Bernard Groethuysen

Bernard Groethuysen (September 9, 1880 – September 17, 1946) was a French writer and philosopher. His works, which transgressed the confines of history and sociology, concern the history of mentalities and representations and the interpretation of the experience of the world. In the interwar period, he made the works of Hölderlin and Kafka and the sociology of Germany available in France.

Bernard Groethuysen was the second child of five. His mother Olga Groloff was part of a family of Russian immigrants. His father, Philipp Groethuysen, was a Dutch physician with a practice in Berlin. The elder Groethuysen suffered from psychiatric ailments, and after 1885 lived in the sanitorium in Baden-Baden where he died in 1900. It was here that the younger Groethuysen completed his primary and secondary studies. He went on to study philosophy and history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

Continuing work on Leibniz, Groethuysen went to Paris in the fall of 1904 where he met André Gide and Jean Paulhan and encountered Charles du Bos, whom he had met in Berlin some time before. Returning each year to the French capital, he became a noteworthy "messenger" between German and French cultures. From 1912, he worked closely with Alix Guillain (1876-1951), a Belgian Communist activist. Both settled in Paris in a small artist's studio on rue Campagne-Première. In February 1915, after war broke out in France, he was interned in Châteauroux at Bitray, a camp reserved for foreign civilians and located in the premises of the insane asylum of the city. His friends Charles Du Bos, Charles Andler and Henri Bergson, petitioned to improve Groethuysen's conditions of detention, and finally persuaded the authorities to let him reside in private accommodations.

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