Writers from Berlin

Heinrich_Blücher

Heinrich Friedrich Ernst Blücher (29 January 1899 – 31 October 1970) was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt whom he had first met in Paris in 1936. During his life in America, Blücher traveled in popular academic circles and appears prominently in the lives of various New York intellectuals.

Henriette_Hardenberg

Henriette Hardenberg (February 5, 1894 – October 26, 1993), born Margarete Rosenberg, was a German-Jewish poet who emigrated to Britain in the late 1930s. In the 1910s, she was part of the circle of writers around the magazine Die Aktion, which championed literary Expressionism. In her poems, she examined the relationship between people and their bodies, especially the skin as both an interface between self and world and a limiting factor. In a late interview, she said that her work expressed a desire to transcend the limits of the body. Hardenberg was one of the few women among German Expressionist writers, and one recent reevaluation of her oeuvre ranks her work among the best of the Expressionists.

Ludwig_Marcuse

Ludwig Marcuse (February 8, 1894 in Berlin – August 2, 1971 in Bad Wiessee) was a German philosopher and writer of Jewish origin.
From 1933 to 1940 Marcuse lived in France, settling with other German exiles in Sanary-sur-Mer. From 1940 to 1950 he lived in Los Angeles. He returned to Germany at the end of his life.
In 1962, his non-fiction book Obscene: The history of an indignation was published. The work revolves around leading obscenity trials: Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (Jena, 1799), Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary (Paris, 1857), Arthur Schnitzler's Round Dance (Berlin, 1920), D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley (London, 1960), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (Los Angeles, 1962). A chapter is also devoted to the crusade of Anthony Comstock and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
Marcuse wrote non-fiction, mostly about the role of German literature in so far as that it was bound up with progressive and emancipatory philosophical, and political causes. These works include subjects like Heine, Börne, Georg Büchner, the development of the tragedy, Sigmund Freud, the philosophy of happiness, and several others.
His papers are held at the University of Southern California.Ludwig was not related to Herbert Marcuse (another exiled German intellectual of Jewish descent) although he did have a brother by the same name.

Sebastian_Droste

Sebastian Droste (born Willÿ Knobloch; 2 February 1898 – 27 June 1927) was a German poet, actor, and dancer associated with the underground art subculture of the Weimar Republic in the 1920s.
Droste relocated from his hometown of Hamburg to Berlin in 1919. He earned a living as a naked dancer, choreographer and expressionist poet. His first poem appeared in April edition of Der Sturm that same year, titled 'Tanz' (Dance). A further 15 poems and ‘grotesques’ appeared across 12 editions of the journal alongside other artists and poets such as Kurt Schwitters and Paul Klee. He alternated between publishing under the name Willy or Willi Knobloch. Also in 1919 he published a drama in the Dresden based expressionist journal Menschen.In 1922, Droste married expressionist exotic dancer and actress in silent movies of the Berlin scene, Anita Berber. She and Droste performed fantasias with titles such as "Suicide," "Morphium," and "Mad House". Droste appeared as a dancer in the silent movie Algol.
In 1923, Droste and Berber jointly published a book of poetry, photographs, and drawings called Die Tänze des Lasters, des Grauens und der Ekstase (Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy), based on their performance of the same name. Full of expressionist imagery, the book offered a glimpse into the angst and cynicism shadowing their artistic and personal existences. Their marriage ended in 1923.
In 1925, Droste met with photographer Francis Bruguière in New York City where he styled himself as Baron Willy Sebastian Knobloch Droste. Together they composed over 60 photographs for a proposed expressionist film starring Drost tentatively titled The Way. UFA GmbH rejected the proposal and the photographs were instead published as part of a photographic journal in Die Dame in July 1925.
Droste was diagnosed with tuberculosis in early 1927. He returned to his parents' home in Hamburg, where he died on June 27 of the same year.

Gerhard_Rohlfs

Gerhard Rohlfs (July 14, 1892 – September 12, 1986) was a German linguist. He taught Romance languages and literature at the universities in Tübingen and Munich. He was described as an "archeologist of words".

Erich_Auerbach

Erich Auerbach (November 9, 1892 – October 13, 1957) was a German philologist and comparative scholar and critic of literature. His best-known work is Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, a history of representation in Western literature from ancient to modern times frequently cited as a classic in the study of realism in literature. Along with Leo Spitzer, Auerbach is widely recognized as one of the foundational figures of comparative literature.