Ernst Glaeser

Independent activity 1902–1963 ○ Died of illness in Mainz

Author of the pacifist novel Jahrgang 1902 who went into exile and returned to Nazi Germany in 1939

German writer, born in 1902 in Butzbach, Hesse. He wrote for the Frankfurter Zeitung and headed the literature department of the South-West German Radio. His pacifist novel Jahrgang 1902 (1928), about a boy growing up in a small town during the First World War, was translated into 24 languages and made his name abroad. In 1930 he signed an election appeal for the Communist Party and attended the Second International Conference of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkov. At the book burning of 10 May 1933 his writings were thrown into the flames with the cry "Against decadence and moral decline!", and he went into exile in Czechoslovakia and then Switzerland. In 1939 he returned to Germany, which other exiles condemned as betrayal; he published under a pseudonym subject to censorship and during the war edited Luftwaffe front newspapers. He died in Mainz in 1963.