Arnold Krieger
(1904-1965)

Childhood, Adolescence
and Displacement

The express trains that raced from Paris to St. Petersburg across the bridge over the Vistula River in Dirschau were among the most important memories of Arnold Krieger’s youth. Even early on he saw himself as a bridge builder between nations, and he became accordingly a student and proponent of the international language Esperanto.

Arnold Krieger was born on December 1, 1904 in the town of Dirschau (now in Poland) and later attended the German Gymnasium in the city of Thorn. Since the entire region surrounding the Vistula became part of the “Polish Corridor” following World War I, Krieger’s family moved westward to Stettin, where his father had taken a position as rector of a middle school. But this was only the first of three displacements that Arnold Krieger was to experience during his lifetime.

University Study,
Initial Work as an Author
and Second Displacement

Krieger studied philology at the universities in Greifswald, Göttingen and Berlin. In 1927 his first stage play premiered at the city theater in Stettin. In the years 1934 and 1935 he published four books: two historical novels, one about the Boer War in South Africa and the other about German-Polish relations prior to World War I, and also two contemporary novels. Ernst Rowohlt was his first publisher. Six years later, and despite Krieger’s strong opposition, the novel about the Boer War supplied several important motifs for Emil Jannings’ famous anti-British propaganda film Ohm Krüger.

In 1936 Arnold Krieger planned to emigrate to Denmark, but this became impossible when his passport was revoked. Consequently he retreated to the island of Wollin in the Baltic near Stettin and did not publish any more books until 1939. In that year two new historical novels appeared, one about German-Polish relations in the 18th century and another set in South Africa following the Boer War.

In 1942 Arnold Krieger married a young woman from Vienna. His new wife Tuja became his coworker, companion through life, and mother of his three daughters.

Also in the year 1942 he published the biographical novel So will es Petöfi, which portrays the life of the famous Hungarian poet and freedom fighter Sandor Petöfi. In the same year he returned to the genre of the contemporary novel with Das Urteil / The Judgment, which delineates the differences between law and justice. In the introduction Krieger wrote a statement that was perhaps a veiled, but nonetheless daring critique of totalitarianism: “The state’s claim to absolute authority is wrong… The people stand above the state.” He published no more novels until 1951.

About a year before the end of World War II, Krieger, who at that time was known primarily as a novelist, published a volume of poems entitled Das schlagende Herz / The Beating Heart (Rütten & Loening). The title appears to be a critique of a book Joseph Goebbels had recently published, Das eherne Herz / The Brazen Heart. These poems were republished three more times in the postwar period.

The End of the War
and Krieger’s Third Displacement

Following the war the island of Wollin was placed under Polish administration. As a result Arnold and Tuja Krieger became homeless. The two refugees finally landed in Switzerland (without passports), where their first daughter was born in 1948. Here Krieger founded a periodical entitled Das eigentliche Leben / The Authentic Life, in which he developed his ideas for aiding mankind and promoting a “revolutionary Christianity.”

His second daughter was born in Switzerland in 1951, but it would take two more years before the family could find a real home. Arnold Krieger described his struggle with the Swiss immigration authorities and the resulting third displacement of his life in the autobiographical work Zwei zogen aus. The family’s odyssey finally came to an end in 1953 when they received an offer of an apartment from the mayor of Darmstadt.

Krieger’s Halcyon Years in Darmstadt

Despite the great difficulties of life in postwar Germany, the Darmstadt years represented a relatively calm and productive period for Arnold Krieger. Within four years, four new novels appeared, among them his masterwork Geliebt, gejagt und unvergessen / Loved, Hunted and Unforgotten, the saga of an African princess who maintains her sense of dignity and independence despite devastating assaults on her freedom. Whereas most of his contemporaries reveled in cynicism and gave in to resignation, Arnold Krieger always believed in the essential goodness of mankind. To close his essay on Albert Schweitzer, he wrote: “It is incumbent upon us all to throw off the solemn vestments of resignation and to do that which the beneficent spirit of our times requires of us.”

More than two million copies of Geliebt, gejagt und unvergessen have been sold over the years, and the book is still in print. It made Arnold Krieger one of the most widely read authors of the postwar period. His last two novels were a contemporary novel with autobiographical features and a Romeo and Juliette story from the German “Wirtschaftswunder,” the economic miracle that brought Western Germany great affluence in the late 1950s and 1960s.

Arnold Krieger kept his distance from both the literary and political cliques of his day. Nevertheless he was, in his own way, politically engaged. He wanted to establish a “World Council of Free Individuals” who, in the spirit of Albert Schweitzer, would develop a “spiritual Lambarene” for Europe. Little came of this utopian idea, but Krieger did leave his political testament concerning power and humanity in his book Stärker als die Übermacht / Stronger than the Superpower (1961). Fours years later he died following a gall bladder operation in Frankfurt.

In 1967 the “Freundeskreis Arnold Krieger” was founded in Darmstadt. Until its dissolution in December of 2003, this organization, in cooperation with his widow Tuja Krieger, held public readings of his works, released previously unpublished materials and republished some of his more popular works.
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