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Bernhard Kellermann
Life Time
4 March 1879 - 17 October 1951
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(1879–1951)
Bernhard Kellermann was born in Germany and educated at the Higher Technical School in Munich. In 1904, his first novel, Jester and Lee, appeared, in which the influence of neo-romanticism, fashionable at the time, vividly affected him. However, from neo-romantics Kellerman was distinguished by increased interest in modern social topics. This turn was marked by the publication in 1913 of the novel “Tunnel”, in which the writer convincingly showed how technology in capitalist society
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(1879–1951)
Bernhard Kellermann was born in Germany and educated at the Higher Technical School in Munich. In 1904, his first novel, Jester and Lee, appeared, in which the influence of neo-romanticism, fashionable at the time, vividly affected him. However, from neo-romantics Kellerman was distinguished by increased interest in modern social topics. This turn was marked by the publication in 1913 of the novel “Tunnel”, in which the writer convincingly showed how technology in capitalist society enslaves a person.
Kellermann hailed the Great October Socialist Revolution and the November Revolution in Germany of 1918, which he described in his novel The Ninth of November (1920). The novel reflects the writer’s view of the first imperialist war, shows that war is the greatest disaster for people.
The novel The City of Anatole was written by Bernhard Kellermann in 1932, on the eve of the collapse of the bourgeois democratic Weimar Republic. In it, Kellerman focuses on the flip side of progress. In a small provincial town in the Balkans found oil. The town is gripped by an entrepreneurial fever, a deadly struggle for profits. The decay of morals, the moral decline of the inhabitants of Anatole are developing with catastrophic rapidity. Kellerman depicts methods of struggle typical of imperialism, which, as competition grows, become more explicit.
During the years of fascism, Kellermann remained in Germany, but did not make any concessions to the Nazis. Kellerman did not want to write about modern Germany, so he boycotted the existing regime, taking a position of passive resistance, without expressing his opinion about the life he witnessed.
After the victory of the Soviet Union in the Great Patriotic War, he was an active participant in the democratic renewal of German culture. In 1948, he wrote the novel The Dance of Death, in which he exposed the criminal essence of fascism. This novel is a significant contribution to progressive realistic literature. Greetings from the SED Central Committee on the occasion of B. Kellerman’s 70th birthday read: “Your novels The Ninth of November and The Dance of Death dealt a crushing blow to the millitarian-fascist legend, the victim of which millions of people fell in the Second World War...” After visiting the Soviet Union, he and his wife Helen wrote a book of essays We Return from Soviet Russia (1948), in which they spoke with great sympathy about the Soviet people.