Ernst Wiechert was a German teacher, poet and writer. His popular novels urged the virtues of simplicity, humility, and ideal love. Despite a three‐month internment in the concentration camp Buchenwald for his openly expressed criticism of the Nazi regime, he is a controversial figure whose status as a dissident has been questioned because of his enduring popularity and success as a published author under the Nazis. Nevertheless, all his work bears testimony to his defiant defence of his beliefs, including the immensely successful Das einfache Leben (The Simple Life, 1939), which advocated living a good life as an answer to the sickness of the age, a guiding light for humankind lost in the gloom of despair. His critical writing survived, buried in his garden, to be published after the war: Die Jerominkinder (The Earth is Our Heritage, vol. i, 1945, vol. ii, 1947) and Der Totenwald (The Forest of the Dead, 1945), a mainly autobiographical record written expressly as a literary chronicle of Buchenwald and a memorial to the dead. Disenchanted with post‐war developments in Germany and the hostile attitude towards his attempts to promote an honest coming‐to‐terms with the Nazi past, he emigrated in 1948 to Switzerland, where he died in 1950.
