Wilhelm Herzog (1884–1960)

Wilhelm Herzog was born to a Jewish family in Berlin, Germany. He studied economics, art history and German studies at the Humboldt University. After publishing early works about Lichtenstein (1905) and Heinrich von Kleist (1907), he became editor of the literary magazine Pan. In 1914-1915 and 1918-1929, he wrote for the magazine Das Forum, which advocated world peace. He was also the publisher of the daily newspaper Die Republik from 1918 to 1919. In 1915, he married Erna Morena, a film actress, with whom he had a daughter. He became a prominent literary and cultural historian, author and playwright. Between 1929 and 1933, he wrote Die Affäre Dreyfus (The Dreyfus Affair), Der Kampf einer Republik (The Struggle of a Republic) and Panama. The Dreyfus Affair was a play co-written with Hans Rehfisch, which premiered in Berlin in 1929 under the pseudonym René Kestner. It was performed in Paris in 1931, but after the right-wing nationalist group Action française organized riots against it, the play closed after one performance. The Dreyfus Affair was then translated into a 1931 English film called Dreyfus (aka The Dreyfus Case), and into a play called "I Accuse!" by James Agate, which had a short run on the London stage in 1937. After the Nazis seized power in Germany in 1933, Herzog went first to Switzerland and then to France. He was interned in France from 1939 to 1941, and then after trying to flee to the USA, interned in Trinidad from 1941 to 1945. At the end of World War II, he was finally allowed to enter the USA. In 1939, he had married Alice La Roche, the daughter of a Swiss banker, with whom he had two children. His 4-volume encyclopedia Große Gestalten der Geschichte (Great Figures of History) was published in the late 1940s even as most of the figures in it were already being forgotten. In 1952, he returned to Germany and lived in Munich.