Criticism about FPG & FrL
Greve/Grove & Else v. Freytag-Loringhoven

The (German-) Canadian Frederick Philip Grove's (1879-1948) intriguing dual biography is still today, almost sixty years after his death, fairly sketchy. It matches in tempting possibilities perhaps only the mysteries surrounding the (German-) Mexican author B. Traven (18??-1969). Both had published in their mother-tongue, both fled Germany, if at different times and for vastly different reasons,[1] and both resumed publishing from their respective new home countries in the 1920s.

Grove's case is comparatively better documented for the first thirty years of his life: in October 1971, Douglas O. Spettigue made the sensational discovery that Grove had been Felix Paul Greve in Germany. [2] Grove's early life now came quickly under intense scrutiny. Many a bright spotlight fell on his humble origins, his excellent education at the Hamburg Gymnasium Johanneum and the universities of Bonn and Munich, his budding literary career in the orbit of Stefan George's Circle, his entanglement with Else Endell, his sudden arrest and imprisonment, his subsequent achievements as a translator, and his alleged suicide in 1909. But the enigma of when and how exactly Greve had crossed the Atlantic was not to be resolved for nearly another three decades.

As recently as 1992, D. O. Spettigue had remarked with regret both in his introduction to Else von Freytag-Loringhoven's memoirs, where her experience with Greve in Europe and America looms large, and in a seminal article about the scandalous pair in Canadian Literature, that despite assiduous efforts, Greve/Grove's passage to North America had remained elusive.[3] The Canadian literature scholar had already researched a large variety of immigration and passenger lists for his first book on Grove in the late 1960s, [4] sometimes in conjunction with the author's son, Leonard Grove.[5] At that time, however, any search for Grove's European roots was still based on the assumption that FPG had arrived in North American in 1892, and that "Grove" was his real name. While Grove's biographer Desmond Pacey was looking for the elusive ancestral "castle" Thurow in Sweden, Margaret Stobie and Douglas Spettigue followed their hunches that he had issued from Germany. Once, Spettigue even believed that he had solved the riddle: one Erich Grove, a ten-year old boy from Braunschweig, had emigrated to New Orleans via Hamburg and New York on the Columbia with his mother Minna in June 1891. Spettigue's research contact F. Gruhne answered to an inquiry (25.11.1970), if "Erich" might not be an abbreviation for "Frederich," with these words: "Nun haben Sie wieder einen neuen Grove gefunden ... Der Name Erich ist auf keinen Fall eine Abkürzung von Frederich" (6.12.1970).[6]

By a lucky coincidence, the knot of Greve/Grove's passage secret has been unraveled in the year marking the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 1948. By another fortunate confluence of circumstances, it can now be revealed in this Festschrift for Walter Pache, the first German scholar to publish about Greve/Grove from a comparative perspective.[7]

In October 1998, the independent Titanic scholar Bruce Thomson from Winnipeg set out to search the Canadian National Archives in Ottawa with support from the University of Manitoba's Greve/Grove Endowment Fund.[8] He consulted the passenger lists of some forty ships, and found nothing for the period of September, October and November 1909. Not easily discouraged, he worked his way backwards through August, and discovered what he had come to look for in late July.[9]

The following will first describe the rationale behind the search strategy which led to the discovery, with a comparison of Grove's stories about his arrival on the North American continent and the real circumstances leading to Greve's departure in 1909. Then the details of his passage documents will be revealed. The implications of these new facts will then be assessed, together with three summary reports on other recent findings: a baffling Pittsburgh directory entry in 1910; Sparta, Kentucky, as the location of Greve and Else's farming year in 1910/11, and the actual Bonanza Farm near Fargo, North Dakota, where the author briefly resided in 1912. Finally, these only known spotlights on the roughly three years of Greve/Grove's obscure itinerary through America will be viewed as an invitation to a careful re-evaluation of the intricate blending of fact and fiction in his stories.