Werner Bergengruen

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Werner Bergengruen (September 16, 1892 – September 4, 1964) was a Baltic German novelist.

Bergengruen was born in Riga, Livonia. After growing up in Lübeck attending the Katharineum, Bergengruen started studying theology in Marburg in 1911. He later changed to studying Germanistics and art history, but failed to graduate. He then moved to Munich. He served as a lieutenant during World War I and joined the Landwehr in 1919 to fight against the Bolsheviks.

Bergengruen started writing novels and short stories in 1923 and decided to become a full-time writer in 1927. While his earlier works were of a more contemplative nature and pondered metaphysical and religious questions, the Nazis' rise to power led him to write more political works - his most successful novel, Der Großtyrann und das Gericht, published in 1935, is set in the renaissance era, but the story of a merciless tyrant playing with the weaknesses of his underlings was often seen as a clear allegory on Germany's current political situation; this political interpretation is doubtful though, as most of this novel was written before the Nazi takeover in 1933. Bergengruen was expelled from the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1937 as being unfit to contribute to German culture. Although Bergengruen was politically a staunch conservative, his Catholicism as well as the fact that his wife was of partly Jewish heritage contibuted to his alienation from the Nazi regime.

In 1942, after his house in Munich was destroyed by bombs, Bergengruen moved to Achenkirch. After World War II, he lived in Switzerland, Rome, and Baden-Baden, where he died in 1964.