Walter Jens

Walter Jens was a German philologist, literature historian, critic, university professor and writer.He was born in Hamburg, and attended the Gelehrtenschule des Johanneums from 1933 to 1941, when he gained his abitur, before studying at the University of Hamburg. In the early 1940s, Jens joined the NSDAP. He denied having applied for membership actively and claimed 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 at the 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.