Sources
Klee, Ernst: Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945, Frankfurt a.M. 2007, S. 674.
Voit, Friedrich: Karl Wolfskehl. Leben und Werk im Exil, Göttingen 2005.
Karl Wolfskehl (17.9.1869 Darmstadt – 30.6.1948 Bayswater-Auckland/New Zealand)
Writer and translator
Mitglieder des „kosmischen Kreises“, links Karl Wolfskehl, 1902 | StadtAM, Per-Schuler-Alfred-01
Karl Wolfskehl was born into an assimilated Jewish patrician family in Darmstadt. His father Otto Wolfskehl was a lawyer, banker and member of parliament. Karl Wolfskehl studied ancient German studies, history of religion, mythology and archaeology in Giessen, Leipzig and Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1893. In the same year he moved to Munich, where he quickly came into contact with leading artistic circles, joining the George Circle, for example, and becoming co-editor of the journal Blätter für die Kunst – the mouthpiece of the Munich-based Cosmist Circle.
Up until the early 1930s he was one of Munich’s best-known intellectual figures, his home becoming one of the most popular meeting places. His role models included the classical scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen and the philosophers Lazarus Geiger and Friedrich Nietzsche. Wolfskehl took a sober, analytical view of politics: on the very day of Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich Chancellor he went to Italy with his partner Margot Ruben. In 1938, the two emigrated to New Zealand, which Wolfskehl called his ‘Antithule’. He died there in 1948.