Hans Grimm's most celebrated work, Volk ohne Raum (People without Space, 1926), brought him both enormous popularity during the 1920s and 1930s and a shrill notoriety in the annals of German literary history since the end of World War II. Although his position in German letters can never be divorced from the emotional impact of that single title, emerging scholarship is beginning to assess much more carefully both his early short fiction chronicling the German colonial experience in South Africa and the voluminous apologia of his postwar essays.

Hans Grimm was born in Wiesbaden on 22 March 1875 to well-to-do, educated parents, Dr. Julius Grimm and Marie Schlumberger Edle von Goldeck Grimm. His father had been both a professor of jurisprudence at the University of Basel and legal counsel for the Austrian railway. A practical man convinced of Germany's prospects as a colonial power, Grimm urged his eldest son to forgo...