author
Kurt Kersten
1891–1962
A German historian, journalist, and novelist, he wrote with the urgency of someone who had lived through upheaval and exile. His work moves between politics, culture, and storytelling, shaped by the turbulent first half of the twentieth century.
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About the author
Born in Wehlheiden near Kassel in 1891, he studied German literature and history in Berlin and Munich, earning a doctorate in 1914. After serving in the First World War, he built a career in Berlin as a freelance writer and journalist, contributing to left-leaning literary and political circles.
The rise of Nazism forced him into exile. He left Germany in the 1930s, lived in several European countries and later in Martinique, and eventually settled in the United States. That experience of displacement and survival became an important part of the perspective behind his historical and literary writing.
Remembered as a historian, publicist, and novelist, he published works on major political figures and eras as well as fiction. He died in New York in 1962.