Bernhard Kellermann

Bernhard Kellermann (Fürth, 1879 – Klein Glienicke, Potsdam, 1951) was a German novelist and poet whose career spanned the Kaiser's empire, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi regime and East Germany. He wrote in German, and he is chiefly remembered for The Tunnel, which became one of the most widely read German novels of its era.

He enrolled at the Technical University of Munich in 1899, though his interests soon turned toward German literature and painting. From 1904 he built a reputation as a novelist. His early books sold well over many years: Ingeborg, published in 1906, was reprinted 131 times by 1939. Before the war he drew on journeys to the United States and Japan, and his novel Das Meer (The Sea, 1910) was adapted for the cinema in 1927.

His major work appeared in 1913. The Tunnel sold about a million copies and was translated into twenty-five languages. His writing, less shaped by the impressionism of his early years, moved toward social criticism and realism. During the First World War he worked as a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1920 he published The Ninth of November, which challenged the conduct of soldiers and officers toward ordinary people. The book brought him trouble once the Nazis took power; it was banned and publicly burned.

Kellermann neither emigrated nor offered any visible resistance, and under the regime he turned mainly to light popular fiction. After the war he settled in the Soviet zone, co-founded a cultural association with Johannes R. Becher, sat in the East German Volkskammer and chaired the Society for German-Soviet Friendship. That commitment brought a boycott from West German publishers, and his name faded in the West. Shortly before his death in 1951 he brought together writers from both German states to press for reunification.