Emil Ludwig

Independent activity 1881–1948 ○ Died near Ascona

Biographer of Goethe, Bismarck and Napoleon, world-famous, branded a "falsifier of history" at the book burnings

Writer born Emil Cohn in 1881 to a Jewish family in Breslau. He studied law but turned to plays and journalism, and in the First World War was correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt in Vienna and Istanbul. In the 1920s his psychological biographies, Goethe and Bismarck among them, made him world-famous, and he interviewed Mussolini and Stalin. After the murder of Walther Rathenau in 1922 he publicly renounced Christianity, and in 1932 he became a Swiss citizen. In the 1933 book burnings he and Werner Hegemann were named as "falsifiers of history" and their books burned with the slogan "Against the falsification of our history and disparagement of its great figures"; in the Berlin broadcast he was called "Emil Ludwig Cohn" to loud cheers. In 1940 he moved to the United States, where he wrote anti-fascist texts, and he died near Ascona in 1948.

Also known as: Emil Ludwig Cohn