Walter Jens

Walter Jens (8 May 1923 – 9 June 2013) was a German philologist, literature historian, critic, university professor and writer. He was born in Hamburg. In the early 1940s, Jens joined the NSDAP. He denied having applied for membership actively and claims that he had become a member automatically because he was a member of the Hitler Youth and that he never received a membership card. During World War II, he earned a doctorate in Freiburg with a work about Sophocles' tragedy and habilitated at age 26 with the work Tacitus und die Freiheit (Tacitus and Freedom) at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Jens was a member of the Turnerschaft Akademischer Turnbund. From 1950 on, Jens was a member of the Group 47. That year, he had his breakthrough with the novel Nein. Die Welt der Angeklagten. One distinguishing characteristic of his literary work is that he interprets current events by looking back at the past.