Werner Bergengruen was born in Riga in 1892, a “neighbor of the Estonian Reval”, as he puts it. He maintained his Baltic identity for life despite never having lived in a Baltic state since attending the ‘Gymnasium’ in Lübeck and Marburg (1903–1910) and even though his parents also fled the “forced Russification of the Baltic provinces” to settle in Germany (Deutsches Reich). An obituary for a Baltic friend, delivered after the World War II, when the entire Baltic region had become part of the Soviet Union, equally applies to Bergengruen himself: namely, he continued life as a “true humanist, a German European from a lost, beloved country.” Humanist also means cosmopolitan individualist: “indeed, our tiny subtribe […] always consisted of people who were fiercely protective of […] their idiosyncrasies.” He drew the following conclusion for himself and his ‘subtribe’ in 1957: “Es läßt sich auch mit Würde und zugleich mit Heiterkeit aussterben” [The process of becoming extinct may be borne with dignity and in good humour.]
Bergengruen’s studies at Marburg, Munich and Berlin universities were cut short by the war in 1914. Both his brothers and he volunteered for the German Army, - he himself served as Ulan and in the infantry in the East, where he was also asked to interpret from Russian and Latvian. In 1919, he joined the “Baltische Landwehr” that was mainly tasked with driving off the Bolshevik troops. In this year, he married Charlotte Hensel.

His writing career started in Berlin with journalism and translations from Russian (Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky), followed soon by his own early novels and stories (from 1927 onwards he was an independent writer). When he worked on his most mature historic novel Der Großtyrann und das Gericht (A matter of conscience, The Grand Tyrant and the Court), the topic “suddenly became […] chillingly and eerily real” as Hitler came to power in 1933. From then on, the author considered the novel a representation of resistance, and when it was published in 1935, his educated readers and friends commented with awe on his “daring courage” (W. Wilk) in conveying a “dire warning” (C.J. Burckhardt). This warning, however, appears to be even less perceivable today as it was then. The national socialist Völkischer Beobachter defused any allusion to people in power by praising the work as a “Führerroman der Renaissance” [Renaissance leadership novel].

Still, Bergengruen was excluded from the Reichsschrifttumskammer in 1937, which meant that “any further books required special permission”. Twelve books could be published in such circumstances, some in large editions, despite being labelled “unwanted”. His next sizeable historic novel Am Himmel wie auf Erden (1940), was – temporarily - forbidden one year later. The fact that his wife’s family tree was considered tainted as she descended from the Jewish Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family was reason enough for Bergengruen’s dissent from the NS regime, and they were threatened by forced divorce or deportation until the end.

Bergengruen converted to Catholicism in 1936: a close friend, the Catholic poet Reinhold Schneider and Bergengruen were later classified as belonging to the circle of Christian-conservative “inner emigration” (Paetel, 1950).

In 1937 followed a move to Catholic Bavaria, to Munich-Solln, where he was able to purchase a spacious house for his family (three children). When it was bombed in 1942, he sought refuge in Tyrol. His seemingly settled existence in Zürich from 1946 to 1958 and later in Baden-Baden was interrupted by multiple (reading) journeys and a lengthy stay in Rome (Römisches Erinnerungsbuch, images by Charlotte Bergengruen, 1949). The much read and well-respected author was not part of any “modern” trend in the newly founded Bundesrepublik; his belief in a higher order, his “noble and precise” wording, ridiculed by Friedrich Sieburg, seemed backward; a volume of poems with the awkward title Die heile Welt (1950) evoked irritation and anger (Adorno in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit).

Werner Bergengruen died in Baden-Baden in 1964, a few days before his 72^nd birthday.