author
Walter Flex
1887–1917
Best known for a deeply felt First World War classic, this German writer turned personal loss and front-line experience into prose that stayed widely read long after his early death in 1917. His work blends friendship, duty, and sorrow in a way that still feels immediate.
1 Audiobook
Der Wanderer zwischen den Welten: Ein Kriegserlebnis
by Walter Flex
About the author
Born in Eisenach on July 6, 1887, Walter Flex studied at Erlangen and worked as a teacher before the First World War. When the war began, he volunteered for service and later fought as an officer, experiences that shaped the writing he is remembered for most.
His best-known book is The Wanderer between the Two Worlds (Der Wanderer zwischen beiden Welten), published in 1916. Drawing on wartime experience and the death of a close friend, the book brings together grief, comradeship, idealism, and the strain of war, which helped make it one of the most widely known German war books of its time.
Flex died in action on October 16, 1917, in Estonia, when he was only 30. Because his life was so short, his reputation rests on a small body of work, but his name remains closely tied to German writing about the First World War and to the emotional world of a generation marked by it.