Ludwig Renn (born Arnold Friedrich Vieth von Golßenau; 22 April 1889 – 21 July 1979) was a German author.

He adopted the name Ludwig Renn in 1930, after becoming a communist, renouncing his noble title and taking the name of the hero of his first successful novel, Krieg (1928).

His mother, Bertha, maiden name Raspe (1867 – 1949) was the daughter of a Moscow apothecary, whilst his father, Carl Johann Vieth von Golßenau (1856 – 1938), was a teacher of mathematics and physics at the Royal Court of Saxony in Dresden.

[3] In 1920 during the Kapp Putsch, Renn refused to open fire upon striking workers and left the police service shortly afterwards.

[2] In Vienna in 1927 he had witnessed dozens of socialist demonstrators being attacked and killed by police and thereafter turned to the left and ultimately communism.

[5] In 1928, the year in which he published Krieg, Renn became a member of the Communist Party of Germany, a step which the novel Nachkrieg (1930) reflects.

[7] In 1933, following the burning of the Reichstag, new laws designed to accelerate Adolf Hitler’s rise to power were passed, leading to Renn, Carl von Ossietzky and Ernst Torgler being arrested together in January 1934.

He was driven out of the city to Cuenca by Claud Cockburn, a British communist journalist, under orders from the government and their Russian advisors.

[16][non-primary source needed] After the defeat of the Spanish Republicans, Renn escaped to France[17] and then travelled into exile to Mexico, where he remained from 1939 to 1947 and served as president of the Free Germany movement (Freies Deutschland).

His most important achievement lay in his novels, which were largely autobiographical in nature, and served to document the turbulent times in which he lived.

Its sequel, Nachkrieg (1930) shows the same character living in a postwar period of intense political conflict and growing in socialist conviction.

As well as novels, travel writing and memoirs, Renn also wrote imaginative works for children and young people.