Peter Gan

Gan, Peter, pseudonym of Richard Moering (Hamburg, 1894-1974, Hamburg), studied at Oxford before the 1914-18 War, in which he served as an officer in the German army. Afterwards he studied law at Marburg, Bonn, and Hamburg universities (1919-24). From 1927 to 1929 he lived in Paris. Until 1938, when he returned to Paris, he was a publisher's reader in Berlin. He was interned by Vichy-France, but reached Spain in 1942. He settled in Hamburg in 1958.

Gan wrote fluent and often reflectively melancholy poetry in traditional forms. His collections of verse are entitled Die Windrose (1935), Ausgewählte Gedichte (1936), Die Holunderflöte (1949), Preis der Dinge (1956, a selection of previously published poems), Schachmatt (1956), Die Neige (1961), and Das alte Spiel (1965). He translated English poetry, and one of his own poems begins with a German rendering of Herrick's line ‘When I a verse shall make’. In 1935 he published a volume of essays, Von Gott und der Welt.