Emil Ludwig

Emil Ludwig was born in 1881 in Breslau, Germany (today Wrocław, Poland) to a secular Jewish family. During World War I, he worked as a war correspondent in Vienna and Istanbul. In the 1920s, Ludwig achieved fame with his biographies of great politicians and artists such as Rembrandt, Napoleon, Bismarck, and Goethe. Many of his works were translated into English and became international bestsellers. In his native Germany, Ludwig was a controversial figure: Germany's university historians envied the newcomer's success and objected to his unconventional approach, which combined storytelling, historiography, and psychoanalysis. Ludwig was among the sharpest critics of German nationalism and warned early on about the rise of the extreme right and anti-Semitism. In response to the murder of Germany's Jewish foreign minister Walter Rathenau in 1922, Ludwig publicly announced his return to Judaism. In his 1937 book The Davos Murder, he describes David Frankfurter, who had assassinated a Nazi official in Switzerland, as a modern King David, earning him a prominent position on the Nazis' black-list. In 1940, he emigrated to the US from Switzerland, where he was living since 1906. Emil Ludwig returned to Europe after the war and died in Ascona in southern Switzerland in 1948.