Ernst Wiechert

Ernst Wiechert (18 May 1887 – 24 August 1950) was a German teacher, poet and writer. Wiechert was born in the village of Kleinort, East Prussia, (now Piersławek, Poland).

He was one of the most widely read novelists in Germany during the 1930s. He incorporated his humanist ideals in his novels among which Das einfache Leben (The simple Life, 1939) and Die Jeromin-Kinder (The Jeromin children, 1945/47) are the best known today.

Wiechert was strongly opposed to Nazism from the start. He appealed in 1933 and 1935 to the undergraduates in Munich to retain their critical thinking in relation to the national socialist ideology. This was rated as call to internal resistance. The minutes of the speech circulated illegally in Germany and reached Moscow in 1937 baked in bread. Here it was published in the influential exile magazine Das Wort (The Word). But Wiechert went even further and dared to openly criticize the imprisonment of Martin Niemöller by the Nazis in 1938. He was arrested shortly after the rigged plebiscite by which Germany absorbed Austria in April 1938.

In consequence of his criticism, he was interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp for four months. He wrote down his memories about his imprisonment and buried the manuscript; it was published in 1945 as Der Totenwald (Forest of the dead).

After the war, Wiechert was a critic of West German society. In 1948, he settled in Stäfa, Switzerland, where he died in August 1950 of cancer. He was buried in Stäfa.