Franziska Reventlow

Franziska Reventlow

Franziska, countess of Reventlow, was born in Husum, in northern Germany, in 1871, the daughter of Prussian aristocrats. Very rebellious from his childhood and youth, as he tells in this novel, he soon distanced himself from his family, part of which would later join Adolf Hitler's Nazi party. In 1893 she settled in Munich, where she worked as a translator from French and author of small satirical articles and jokes for newspapers and magazines. She lived in the midst of the bohemia of that city, she was active in the feminist movement, she had several lovers, she married Walter Lubke, she divorced him, she had a son, she fell in love with men and women, she defended sexual freedom and the abolition of marriage. She was friends with the writers Theodor Lessing and Rainer Maria Rilke, who, among others, financed the publication of their novels, always autobiographical. He traveled through half of Europe, settled in Switzerland in 1910 and remarried, this time for convenience, with Baron Alexander von Rechenberg-Linten, as he tells in The Money Complex, published by Peripheral. He died in 1918 in a Locarno clinic after a bicycle accident. Already during the 1960s, in Germany, she was recovered and acclaimed as "grandmother of the hippies" and cult author.