Hugo Salus

Hugo Salus (3 August 1866 – 4 February 1929) was a German-Czech medical doctor, writer and poet.

Life

Salus was born in Česká Lípa, Bohemia, Austrian Empire on 3 August 1866. He studied medicine in Prague and established a practice in gynaecology there from 1895 onwards. Apart from his professional activities as a doctor, he published numerous volumes of poetry and short stories, and was one of the more important exponents of German-Jewish literature in the Prague of his day, moving in a circle which included younger figures of the stature of Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Franz Werfel, Egon Erwin Kisch, Oskar Baum, Johannes Urzidil, Paul Kornfeld, Ernst Weiss and Kamil Hoffmann. Several of his works were illustrated by Heinrich Vogeler, while Arnold Schoenberg set two of his poems to music. A prolific author, he soon became 'the acknowledged arbiter of Prague literary taste', and "the most respected Bohemian poet writing in German" at the time. An early friend and mentor of Rainer Maria Rilke, his verse had some influence on Rilke's early lyric style.

To some of his fellow Jewish intellectuals, he was regarded as an unadulterated "assimilationist," and "a militant protagonist of German liberalism and Jewish assimilation" whose attachment to Zionism was little more than a matter of embracing a fashionable trend (Mode-Zionismus). Lothar Kahn, on the other hand, says that while Salus was described by Max Brod as an unqualified assimilationist, "this may be an exaggeration, Salus did hope, all else failing, for full Jewish absorption into the host society."