author
Gustav Sack
1885–1916
An early Expressionist voice cut short by the First World War, this German writer left behind fiction, poetry, and drama full of restless energy. His work often draws on his own unsettled life and still feels vivid for its honesty and intensity.
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About the author
Born in Schermbeck near Wesel in 1885, Gustav Sack was a German writer, poet, and dramatist associated with early Expressionism. He also published under the pseudonym Ernst Schahr. After a brief start as an apprentice pharmacist, he studied German literature and the natural sciences in Greifswald, Münster, and Halle, though he did not complete a degree.
Sack led a wandering, unsettled life, and that sense of movement and inner tension runs through his writing. He became known for strongly autobiographical fiction as well as poems and plays, and later readers have often seen him as an important early Expressionist talent. His novels Ein verbummelter Student and Ein Namenloser are especially linked to his own experiences.
His career was tragically brief. During the First World War he served in the German army and was killed in Romania in 1916, at just 31 years old. Much of his reputation rests on work published or gathered after his death, which helped preserve a distinctive literary voice that might otherwise have been lost too soon.