Bernhard Kellermann (Fürth, 1879 - Klein Glienicke, Potsdam, 1951) was a German writer who lived through the Kaiserreich, the Weimar Republic, the Nazi era and the postwar years in East Germany. He is best known as a novelist, though he also wrote poetry, short stories and travelogues. His books were widely read in the early twentieth century, and his career is now often studied as a case of literary life under very different political regimes.
In 1899 he enrolled at the Technical University of Munich, and later turned to painting and German philology. From 1904 he built a reputation as a novelist with Yester and Li, which went through 183 printings by 1939. Ingeborg (1906) reached 131 printings by the same date. His novel Das Meer (The Sea, 1910) was adapted for the cinema in 1927. His major work, Der Tunnel (The Tunnel, 1913), sold a million copies and was translated into 25 languages, and it too became a film in 1933. His writing moved away from the earlier impressionism toward social criticism and realism.
During the First World War he worked as a correspondent for the Berliner Tageblatt. In 1920 he published Der 9. November (The Ninth of November), a novel that criticised the conduct of soldiers and officers toward ordinary people. When the Nazis took power, the book was banned and publicly burned, and Kellermann neither emigrated nor offered open resistance. After the war he took part in cultural life in East Germany, serving as a representative in the Volkskammer and as chairman of the Society for German-Soviet Friendship. This commitment brought a boycott from West German publishers, and his name faded in the West.
Shortly before his death in 1951, he brought together writers from both German states in an effort to promote unification. He was buried in the Neuer Friedhof in Potsdam.