Ernst W. (Ernst Wolfgang) Freissler

Born on July 7, 1884, in Troppau in Austrian Silesia, Ernst Wolfgang Freissler was an author, literary editor, and translator. He is closely associated with Austrian-Silesian writing, and reference sources also note that he worked as a bank employee earlier in life before becoming more fully involved in literary work.

Freissler is especially known as a translator of Joseph Conrad into German, a role that helped keep his name in circulation even as his own fiction became less widely remembered. He also worked as a lector in publishing, and his writing drew on provincial and rural settings rather than big-city literary life.

He died on February 25, 1937, in Olbersdorf in what was then Czechoslovakia. Later literary reference works have described him as an unfairly neglected writer, pointing to novels and stories that captured the social texture of Silesian and neighboring Central European landscapes.