Henry Winterfeld (1901–1990)

Henry Winterfeld was born to a Jewish family in Hamburg, Germany. His father Max Winterfeld was a composer and conductor who used a then-fashionable foreign pseudonym, Jean Gilbert. His brother Robert Winterfeld became a composer and writer under the pseudonym Robert Gilbert. After attending private school, Henry studied music at the Berlin Conservatory. He worked as a pianist and also wrote screenplays for films. He began his literary career writing stories to entertain his young son, Thomas Henry, who was sick with scarlet fever. The result was his successful first book, Timpetill – Die Stadt ohne Eltern (English translation: Trouble at Timpetill), published in 1937 in Zurich under the pseudonym Manfred Michael. After the Nazi regime rose to power in Germany in 1933, Winterfeld moved to Austria. With the Nazi Anschluss (annexation) of Austria, he moved with his wife and son to France in 1938. In 1939, he was arrested in Paris as a refugee and interned in Nevers until he and his family were allowed to emigrate to the USA in May 1940, one month before the German invasion of France in World War II. In 1946, he became an American citizen. He became famous with his popular children's and young adult novels, written in German and translated into many other languages. Some of his books have been adapted into films, including Les enfants de Timpelbach (2007), a French-Belgian-Luxembourg production. He was married to Elsie Winterfeld, a toy designer. Winterfeld's niece, Marianne Gilbert Finnegan, describes the life of the Winterfelds in the USA in her 2002 autobiography Memories of a Mischling: Becoming an American.