Emil Ludwig (1881–1948)

Emil Ludwig was born Emil Cohn to a non-religious Jewish family in Breslau, Germany (present-day Poland). He studied law but at age 25 chose writing as his career. He began writing plays and novellas and worked as a journalist. In 1906, he moved to Switzerland. During World War I, he worked as a foreign correspondent in Vienna and Istanbul for the Berliner Tageblatt. He published his first novel, Diana, in 1918–1919. In the 1920s, Ludwig achieved international fame for his popular biographies that combined historical fact and fiction with psychological analysis. After his successful biography of Goethe, published in 1920, he wrote books about Napoleon (1924), Bismarck (1927), Jesus (The Son of Man, 1928), Lincoln (1929), Cleopatra (1937), Beethoven (1943), and many others. From his home in Ascona, Ludwig wrote articles criticizing the Nazis and helped his fellow writers and intellectuals who sought to flee Germany. He also published interviews with major political figures of the era such as Benito Mussolini, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Joseph Stalin, and Tomáš Masaryk. He became a Swiss citizen in 1932, and then emigrated to the USA in 1940. As his books were widely translated and sold well outside of Germany, he was one of the fortunate émigrés with income. In 1944, Ludwig wrote a letter to The New York Times urging the Allies to take action to stop the murder of Jews in Europe. After World War II, he went back to Germany as a journalist. While there, he retrieved the coffins of Goethe and Schiller, which had disappeared from Weimar in 1943-1944. He then returned to Switzerland, where he lived for the rest of his life. His biography of Napoleon, first published in English in 1926, is still in print and considered a classic work.