Korfiz Holm

Korfiz Holm (also Corfitz Holm (21 August 1872 – 5 August 1942 was a German publisher, translator and author.

Life Diedrich Heinrich Corfitz/Korfiz Holm was born into a German speaking family in Riga, where his father Diedrich Eduard Holm (1846–95) worked as a railway company director.

Holm attended school at the Gymnasium (secondary school) in Riga. At least one source refers to part of his childhood having been spent in Moscow, but most make no mention of this. If there was a period in Moscow it was almost certainly brief, and probably connected with his father's business as the director of a railway company: by the time his father died, in 1895, Diedrich Holm was in Saratov, a large industrial far to the south of Moscow. Later, when they were all grown up and Holm had joined a publishing business, he intervened to help Mann obtain work with the Munich-based satirical magazine "Simplicissimus".

Holm was already 21 during the early summer of 1894 when, at a slightly older age than was conventional, he passed his "Reifeprüfung" ("Matriculation" - school graduation exam). He enrolled to study for a degree in Jurisprudence at Berlin University. That same year he moved on to the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, intending to stay for a year as part of his degree course. As matters turned out, Munich would remain his home city for the rest of his life, though it is not clear that he ever completed his degree. Langen himself had married the nineteen year-old Dagny Bjørnson Sautreau in 1896, after which it seems that Holm was encouraged to take more responsibility within the business. By 1898 Korfiz Holm had gained his employer's confidence to the point at which he became a "Prokurist", contractually authorised to sign off certain agreements on behalf of Langen's publishing business. During the next few years titles by Heinrich Mann, Henrik Ibsen, Marcel Prévost and Verner von Heidenstam were published. Together, Langen and Holm evidently made formidable team: business was booming. In April 1909, however, Albert Langen died as a deferred consequence of Otitis media. After 1909, Holm managed the business as a trustee ("Kurator" / "Treuhänder").

In 1918

Korfiz Holm died in Munich after a long illness on 5 August 1942.

Works Korfiz Holm was the author of novels, short stories, poems and stage plays. His work can be classified as entertainment literature. He also published several engaging autobiographical volumes and shorter pieces about his childhood and years as a young man in Munich. He also translated works of literature into German from Russian, French and Danish. His translations of Gogol, still regarded as classics of their kind, found a particularly welcoming resonance with critics and readers.

Output (selection) as author

translations into German