The place of Emil Ludwig in history of German biography

The paper focuses on the place of the famous in the 1920–30s German biographer Emil Ludwig in the history of German biography. For the first time the biographic creative writing of the founder of novelistic biography has been regarded not in its historical context, but in correlation with the national tradition of the genre. On the data of the three texts, biographies «Goethe» (1920), «Napoleon» (1924), and «Wilhelm II» (1925) the characteristics of the conflicts and problems of Ludwig’s biographies are analysed. The comparative analysis of the results with the data about the genre conventions of German biography of the XVIII–XIX presented in the works of German literary critics allows tracing continuity of E. Ludwig’s works in the predecessor genre tradition.