Sudermann was born on 30 September 1857 at Matziken in the district of Heydekrug in Memelland, East Prussia. He was the first of four children of the brewer Johann Sudermann and Dorothea Raabe Sudermann. His father's family was of Dutch and western German Mennonite origin. Around 1857 many small-town German brewers were beginning to feel the adverse economic effects of modernization and consolidation within the trade. His own family's precarious financial condition affected Sudermann only briefly, when he was compelled to withdraw from secondary school in nearby Elbing. A short pharmacological apprenticeship followed, after which distant relatives from Russia sent him to a preparatory school in Tilsit. At eighteen Sudermann enrolled at the University of Königsberg to study modern languages and literatures. By this time he and his classmates had begun to read and discuss the works of the more radical philosophers and theorists of the day, including the physician-turned-novelist Max Nordau's Die conventionellen Lügen der Kulturmenschheit (1883; translated as Conventional Lies of Our Civilization, 1884). Sudermann's liberalism was a result of this formative period.
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