Hans Herbert Grimm was born in 1896 in the Saxon city of Altenburg. He participated in the First World War and subsequently worked as a teacher of German, Spanish and French.
In order not to lose his job, he published the novel that would make him famous, History and Misadventures of the Unknown Soldier Schlump, under a pseudonym. It was not a revolutionary book, but a pacifist one, published by a left-wing Jewish publisher, Kurt Wolff, in which nationalist pathos was ridiculed. When the Nazis came to power, they burned all copies of the book, which was considered anti-German, but the author managed to hide a copy on a wall without revealing his identity to anyone. After the war, the authorities of the newly created East Germany did not allow Grimm to continue working as a teacher, despite the fact that his students testified in his favor, arguing that he taught values ​​of tolerance and spoke of books banned during the war. None of that helped. Not even his status as the author of Schlump, a circumstance that could have helped him for the first time and returned him to his precious life as a teacher. In the summer of 1950, the authorities ordered his transfer to Weimar. No one knows what was discussed there. Grimm never said a single word about it. But two days after his return from Weimar, on July 7, 1950, he took his own life while his wife was shopping. History and misadventures of the unknown soldier Schlump would continue missing for more than eighty years, until Volker Weidermann, an expert in books burned by the Nazis, recovered the only copy that Grimm, at the time, walled up hoping that posterity would do him justice.