ABSTRACT
Born in East Prussia, Wiechert studied German, English and geography at Königsberg, becoming a teacher; he served as an officer from 1914 to 1918. His early novels, Die Flucht (1916) and Der Totenwolf (1924) contrast the beauty of the countryside (East Prussia) with the aggressive tendencies of the modern age; Der Knecht Gottes Andreas Nyland (1926) continues this theme, a sombre tone predominates. Die Magd des Jürgen Doskocil, Wiechert’s first success, appeared in 1931-2. Wiechert taught no more after 1933, when he devoted himself entirely to his writing: his patriotic stance, and the loving descriptions of his East Prussian homeland, led the Nazis to consider him a suitable novelist. (He had contemplated a ‘Kantate der deutschen Seele’ and a book to be called Das dritte Reich.) Wiechert had been critical of many aspects of the Weimar Republic; in 1936, however, he fell from favour for the pessimism of his outlook and his unwillingness to reject writers (such as Heine) who were anathema to the Nazis. His essay Der Dichter und die Jugend (published in 1936) was condemned; in 1935 he had addressed the students at Munich University and stressed the need for prudence and reason; in 1937 he gave a public reading of his story Der weiβe Büffel (to be published in 1946), a reworking of an Indian legend on the theme of justice. He had also objected to the arrest of Pastor Niemöller and had essays published in the émigré journal Das Wort. He was arrested in 1938 and spent several months in Buchenwald. (His novel Das einfache Leben (1919), did, however, achieve record sales between 1939 and 1941.) Der Totenwald (published in 1945 and buried during the war in Wiechert’s garden) gives an account of this incarceration, from which he was released due to Goebbels’s intervention. The novel Die Jerominkinder (1945-7) deals with a family living in a remote Masurian village between 1900 and 1939: the Nazi menace poisons the patriarchal atmosphere. A collection of poems, Die letzten Lieder, appeared in 1951. Wiechert’s essays (Rede an die deutsche Jugend (1945)) failed to make the impact that he had hoped, his ideals being deemed outmoded and too sentimental for the modern age. Sämtliche Werke (ten vols) appeared in 1957; Novellen und Erzählungen in 1962; Werke (five vols) in 1980.
