Julius Stinde

Born on August 28, 1841, in Kirchnüchel in Holstein, Julius Stinde was the son of a clergyman and was educated at the gymnasium in Eutin. He was first apprenticed to a chemist in Lübeck, then studied chemistry at Kiel, Jena, and Giessen, earning a doctorate before working as a consulting chemist in Hamburg.

Stinde later moved into journalism and literature, writing with a lively, humorous touch that made him especially popular as an observer of middle-class life. His best-known work is the Buchholz series, including Die Familie Buchholz, a set of satirical novels centered on a Berlin family and the manners of the growing bourgeois world around them.

Alongside fiction, he also wrote for periodicals and used a number of pseudonyms over the course of his career. He died on August 5, 1905, in Olsberg in the Sauerland, but he is still remembered for bringing late 19th-century Berlin society to life with wit, detail, and an affectionate sense of human absurdity.