Writers from Berlin

Leopold Andrian, actually Leopold Freiherr Ferdinand von Andrian zu Werburg (May 9, 1875 in Berlin − November 19, 1951 in Fribourg) was an Austrian author, dramatist and diplomat.

Reinhard Johannes Sorge (29 January 1892 – 20 July 1916) was a German dramatist and poet. He is best known for writing the Expressionist play The Beggar (Der Bettler), which won the Kleist Prize in 1912 and almost singlehandedly created surrealist theatre and modern theatrical stagecraft. After being subsequently received into the Roman Catholic Church, Sorge began an effort to bring the Catholic literary revival into the literature of the Germanosphere. Instead, Sorge was conscripted into the Imperial German Army in World War I in 1915. He was killed in action during the Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916. Sorge's Der Bettler, however, received a posthumous premiere in a groundbreaking production by legendary Austrian Jewish stage director Max Reinhardt in 1917.

Martin Foss (1889–1968) was a German-born American philosopher, professor, and scholar.

Ilse Reicke (4 July 1893 – 14 January 1989) was a German writer, journalist and feminist.

Paul Otto Gustav Schmidt (23 June 1899 – 21 April 1970) was an interpreter in the German foreign ministry from 1923 to 1945. During his career, he served as the translator for Neville Chamberlain's negotiations with Adolf Hitler over the Munich Agreement, the British Declaration of War and the surrender of France.

Robert René ('René') Kuczynski (1876–1947) was a left-wing German economist and demographer and is said to be one of the founders of modern vital statistics.

Paul Jacobsthal (23 February 1880 in Berlin – 27 October 1957 in Oxford) was a scholar of Greek vase painting and Celtic art. He wrote his dissertation at the University of Bonn under the supervision of Georg Loeschcke. In 1912 he published a catalog of the Greek vases in Göttingen, and received a position as a professor at the University of Marburg.
In the 1920s Jacobsthal became interested in the work of John Beazley on vase painting, and began to adopt Beazley's taxonomical methodologies. His 1927 work, Ornamente griechischer Vasen, was dedicated to Beazley. In 1930 Jacobsthal and Beazley began to collaborate on an inventory of early Greek vases, the Bilder griechischer Vasen, a project which they concluded in 1939. After World War II, the two scholars served as co-editors of the Oxford Classical Monographs.
In 1935 Jacobsthal was forced to leave Nazi Germany on account of his Jewish heritage – though he was baptised a protestant, both of his parents were Jewish. He settled in England, and in 1937 was appointed as a lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford. There he continued his collaboration with Beazley.
Soon after his arrival in England, Jacobsthal began to study the art of the Celts, and in 1944 published his study of Early Celtic Art. This book focused on the impact of Greek ornament on Celtic decorative arts, and was one of the earliest English-language works to employ the terminology established by Alois Riegl in his Stilfragen. From 1947 through 1950 Jacobsthal served as University Reader in Celtic Archaeology at Oxford University.
Jacobsthal's final study, Greek pins and their connexions with Europe and Asia (1956), returned to the cataloguing of material from Greek antiquity, while remaining engaged with issues of the reception of Greek art abroad.
Jacobsthal's students included the Swiss archaeologist Karl Schefold and Hans Möbius.

Franz Hessel (November 21, 1880 – January 6, 1941) was a German writer and translator. With Walter Benjamin, he produced a German translation of three volumes of Marcel Proust's 1913-1927 work À la recherche du temps perdu in the late 1920s.
Hessel's parents, Fanny and Heinrich Hessel, came to Berlin in 1880, and joined the Lutheran church (having been born Jewish). In 1900, when Franz Hessel's father dies, he left a large fortune, enabling Franz Hessel to live a carefree life in Munich and Paris. In 1901, he attends the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he publishes twelve poems in Avalun. Ein Jahrbuch neuer deutscher lyrischer Wortkunst. In 1908, he publishes his first prose prose collection, Laura Wunderl. Müncher Novellen. In 1913, he marries Helen Grund, and publishes Der Kramladen des Glücks. On 27 July 1914, their first son Ulrich is born, and in 1917, their second son Stefan is born. In 1920, he publishes Pariser Romanze. In 1922, he publishes Von den Irrtümern der Liebenden. Eine Nachtwache.Hessel became one of the first German exponents of the French idea of flânerie, and in 1929 published a collection of essays on the subject related to his native Berlin, Walking in Berlin (German: Spazieren in Berlin). Reviewing the book in 1929, Benjamin described it as "an echo of the stories the city has told [Hessel] ever since he was a child—an epic book through and through, a process of memorizing while strolling around, a book for which memory has acted not as the source but as the Muse." Concluding, Benjamin wrote: "if a Berliner is willing to explore his city for any treasures other than neon advertisements, he will grow to love this book."In October 1938, the Hessels flee Germany for exile in Paris. In April 1940, the family flees Paris for Sanary-sur-Mer. In May, Franz and Ulrich are interned in Camp des Milles. On 27 July 1940, both are released and are able to return to Helen in Sanary-sur-Mer. However, Franz has dysentery, and has suffered a stroke, from which he does not recover.: 167–180 Hessel inspired the character of Jules in Henri-Pierre Roche's novel Jules et Jim.

Heinrich Eduard Jacob (7 October 1889 – 25 October 1967) was a German and American journalist and author. Born to a Jewish family in Berlin and raised partly in Vienna, Jacob worked for two decades as a journalist and biographer before the rise to power of the Nazi Party. Interned in the late 1930s in the concentration camps at Dachau and then Buchenwald, he was released through the efforts of his future wife Dora, and emigrated to the United States. There he continued to publish books and contribute to newspapers before returning to Europe after the Second World War. Ill health, aggravated by his experiences in the camps, dogged him in later life, but he continued to publish through to the end of the 1950s. He wrote also under the pen names Henry E. Jacob and Eric Jens Petersen.

Kurt Hiller (17 August 1885, Berlin – 1 October 1972, Hamburg) was a German essayist, lawyer, and expressionist poet. He was also a political (namely pacifist) journalist.