Ricarda Huch (July 18, 1864 - November 17, 1947) was a pioneering German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 intellectual. Trained as a historian, and the author of many works of European history, she also wrote novel

Novel

A novel is a book of long narrative in literary prose. The genre has historical roots both in the fields of the medieval and early modern romance and in the tradition of the novella. The latter supplied the present generic term in the late 18th century....

s, poems, and a play. Asteroid

Asteroid

Asteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...

 879 Ricarda

879 Ricarda

-External links:*...

 is named in her honour.

Life

Huch was born in Braunschweig

Braunschweig

Braunschweig , is a city of 247,400 people, located in the federal-state of Lower Saxony, Germany. It is located north of the Harz mountains at the farthest navigable point of the Oker river, which connects to the North Sea via the rivers Aller and Weser....

 and died in Schönberg in the Taunus

Taunus

The Taunus is a low mountain range in Hesse, Germany that composes part of the Rhenish Slate Mountains. It is bounded by the river valleys of Rhine, Main and Lahn. On the opposite side of the Rhine, the mountains are continued by the Hunsrück...

 (today, part of Kronberg

Kronberg im Taunus

Kronberg im Taunus is a town in the Hochtaunuskreis district, Hesse, Germany. Before 1866, it was in the Duchy of Nassau; in that year the whole Duchy was absorbed into Prussia. Kronberg lies at the foot of the Taunus, flanked in the north and southwest by forests...

). 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

Zürich

Zurich is the largest city in Switzerland and the capital of the canton of Zurich. It is located in central Switzerland at the northwestern tip of Lake Zurich...

, 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

Bremen

The City Municipality of Bremen is a Hanseatic city in northwestern Germany. A commercial and industrial city with a major port on the river Weser, Bremen is part of the Bremen-Oldenburg metropolitan area . Bremen is the second most populous city in North Germany and tenth in Germany.Bremen is...

, where she taught German and history. She later moved to Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 and in 1898, she married Ermanno Ceconi, an Italian dentist. She moved to his Italian homeland of Trieste

Trieste

Trieste is a city and seaport in northeastern Italy. It is situated towards the end of a narrow strip of land lying between the Adriatic Sea and Italy's border with Slovenia, which lies almost immediately south and east of the city...

 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

Machtergreifung

Machtergreifung is a German word meaning "seizure of power". It is normally used specifically to refer to the Nazi takeover of power in the democratic Weimar Republic on 30 January 1933, the day Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany, turning it into the Nazi German dictatorship.-Term:The...

 and began purging the Academy. Huch left after Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin was a German expressionist novelist, best known for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz .- 1878–1918:...

 quit. Despite her critical attitude to the new régime, Joseph Goebbels

Joseph Goebbels

Paul Joseph Goebbels was a German politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945. As one of Adolf Hitler's closest associates and most devout followers, he was known for his zealous oratory and anti-Semitism...

 and Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler

Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...

 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 First German Writers Congress in Berlin.

Perspectives

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

 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

Clive James

Clive James, AM is an Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet and memoirist, best known for his autobiographical series Unreliable Memoirs, for his chat shows and documentaries on British television and for his prolific journalism...

 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

Germaine Greer

Germaine Greer is an Australian writer, academic, journalist and scholar of early modern English literature, widely regarded as one of the most significant feminist voices of the later 20th century....

. He reminds readers that she educated at the University of Zurich

University of Zurich

The University of Zurich , located in the city of Zurich, is the largest university in Switzerland, with over 25,000 students. It was founded in 1833 from the existing colleges of theology, law, medicine and a new faculty of philosophy....

, 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

Thirty Years' War

The Thirty Years' War was fought primarily in what is now Germany, and at various points involved most countries in Europe. It was one of the most destructive conflicts in European history....

. 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

Prussian Academy of Arts

The Prussian Academy of Arts was an art school set up in Berlin, Brandenburg, in 1694/1696 by prince-elector Frederick III, in personal union Duke Frederick I of Prussia, and later king in Prussia. It had a decisive influence on art and its development in the German-speaking world throughout its...

, and wrote to composer Max von Schillings

Max von Schillings

Max von Schillings was a German conductor, composer and theatre director. He was chief conductor at the Berlin State Opera from 1919 to 1925....

, president of the Prussian Academy, asserting that the Nazi concept of Germanness was not her Germanness. She then retired to private life in Jena

Jena

Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...

 (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

July 20 Plot

On 20 July 1944, an attempt was made to assassinate Adolf Hitler, Führer of the Third Reich, inside his Wolf's Lair field headquarters near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The plot was the culmination of the efforts of several groups in the German Resistance to overthrow the Nazi-led German government...

 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

Benito Mussolini

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was an Italian politician who led the National Fascist Party and is credited with being one of the key figures in the creation of Fascism....

's and Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Bakunin

Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin was a well-known Russian revolutionary and theorist of collectivist anarchism. He has also often been called the father of anarchist theory in general. Bakunin grew up near Moscow, where he moved to study philosophy and began to read the French Encyclopedists,...

’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
  Epistolary novel
  An epistolary novel is a novel written as a series of documents. The usual form is letters, although diary entries, newspaper clippings and other documents are sometimes used. Recently, electronic "documents" such as recordings and radio, blogs, and e-mails have also come into use...
  
  , 1910)
• Das Leben des Grafen Federigo Confalonieri (1910)
• Der große Krieg in Deutschland. Three volumes (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)
• Gesammelte Gedichte (1929)
• Deutsche Geschichte (1934–1949)
• Frühling in der Schweiz, Jugenderinnerungen (1938)
• Herbstfeuer (1944)
• Urphänomene (1946)

Books about Huch

• E. A. Regener (1904) Ricarda Huch, eine Studie. Leipzig.
• Elfriede Gottlieb (1914) Ricarda Huch, ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Epik.