Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Grève
Figure 5- View of the interior of the boathouse's second floor with the main assembly
hall and the library at the back. On the left-hand wall two of Greve's gifts to the club are
on display, the tall crystal goblet and, framed, one of the two "rubbings by Mack" showing
Castle Liechtenstein. Robert von Kraft's gift of his collection of Malayan kris is on
display on the wall to the right of the door. The frieze of members' photos may be seen
along the top of the panelling covering the lower portions of both walls.
on the island of Java, not far from Batavia" (ISM 154). Grove later ascribed
to the fictive "Van der Eist" (elsewhere he mentions a certain "von Els" as
one of "the parasitic young men in Europe" he claimed to have met; see SFA
40), the real Indonesian setting described by Kraft, while he depicted
"Jacobsen" as owning Kraft's collection of kris. Much as the Bootshaus may
have supplied Grove with the architecture of his "Castle Thurow," and at
least three of the Rhenus members—Kraft, Thiel, and Kilian—supplied Grove
with "family connections" and tales of travels in southeast Asia. These stories
possibly also involved accounts of Kraft's travels to southeast Asia by way of
Siberia, passing through Omsk, Semipalatinsk, arriving at "Nikolayevsk,
which, at the time, was almost an Arctic port," followed by the "long voyage
home," from southeast Asia, "via Java, the Malay Peninsula, two or three
Indian cities, the Red Sea, and the familiar Mediterranean" (ISM 149-155),
then, we might add, past Gibraltar and into the English Channel to land
safely in Rotterdam, 400 km downriver from Bonn, after which Kraft's
"Rotterdam Estate" was named. It was Rotterdam where Greve's and several
of Rhenus' boats had been built to order. It was well known to him. Did
Grève, in 1909, leave Europe from there? We should note here that another
poet, the then much admired Maximilian Dauthendey, actually went to
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