ABSTRACT
The son of a Protestant pastor, Klepper committed suicide with his Jewish wife in 1942 when she was due to be deported to a concentration camp. The informing spirit of his one major work Der Vater (1937), which traces the life of Friedrich Wilhelm I King of Prussia from 1713 to 1740, is a Christianity absent from the cultivation of the Prussian ethos and the adulation of the Prussian monarchy and military establishment characteristic of conservative and nationalist writers active between the mid-nineteenth century and the end of the Third Reich. Klepper also wrote a lighter novel Der Kahn der fröhlichen Leute (1933) and the first chapter, Die Flucht der Katharine von Bora (1951), of a planned novel on Luther Das ewige Haus, poems collected in Ziel der Zeit (1962) and the diaries Unter dem Schatten deiner Flügel (1956) and Überwindung (1958).
