Palle Rosenkrantz

Palle Rosenkrantz

Palle Adam Vilhelm Rosenkrantz (born April 22, 1867 in Helsingør , Denmark , † October 1, 1941 in Gentofte Kommune , Denmark) was a Danish baron , lawyer , author and translator .

Live and act

Youth and education

Palle Rosenkrantz was the son of Baron Iver Holger Rosenkrantz (1813–1873). It was named after one of his ancestors, Palle Rosenkrantz (* 1587). Although Palle Rosenkrantz comes from the Danish noble family Rosenkrantz, the family was not from the branch to which the ancestral estate belonged, and the children therefore had to grow up in relatively tight economic circumstances. The father died when Palle Rosenkrantz was only six years old, and the mother, Julia Mackenzie of Tarbat (1840-1911), stayed afterwards often with her family, who were of the Scottish Highland ancestry.

The children were mostly raised by servants, and Rosenkrantz never developed a close relationship with his mother. In 1868 the family moved to the civil servants' apartment at Frederiksborg Castle (1870), but in 1870 they moved back to Rungstedgård. Two years later the family moved again, and so it went through Palle Rosenkrantz's entire childhood, a life that he himself called “the nomadic life of my childhood”. Palle Rosenkrantz continued this wandering life into his adult life.

From 1874 to 1875 the children lived in Rome with their mother's sister while the mother was in England. Magister Martinius Galschiøt, literary critic of the Dagbladet newspaper (1851), was the children's teacher during this period. The family then moved back to Copenhagen with their mother. Here Palle Rosenkrantz went to various schools in Copenhagen without success, including the Metropolitan School and the Herlufholm School (1882-1884). He became a student at the Borgerdyd School in 1885 and then did his military service.

In 1887 he began to study law at the University of Copenhagen and in 1891 was cand. Jur. with a mediocre exam. In his memoirs he himself admits that he used most of his student days for "an all too lively student life, carelessness and a pleasure in not always innocent diversions".

Legal activity

He got a job in a law firm in Copenhagen and married on November 11, 1892 the merchant's daughter Edle Christiane Nielsen (1869-1954). In 1893 he was employed as the municipal bailiff in Rødy on Lolland. He later described his experiences there in a semi-biographical manner in the novel Den røde Hane ( The Red Rooster ) from 1908. In 1895 he was promoted to first bailiff for the district of Nørre Herred in Nakskov on Lolland. This period he described in the roman à clef Retsbetjente ( bailiff ) in 1905. There, debuted Palle Rosenkrantz also an author with a concert review in the local newspaper Nakskov Tidende . He also wrote other articles and wrote a local review in which he played all the roles.

As a legal agent, Palle Rosenkrantz handled a very mixed set of duties, from administrative office work to direct detective and investigative work in the area. And when he was appointed district judge in 1897, he helped, among other things, to solve a child murder in Kastager. In the meantime, the family's already dire situation worsened. He had always lived on borrowed money from family and friends and that beyond his means. For example, he built a magnificent apartment with a tower in Nakskov. Rosenkrantz's boss from 1898, the lawyer VA Secher, looked through the accounts and said that Rosenkrantz had misused the funds entrusted to him, and he passed him off in April 1898.

Rosenkrantz returned to Copenhagen, where he was arrested and charged with improper use of public funds. In the meantime, the friends managed to get the missing sum (3,050 crowns) and the charges were dropped. However, he was declared bankrupt with a debt of 70,000 kroner and had no opportunity for a rewarding career as a lawyer due to the scandal.

Author activity

However, he got a modest job in a law firm managing his bankruptcy estate while also starting to write in the evenings to support the family. As a result, he published over 80 books. From 1900 to 1902 he was the main board member at KTAS, the Kopenhagener Telefon AG. He also worked for the newspaper Politiken , translated, wrote plays and radio plays. In 1909 he became a senior court attorney. In the period 1911 to 1925 he also wrote twelve silent film scripts. By the First World War he is said to have been Denmark's most productive and best-selling writer. His newfound success enabled him to build a villa at Hambrosallee 14 in 1908 by the architect HC Andersen. As early as 1917, the nomadic Rosenkrantz moved on to a new villa in the same area at Norgesmindeweg 15, which Andersen was also responsible for. From 1911 to 1915 he was editor of the theater paper Masken and from 1918 to 1923 co-editor of Danske Herregaarde ( Danish manors ). In 1927 and 1928 he published the work Prokuratorerne i Danmark i det 17-19 in two volumes . Aarhundrede ( Lawyers in Denmark from the 17th to 19th centuries ), which describes the development of the legal profession in the period mentioned.

Palle Rosenkrantz is considered to be the author who established the crime thriller as an independent literary genre in Denmark with the novel Hvad Skovsøen gemte (1903).

Several of Rosenkrantz's books have been influenced by social criticism . In addition to his authorship, he took part in the public debate and gave lectures for a reform of the Danish criminal justice system, especially for a separation of judicial power and prosecution, which was not carried out before 1919, and for a reform of the investigation process at that time. In addition to his personal experiences as a lawyer, which gave him insights into a corrupt judicial system, it was his involvement in another process that gave the starting shot for his political commitment through literature.

As a friend of mine, he had agreed to testify on a case about a missing check, but when he appeared in court he was treated very condescendingly by the prosecutor, the lawyer Axel Petersen. That ended with Petersen accusing Rosenkrantz of theft, even though he hadn't been anywhere near the place. This was later verified and the charges dropped, but Rosenkrantz felt that he had been humiliated by an arrogant and randomized legal system for no reason. This coincided with the fact that he was in contact with the supporters of the modern breakthrough of the time, wrote for politics and was known to Georg Brandes , who had written the foreword for his beautiful literary debut Fruen paa Havreholm from 1899, and Edvard Brandes . The slogan for Brandes' naturalistic literary direction was that it should bring problems up for debate, something Rosenkrantz fulfilled in many of his books, which were otherwise written primarily to feed his family.

The first result of this was the dramatic sketch En Tilstaaelse ( Ein Geständnis ), which was printed in Ludvig Mylius-Erichsen's magazine VAGEN in 1899, and which was later expanded and reworked into a real play that premiered in the Dagmartheater on April 8, 1900 . The play is about how an innocent man is pressured by a harsh legal system to confess a crime he did not commit. The piece was widely discussed in the press because of its problem.

In addition, Rosenkrantz was a journalist at the Reichstag and wrote biographical portraits of the elected representatives.

Works

(Selection)

Detective novels

• Hvad skovsøen gemte (1903)
• Det tredie skud (1904)
• Official cathedral Sterner (1906)
• Amy's Kat (1907)
• Barberkniven (1907)

Autobiography

• Billeder fra min Barndom (1917)
• Junkerdrømme (1918)
• Tre Aar paa Herlufsholm (1927)
• Tredive Aar paa det danske Parnas (1927)

Specialist literature

• Den danske Regering og Rigsdag 1901: Biografier og Portrætter. Dansk Grafisk Forlag 1901–1903. The book contains biographies of the members of the Reichstag in 1901 and is available in digital form from Google Books
• Prokuratorerne i Danmark i det 17th and 18th Aarhundrede: 1683–1810: Bidrag til den danske Prokuratorstands Historie I. Gyldendal 1927.
• Prokuratorerne i Danmark i det 19. Aarhundrede: 1810–1868: 2. del af Bidrag til den danske Prokuratorstands history. Gyldendal 1928.
• Den danske Regering og Rigsdag 1903–1934. Arthur Jensens Forlag 1934.
• Office man's bow. Portraits and biographers of Stiftamtmænd and Amtmænd i Danmark 1660–1935. Arthur Jensens Forlag 1936.

See also

• Palle Rosenkrantz Prize

Remarks

1. ^ Palle Rosenkrantz: Billeder fra min Barndom. Gyldendal, 1917, p. 16.
2. ↑ Palle Rosenkrantz: Tredive Aar paa det danske Parnas. Steen Hasselbalchs Forlag, 1927, p. 7.

literature

• Benni Bødker: The criminal baron. En efterscript. In: Palle Rosenkrantz: Kriminalnoveller. Cicero, 2003, ISBN 87-7714-640-9 . (The most thorough text to date on Rosenkrantz and his writing.)

Web links

Commons : Palle Rosenkrantz  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Works by Palle Rosenkrantz in the Gutenberg-DE project
• Palle Rosenkrantz gravsted