Werner Bergengruen
Werner Bergengruen was a notable German author and journalist, born into a family of Swedish descent in Riga, Latvia. His early years were marked by a privileged upbringing, and he later pursued education in law, history, and literature at universities in Germany. Bergengruen’s life was profoundly affected by World War I, during which he served alongside his family, experiencing significant loss when both of his brothers were killed in action. He married Charlotte Hensel, who became a vital support for his literary career, even posthumously publishing some of his works.
In the 1930s, as the political climate in Germany shifted dramatically with the rise of National Socialism, Bergengruen faced censorship and personal challenges, particularly due to his wife’s Jewish heritage. Despite these adversities, he continued to write, producing works that often critiqued the regime. His experiences during the war and its aftermath influenced his storytelling, which balanced acknowledgment of evil with a hopeful belief in a divinely ordered universe. Throughout his life, Bergengruen received various honors acknowledging his contributions to literature, reflecting his enduring significance in German cultural history.
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Werner Bergengruen
Author
- Born: September 16, 1892
- Birthplace: Riga, Latvia
- Died: September 4, 1964
Biography
Werner Bergengruen was one of three children born to the physician Paul Bergengruen and his wife Helene von Boetticher Bergengruen. They had a large baroque house in Riga, Latvia, and a country home where they spent the summers. Werner Bergengruen’s childhood memories are captured in Der Letzte Rittmeister (1952; The Last Captain of Horse: A Portrait of Chivalry, 1953).
The family was of Swedish origin and spoke German and Russian. Bergengruen received private tutoring at home until he was ten and was then sent to Lübeck, Germany, where from 1903 to 1910 he attended the Katharineum, the same school that the German authors Theodor Storm and Thomas Mann had attended. From 1911 to 1914 Bergengruen attended universities in Marburg, Munich, and Berlin, studying law, history, and literature. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Werner, his brothers Wolfgang and Olaf, and their father volunteered to fight on the German side. Both of Werner’s brothers were killed in action.
In 1919, Bergengruen married Charlotte Hensel. They had two daughters and a son. Charlotte was supportive of his writing, illustrating his Römisches Erinnerungsbuch (1949; Rome Remembered, 1968), and published some of his works posthumously. They settled in Berlin, where Bergengruen worked initially as a journalist. In 1927, he bought their first house in the suburb Berlin-Zehlendorf.
In the summer of 1933, Bergengruen went on a bicycle tour of Germany. His description of the various provinces in Deutsche Reise (1934; German travels) is one of the last such descriptions before World War II and the subsequent division of Germany. The book was reprinted in 2004.
With the rise of National Socialism, writers were increasingly censored. Nevertheless, Bergengruen’s novel Der Grosstyrann und das Gericht (A Matter of Conscience, 1952) was published in 1935, even though it can be read as criticism of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. In 1936, the Bergengruens moved to Solln, near Munich, bought a bigger house, and converted to Catholicism. Bergengruen did not join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party. When the Nazis discovered in 1937 that his wife was three-quarters Jewish, Bergengruen was found “unsuited to contribute to the promotion of German culture through literary publications.” He was expelled from the Reich’s Association for Literature and forbidden to write, an order he did not obey.
In 1942, the Bergengruens’ house in Solln was bombed beyond repair, and they moved to Achenkirch in Tirol, Austria. After the end of World War II, they moved to Zürich, Switzerland. In 1958 they moved again, to Baden-Baden, Germany, because Bergengruen wanted to live near his friend, the author Reinhold Schneider.
Bergengruen was awarded the Wilhelm Raabe Prize of the City of Braunschweig in 1947; the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on his sixty-fifth birthday; an honorary doctorate from the University of Munich in 1958; and in the same year, he was appointed to the Order Pour le mérite. He could tell a good story, and his message was one the German people wanted to hear in the politically troubled times of the Third Reich and the postwar years. In traditional style and form, Bergengruen acknowledges that evil exists but professes his faith in a divinely ordered world.