Werner Bergengruen

The writer Werner Bergengruen has been described as the last great poet and novelist of the classical-romantic tradition. Expelled from the Baltic States into the Berlin bohemia of the 1920s, he worked alongside the White Rose in the resistance against Hitler and was nominated for the Nobel Prize five times in the post-war period. Soon after his death sixty years ago, Adorno and the sixty-eighters banished him to the orcus of oblivion. Now Bergengruen can be rediscovered in letters and his diary-like "Compendium" from his estate as an astute critic and analyst: a master of aphorism and essay - as well as of shaking rhyme. Eckhard Lange has researched the estates of Munich, Berlin and Marbach.