Werner Hegemann

Independent activity 1881–1936 ○ Died of illness in exile in New York

City planner who satirised Prussian hero worship and was branded a "falsifier of history" at the book burnings

German city planner, architecture critic and political writer, born in Mannheim in 1881. He was general secretary of the 1910 Berlin city planning exhibition, and in the United States drew up a plan for Oakland and Berkeley and published The American Vitruvius (1922) with Elbert Peets. From 1924 he edited Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst; he had joined the SPD. His Fridericus and Napoleon satirised German hero worship, and in February 1933 he published Unmasked History, ironically dedicated to Hitler, and left the country. In the 1933 book burnings he and Emil Ludwig were named as "falsifiers of history" and his books burned with the slogan "Against the falsification of our history and disparagement of its great figures". Stripped of citizenship in 1935, he taught at the New School and Columbia University and died in New York in 1936.

Also known as: Manfred Maria Ellis