Emil Ludwig

Origins and early life

Emil Ludwig was born Emil Cohn in Breslau on 25 January 1881, the son of Hermann Cohn, a celebrated Jewish ophthalmologist who changed the family name to Ludwig in 1883 to spare his children the prejudice attached to their own.

Work and career

He was baptized a Protestant in 1902 and, after the murder of Walther Rathenau by antisemitic nationalists in 1922, publicly renounced that baptism and declared himself a Jew again — both facts this fiche states plainly, as he did. Trained in law, he worked as a correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt in London and Vienna and found his form in the 1920s: the popular biography, psychological, novelistic, written for the general reader, of which his Goethe of 1920, his Napoleon of 1925, his Bismarck and his Wilhelm II of 1926 and his Lincoln of 1930 sold in the millions and were translated into twenty-five languages, to the fury of academic historians who called the genre 'Ludwigism'.

He interviewed Mussolini and Stalin at length, published his talks with both, and was among the first authors whose books the Nazis burned in May 1933; a Swiss citizen since 1932, he lived above Ascona, moved to the United States in 1940 and advised the Roosevelt administration on the treatment of a defeated Germany, whose national character he analyzed in The Germans of 1941. He wrote lives of Freud, Lassalle and Rathenau among the Jews of Germany, and died at Moscia, on Lake Maggiore, on 17 September 1948.