Hermann von Wedderkop

Hermann von Wedderkop (1875–1956), also known as Weddo, was a German writer, translator and editor of the art magazine Der Querschnitt.^[1]

He was born into the von Wedderkop family, which belonged to the German nobility. His father, Magnus von Wedderkop, was a judge and chamberlain in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg. His mother was Elisabeth Post, a great-granddaughter of the mayor of Bremen Liborius Diederich Post. In honour of her grandfather Albert Hermann von Post, he also used the pseudonym ‘Hermann Albert Post’, which was registered by the Reichsschrifttumskammer, a subdivision of the Reich Chamber of Culture. Von Wedderkop played the piano from the age of four.

At the age of 19, Hermann von Wedderkop graduated from the Grand Ducal Grammar School in Eutin. On 1 April 1895, he joined the ‘Grand Duke of Saxony’ (5th Thuringian) Infantry Regiment No. 94 in Weimar as an avantageur. He became a lieutenant there, but had to resign in 1899 due to a heart condition. He went on to study law at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, the Kiel University and the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where his teachers included Franz von Liszt and Heinrich Dernburg, among others.

In addition to law, he also studied art history and archaeology. On 6 September 1912, he entered the civil service as a trainee lawyer and worked at the district courts in Altona and Berlin. He then headed the district court in Mölln, Schleswig-Holstein, and later became a government assessor in Cologne.

In 1907 he met the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim in Paris, who gave him his first artistic impulses and later recruited him for his gallery magazine Der Querschnitt. Between September 1909 to July 1910 he worked as a trainee at the private bank Alfred Gans et Cie in Paris. On 1 September 1911, Wedderkop was appointed deputy chairman of the income tax assessment commission in Cologne and retired from the judiciary. In 1912 he wrote an exhibition guide for the Sonderbund in Cologne. By 1 July 1913, he was appointed acting chairman of the commission, and from 1 August 1914 he was chairman of the commission.

During World War I, Wedderkop became an orderly officer to the district governor of Brussels and, from 2 September 1915, a civil commissioner of the German occupation administration to the imperial district governor in Brussels. There, at La Hulpe, he met the writer Carl Sternheim and Gottfried Benn, who was ‘experimenting’ with cocaine as a hospital doctor at the time and thus incurred the displeasure of the administrative officer Wedderkop. Benn later accused him of having an equally disavowing affair with the 20 years younger and later decidedly ‘anti-German’ young actress Yvonne George. From 3 May 1917, Wedderkop became a government councillor in Cologne. From 1 October 1919, he was head of the state tax office in Jülich. He retired at his own request on 1 July 1921 to devote himself to his literary work.

At the beginning of the 1920s, Wedderkop was a member of the advisory committee of the artists' association Das Junge Rheinland. In the series Junge Kunst published by Verlag Klinkhardt and Biermann Leipzig, he published the volumes on Paul Klee (1920) and Marie Laurencin (1921). From 1921 he was an employee of the Der Querschnitt. As editor, Wedderkop succeeded in making Der Querschnitt into the leading German Zeitgeist magazine of the 1920s: open to the artistic avant-garde, such as Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall and Fernand Léger, and in addition to the heroes of boxing, ironically elitist and artistic photos of male and female nude models.

In Ernest Hemingway's posthumous memoirs "A Moveable Feast", Wedderkop is mentioned as a purchaser of his works and described as "awfully nice". Wedderkop's removal as chief editor in 1929 by the Ullstein Verlag, and from his editor's post there in May 1931, is said to have had something to do with his publicistic enthusiasm for Benito Mussolini, according to Wilmont Haacke. Wedderkop visited Mussolini on May 5 and October 10, 1930, and on May 28, 1935. He spent most of the period of Nazi Germany in Italy. Wedderkop's book Deutsche Graphik des Westens was placed on the list of harmful and undesirable literature by the Reichsschrifttumkammer in 1938.

Wedderkop rejected the "old literature" by Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, pressing instead for the social novel. In 1927, he published a corresponding autobiographically colored novel with Adieu Berlin. The book, set in the North Sea resort of Kampen, did not receive much attention.

More success came with his alternative travel books for Cologne, Düsseldorf, and Bonn (1928), Paris (1929), London and Rome (1930) and Oberitalien (1931), published by Piper Verlag in the series Was nicht im ″Baedeker″ steht. After 1938, Wedderkop appeared as the translator of the motivational trainer and author Dale Carnegie, later co-authored in German editions. Wedderkop also translated into German Et in Arcadia ego by the Italian writer Emilio Cecchi.

• Der Rhein von den Alpen bis zum Meere (1931)
• Sizilien, schicksal einer insel (1940)
• Die falsche Note; ein Musikroman (1940)