the author of many works of European history, she also wrote novels, poems, and a play. Asteroid 879 Ricarda is named in her honour.

Life

Ricarda Huch; 1916, by Paul Peterich, sculptor, 1864–1937

Huch was born in Braunschweig and died in Schönberg in the Taunus (today, part of Kronberg). She was the daughter of Richard Huch, a wholesale merchant, and his wife Emilie (née Haehn). She also used the pseudonym Richard Hugo and published her first poems under the alias R. Ith Carda. She prepared for university work privately and studied in Zürich, where she received her doctorate in 1891. Her brother, Rudolf, and her cousins, Friedrich and Felix, were also well-known writers.

Huch studied philosophy, history and philology at Zürich University, as women were not then eligible for degrees at German universities. In 1890, she was one of the first women to attain a doctorate from Zurich with a dissertation on "The neutrality of the Confederation during the Spanish War of Succession" (Die Neutralität der Eidgenossenschaft während des spanischen Erbfolgekrieges). Shortly after attaining her doctorate, she published poetry under the alias of Richard Hugo. After working as a librarian, Huch left for Bremen, where she taught German and history. She later moved to Vienna and in 1898, she married Ermanno Ceconi, an Italian dentist. She moved to his Italian homeland of Trieste for several years, where they had a daughter, but they divorced in 1906. She later married her brother-in-law and cousin, the writer Richard Huch.

Huch was a member of the "Preußische Akademie der Künste", but resigned in 1933 when the National Socialists seized power and began purging the Academy. Huch left after Alfred Döblin quit. Despite her critical attitude to the new régime, Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler sent her congratulatory telegrams on her 80th birthday. Huch dedicated much of her life to Italian, German and Russian history and historical novels that were psychological biographies. In 1947, she was an honorary president of the All-German Writers Congress in Berlin.

Perspectives

Thomas Mann called her "The First Lady of Germany".

Ricarda Huch was not well known in the English-speaking world until the Australian critic and man of letters Clive James devoted pp. 328–33 of his 2007 Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts to her. He called her the First Lady of German humanism and as a bridging figure between Germaine de Stael and Germaine Greer. He reminds readers that she was educated at the University of Zurich, from which she was one of the first women to graduate, because in her day, German universities did not allow women to be candidates for degrees. He describes her gift for talking about the powerless as if they had the importance of the powerful, as shown in her book about the Thirty Years' War. According to James, when the Nazis came to power in 1933, they sought to recruit her into the party or at least “co-opt her prestige” but she declined to cooperate. She resigned as the first woman ever elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts and wrote to composer Max von Schillings, president of the Prussian Academy, asserting that the Nazi concept of Germanness (Deutschtum) was not her Germanness. She then retired to private life in Jena (she turned 69 in 1933), effectively going into internal exile.

After the war, Huch wrote as follows about the young men involved in the July 20 Plot against Hitler's life:

“To save Germany was not granted to them; only to die for it; luck was not with them, it was with Hitler. But they did not die in vain. Just as we need air if we are to breathe, and light if we are to see, so we need noble people if we are to live” (Ricarda Huch, "Für die Märtyrer der Freiheit," March/April 1946, cited in Briefe an die Freunde, p. 449, as quoted in James p. 329).

The Third Reich tacitly tolerated Huch's contempt for it as long as she was not too vocal about her opinions. James contrasts this silence with Huch’s younger, rebel years, when she intellectually admired Benito Mussolini's and Mikhail Bakunin’s anarchist origins. He describes how Huch stole her sister's husband and otherwise treated men and suitors in a manner that was stunning given her place and time. James believes this rebel attitude never died, as evidenced by the fact that she wrote with delight about the first air raid she experienced, in June 1943. Although 79 at the time, she enjoyed the destroyed buildings and rubble.

Books by Huch

Erinnerungen von Ludolf Ursleu dem Jüngeren (1893)
Fra Celeste (1899)
Die Blütezeit der Romantik (1899)
Ausbreitung und Verfall der Romantik (1902)
Aus der Triumphgasse (1902)
Vita somnium breve (1903. Title after 1913: Michael Unger)
Von den Königen und der Krone (1904)
Die Geschichten von Garibaldi (1906)
Menschen und Schicksale aus dem Risorgimento (1908)
Der letzte Sommer (epistolary novel, 1910)
Das Leben des Grafen Federigo Confalonieri (1910)
Der große Krieg in Deutschland. Three volumes (1912 - 1914)
Natur und geist als die Wurzeln des Lebens und der Kunst (1914)
Wallenstein (1915)
Das Judengrab (1916)
Luthers Glaube (1916)
Der Fall Deruga (courtroom drama, 1917)
Der Sinn der Heiligen Schrift (1919)
Michael Bakunin und die Anarchie (1923)
Im alten Reich (1927)
Gesammelte Gedichte (1929)
Deutsche Geschichte (1934–1949)
Frühling in der Schweiz, Jugenderinnerungen (1938)
Herbstfeuer (1944)
Urphänomene (1946)

References

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The Riverside Dictionary of Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Excerpts from criticism of the works of novelists, poets, playwrights, short story writers, and other creative writers who died between 1900 and 1960, from the first published critical appraisals to current evaluations. Volume 13. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. Biography contains portrait.
Women in World History. A biographical encyclopedia. Seventeen volumes. Waterford, CT: Yorkin Publications, 1999-2002. Use the Index in vol. 17 to locate biographies. Biography contains portrait.

External links

Media related to Ricarda Huch at Wikimedia Commons
Works by Ricarda Huch at Project Gutenberg
Works by or about Ricarda Huch at Internet Archive

German language literature

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Authority control	WorldCat Identities VIAF: 24602873 LCCN: n50029208 ISNI: 0000 0001 0879 2522 GND: 118554190 SELIBR: 241800 SUDOC: 030976510 BNF: cb11907908s (data) HDS: 11964 NDL: 00522759 NKC: jn20000603066 BNE: XX1313362

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