Jean Rivard - University of British Columbia

Grève
Exit
There must have been additional cause besides Kilian's absence from the
funeral and the failure to write an apology for him to be summarily
expelled. Either his behaviour was simply the last straw in the accumulation
of previous misbehaviour (nowhere mentioned), or he was under a far
darker cloud in connection with the Lomberg case. The Rhenus log remains
curiously silent. I have little doubt that there was a secret to be kept.
However, one of the next entries in the Rhenus journal, the one for
January 19,1901, when read in connection with the occurrences of a few
weeks before, is both laconic and eloquent in what it does not say: "Our
erstwhile member Grève has been granted his request to leave." There is not
a word of regret, no mention of his spectacular achievements for himself
and the unprecedented recognition he had won for the club almost exactly
a year before. The Lomberg affair had ended in sentimental funeral oratory.
The mystery of his death was allowed to remain unsolved. It was as if all
those in the know had formed a conspiracy of silence. Had there been an
unwritten agreement—the less said, the sooner mended—to part ways with
no damage to the reputation of either Rhenus or its three former members,
easily the flower of the "foxes" of April, 1898? Of these, one was dead, and
two departed. The sentence granting Felix Grève his request to leave, however,
is not the last we hear of him in the annals of the ARC Rhenus.
Mention of him in his various capacities as sportsman and Rhenus official
are made repeatedly throughout the following decades. That his actual
name tends to be omitted in later Rhenus records may be due not only to
his trial for fraud, on May 29,1903, but also to the occurrences of
November, 1900. There is not a word in the Rhenus records concerning
Greve's public disgrace. Indeed, his name is so extensively erased, he might
as well have died in February, 1901.
Coda
In closing, I think it not enough to view young FPG merely as part of a
small avant-garde coterie of possibly homosexual young artists and poets
determined to imitate the "master," Stefan George. It also will not do to
limit our reading of Greve's years in Bonn as an anticipation of his later
fraudulence. The young man who allowed himself and his single scull to be
called Nixe was also an exceptional athlete, a tremendously gifted and efficient
scholar with singular powers of concentration and an unusual capac-