Ehm Welk

Emil Welk, known by his nickname Ehm Welk (August 29, 1884 – December 19, 1966), was a German journalist, writer, professor and founder of Volkshochschulen (adult education centres). He became known for his work Die Heiden von Kummerow (The Heathens of Kummerow) and used Thomas Trimm as a pseudonym.

Welk was born as the son of a farmer in Biesenbrow (now part of Angermünde), Brandenburg. After frequenting the village school, the 16-year-old moved away from home, completed a commercial education, worked on the sea and as a journalist for several papers, e.g. in Brunswick for the Braunschweiger Allgemeiner Anzeiger, whose editor-in-chief he was from 1910 on to 1919. Afterwards, he worked for the Braunschweiger Morgenzeitung.

During these times, Welk experienced the German Revolution in Brunswick. His experiences later built the background for the novel Im Morgennebel, that describes true Brunswick events and people of these times in a not much encrypted way. This novel's manuscript, that employed Welk for a long time, was already finished in 1940 but not published until 1953 in East Germany

In 1922 Welk traveled to the United States and Latin America. One year later, he went back to Weimar Germany and worked as a writer and journalist, mainly in Berlin and neighbourhood. Two revolutionary dramas, Gewitter über Gotland (1926) and Kreuzabnahme (1927), caused scandals and had to be taken out of the theatres' repertoires – despite their popular success.

In 1934, one year after Hitler's Machtergreifung, Welk, under the pseudonym Thomas Trimm, wrote an open letter in the Grüne Post titled Auf ein Wort, Herr Minister, in which he criticised Nazi press censorship under Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels. The writer was then arrested and imprisoned in KZ Oranienburg for a short while. After his discharge (that was mainly due to protests by foreign journalists), he was banned from his profession.

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