A Baltic German Loner and Outsider

WERNER BERGENGRUEN WAS born in 1892 in Riga. Throughout his life he retained a keen awareness of his ethnic origins in the eastern Baltic region, and the mature writer's internationalism has its roots in his inherited dual identity: the Baltic Germans were citizens of Russia and owed allegiance to the tsar and the empire, but at the same time they saw themselves culturally and linguistically very much as ethnic Germans, and indeed several of Bergengruen's relations fought on different sides in the First World War.

Bergengruen's parents left Riga in 1909 to move to Marburg an der Lahn, and from 1911 to 1914 he studied history, German, theology, and art history in Marburg, Berlin, and Munich. During the First World War, he fought as a volunteer in the German Army and later served as an officer in a German-Baltic unit of the White Army fighting to free the Baltic region from the Bolsheviks. However, the revolutionary events of 1917 put an end to the German dominance of the Baltic region, and Bergengruen was subsequently cut off from his native land. From 1920 he worked as an editor and translator for different journals focused on eastern Europe and lived variously in Berlin, Munich, Tirol, Zurich, and Rome before becoming an independent writer in 1924 and settling in Berlin, where he lived until 1936. Although he had contacts with many leading writers, he generally kept his distance from the intellectual and cultural life of the capital, showing himself from the start to be an independent-minded nonconformist for whom alignment with any particular literary school was quite alien.

In 1935, Bergengruen and his wife, Charlotte (a granddaughter of Fanny Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn), whom he had married in 1919, converted to Catholicism. Bergengruen's early ties to the Russian Orthodox faith no doubt played a role here, and, after the family's move in 1936 from Berlin to Solln near Munich, he was increasingly attracted to Catholic resistance circles. In Solln he was a neighbor of Karl Muth, the founder and editor of the journal Hochland, and through Muth developed links to such figures as the writer Theodor Haecker, the philosopher Alois Dempf, the writer Max Stefl, and the student Hans Scholl.