Background
Ludwig Renn was born in Dresden on 22 April 1889 under his original name of Arnold Vieth von Golsenau.
Ludwig Renn was born in Dresden on 22 April 1889 under his original name of Arnold Vieth von Golsenau.
After leaving the army in 1920 he studied law, economics and Russian at Gottingen and Munich. Then studied archaeology and Chinese history.
Renn knew the German army and its traditions from the inside, having served during World War I as a company and battalion Commander.
During 1919 he was in the Freikorps.
After studies Renn became a freelance writer and joined the KPD (German Communist Party) after publishing his first book, Der Krieg ( The War), in 1928. Renn’s novel reflected the new realism and sobriety in German literature which coincided with the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity ) movement in painting and architecture.
In 1928 Renn became Secretary of the Alliance of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, a position he held for four years, and also edited the communist-oriented journal, Linkskune ( Left Trajectory ). His novel Nachkrieg ( 1930) dealt with the security forces of the Weimar Republic, and in 1932 he published Russlandfahrten based on his visit to the Soviet Union in 1929. Renn was arrested on the night of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) and spent two and a half years in prison. He succeeded in fleeing to Switzerland in 1936 and in the same year became Chief of Staff of the Eleventh International Brigade which participated in the Spanish Civil War. Interned in France in 1939, he was released a year later and settled in Mexico (after brief stays in Britain and America), becoming Professor of European History and Languages at the University of Morelia.
From 1941 to 1946 he was a founder and leading figure in Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), a movement of exiled anti-Nazi German writers based in Latin America. His communist convictions led him to settle in East Germany after 1947, where he became Professor of Anthropology at Dresden Technical College and a prominent defender of the régime.
A member of the communist SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) he held several high positions in the cultural life of the GDR and was appointed Honorary President of the East German Academy of Arts in 1969.
(Written in the impersonal, passionless tone of a field no...)
1928Russlandfahrten
(Based on the writer's visit to the Soviet Union in 1929.)
1932