Career
He was the younger of 4 boys born to a corn merchant. Werner was a child prodigy, starting to sit at the piano at age 3, receiving violin lessons at age 5, and writing his own compositions at age 8. His Spring Nocturne Foreign Orchestra was based on one of his brother"s texts.
Although he had served in the Prussian Army during World War I, he later became involved with the postwar radical politics and pacifism of the Berlin scene.
Moving to composing for the stage, he wrote the music for the Ernst Toller play Transformation
When the theater impresario Max Reinhardt opened the satirical cabaret Sound And Smoke he became, with Friedrich Hollaender, one of its two main pianists. Later the film producer Erich Pommer introduced him to the UFA studio, where he wrote music that accompanied over a dozen silents, including Faust by F.W. Murnau and Spies by Fritz Language.
When sound came in, the songs he wrote for the then popular musicals became hits and are the work for which he is most well known today. Among these films is The Congress Dances, directed by Erik Charell with whom he would work again soon on Caravan in Hollywood, after he had to quickly leave his country, along with other artists, when the National Socialists took power in 1933.
The emigre German director Ernst Lubitsch got him to work on 5 of his classic American comedies.
He also scored 2 films by another great comedy director, Preston Sturges. His memoirs, recorded on tape during his last years, were published as an autobiography in Germany in 2001. I love freedom. I hate dictatorship, godlessness, writing scores, wool next to my skin, and stones in my shoes.