The Encyclopedia Americana (1920)/Kellermann, Bernhard

KELLERMANN, Bernhard, German novelist, author of a number of very sensational works: b. Fürth, Bavaria, 4 March 1879. He traveled considerably and lived in a number of cities: Rome (1904-05), Berlin (1905-06), Grünwald bei München (1906-09), Schöneberg bei Berlin (from 1909). His most famous work is ‘Der Tunnel’ (1913; English translation, ‘The Tunnel,’ New York 1914), of which 100,000 copies were printed in its first year. It is a romance of iron and steel, a study of commercial expansion and consequent clash of interests, centring about the construction of a tunnel joining the continents of Europe and North America under the Atlantic Ocean: in short, a typical product of the imperialistic imagination as molded under the hothouse conditions of modern industrial life. He has traveled in the Orient to obtain impressions of Eastern life and has rendered these impressions in the last two of the works enumerated below. His works include ‘Yester und Li’ (1904); ‘Ingeborg’ (1906); ‘Der Tor’ (1907): ‘Das Meer’ (1910); ‘Ein Spaziergang in Japan’ (1911); ‘Sassayo Yassa’ (1913). An English translation, ‘God's Beloved,’ of a story written by Kellermann in 1911 appears in ‘German Classics’ (Vol. XX, New York 1914).