Richard Friedenthal was born into a family of Jewish descent in Nikolassee near Berlin in Germany in 1896. He studied literature, art history and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, receiving his doctorate in 1922. In 1938 Friedenthal fled to Britain and was interned as an 'enemy alien' at Hutchinson Camp, on the Isle of Man, where he produced a number of sketches and exhibited with the internees; on release he established himself as a successful editor and author.
Publisher and writer Richard Friedenthal was born into a family of Jewish descent in Nikolassee near Berlin, in 1896, son of the physician and anthropologist Hans Wilhelm Carl Friedenthal and Martha Friedenthal (née Elster). During the First World War, he served as a soldier and was seriously injured. Afterwards, he studied literature, art history and philosophy at the Humboldt University in Berlin, Friedrich Schiller University in Jena and Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, where his professors included Heinrich Wölfflin, Fritz Strich and Max Weber. Friedenthal received his doctorate in 1922. His first literary attempts in the 1920s were encouraged by writer Stefan Zweig. He worked as a publishing editor from 1928 and became the head of the Droemer Knaur publishing house in Berlin in 1930. During this time, Friedenthal published Knaur's Konversationslexikon, a condensed version of an encyclopaedia that embodied a new type of one-volume, popular reference work and which was a great commercial success. Following Hitler's accession to the Chancellorship in 1933 and the introduction of increasingly anti-Semitic legislation, Friedenthal was banned from writing and publishing because of his Jewish origins.
In 1938 Friedenthal fled to Britain, where he was interned as a so-called 'enemy alien', first briefly at Kempton Park Racecourse and Prees Heath temporary transit camps, and from June 1940 to March 1941 at Hutchinson Camp in the Isle of Man (the so-called 'artists' camp, given the significant number of European figures of repute it contained). During his internment, he produced a number of drawings, including a humorous menu for a farewell dinner of a fellow internee Hellmuth Weissenborn. The menu is described by Jutta Vinzent in Identity and Image: Refugee Artists from Nazi Germany in Britain 1933–1945: '[...] for example, the 'risotto' is called 'A la dame absente' by way of allusion to the all-male nature of the camp, while the salad is titled 'Cantinoiserie' in punning reference to the canteen food' (p. 100). Friedenthal also participated in the second art exhibition organised at the camp in November 1940. His recollections of his time in Hutchinson are described in his novel Die Welt in der Nußschale (The World in a Nutshell) published in 1956. From 1942 to 1950 Friedenthal served as secretary of the PEN Centre of German-Speaking Writers Abroad, a member of PEN International, founded in London in 1934. From 1943 to 1951 he worked for the BBC. From 1945 to 1950 he was co-editor of the New Rundschau published in Stockholm, a reincarnation in exile of one of Germany's oldest and most important cultural magazines, Die neue Rundschau. In addition, Friedenthal published Stefan Zweig's works and administered his estate. In 1949 he collaborated with émigré printmaker and former internee, Hellmuth Weissenborn, on the Goethe Chronicle, published by Weissenborn's private Acorn Press and accompanied by his wood-engravings. In 1951 Friedenthal gained British citizenship and moved temporarily to Germany until 1954, heading the Droemersche Verlagsanstalt publishing house in Munich. Resettling in England, during the 1960s he authored several cultural and art historical texts, including a 'monograph' on London (London zwischen Gestern und Morgen, 1960) and Letters of the Great Artists, published in two volumes in 1963 by Thames and Hudson (the London-based firm itself established by Austrian émigrés).
Friedenthal died in 1979 during a visit to Kiel, Germany, and is buried in a grave of honour at the Nikolassee cemetery, Berlin.