Paul Ernst, one of the most prolific twentieth-century German writers, began his career as a dramatist--indeed as the originator of a neoclassical kind of tragedy--but turned to prose fiction and essays as forms more appealing to contemporary readers. His novels and short stories made him one of the best-known representatives of German literature in the 1920s. His social philosophy was uncompromisingly conservative and in sympathy with the sentiments that prepared the ground for National Socialism.

Paul Carl Friedrich Ernst was born on 7 March 1866 in Elbingerode in the Harz Mountains to Johann Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst, a mine foreman who embodied the old-fashioned virtues of responsibility and craftsmanship to which Ernst himself was to hold throughout his life, and Charlotte Dittmann Ernst. Ernst studied theology, economics, and literature at Göttingen, Tübingen, Berlin, and Bern. His first published work was an essay on Tolstoy, whose religious...