author
Hugo Bertsch
1851–1935
A German-born writer who carried the experiences of travel and emigration into his fiction, he spent much of his life between Europe and the United States. His work often draws close to ordinary people and the social worlds they moved through at the turn of the century.
1 Audiobook
Die Geschwister
by Hugo Bertsch
About the author
Born on October 7, 1851, in Margrethausen in Württemberg, Hugo Bertsch trained as a furrier before becoming known as a writer. Reliable library and biographical records place his life between southern Germany and New York, where he died on August 24, 1935.
Bertsch traveled widely, including in France, England, North and South America, and New Zealand, and eventually settled in New York. That broad experience seems to have fed the outlook of his writing, which is remembered as part of the long tradition of German-speaking authors who wrote with one foot in Europe and the other in America.
He published novels and other prose, and his papers were preserved in the German Literature Archive in Marbach, a sign of lasting literary interest in his work. For modern readers, Bertsch offers a window into migration, work, and everyday life in the German and German-American world of his era.