The son of a pharmacist, he spent his youth in Crossen. At sixteen, he was stricken with tuberculosis, which earned him many stays in a sanatorium and no doubt influenced his literary production, poetry, novels, prose plays, theatre, adaptations and works of literary history, if only in its magnitude.
In fifteen years, in fact, Klabund has built up a body of work that many prolific writers would be proud of. At the secondary school in Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, he became friends with the future poet Gottfried Benn. In , he began studying philosophy and literature in Munich, did not complete them, then went to Berlin and Lausanne and from then on earned his living as a freelance writer between these three cities.
His first collection of poetry, Morgenrot! Die Tage damn! Klabund radically breaks with impressionism and particularly ambient naturalism. We already sense this practice of rupture in the discourse and this exacerbated lyricism which will so often evoke the term "expressionism" about him.
It was Alfred Kerr who revealed it to the public the same year in his magazine Pan with deliberately provocative erotic poems. Author and publisher will end up in court. Overnight, Klabund is famous. The scandal opened the doors of many newspapers and magazines to him.
The Great War marked a profound turning point in Klabund's vision of history and of the world; all his work will be affected by it. In , he was first carried away by the general wave of patriotic enthusiasm. It doesn't take long to change his mind. His fierce honesty and pacifism are expressed in a twisted form in masterful adaptations of Oriental, Persian, Chinese, Japanese poetry. In , in the dark of the conflict, he thus translated Li-Tai-Pe and in , in the heart of the turmoil that followed the defeat, triggered the German Revolution and caused the abdication of the Kaiser, he published the poems of Geisha O-Sen.
