Walter Ernsting

Who was Walter Ernsting?

Walter Ernsting was a German science fiction and fantasy author who mainly published under the pseudonym Clark Darlton. He grew up in Koblenz and was drafted into the German Wehrmacht shortly after the beginning of World War II. He served in an intelligence unit in Norway and on the Eastern Front where he was captured and spent several years as a prisoner of war in Siberia.

After returning to Germany, Ernsting started to work as a translator for the British authorities in 1952 and came into contact with Anglo-American science fiction magazines. Intrigued with this literary genre, he started working on some science fiction novels of his own, but Germany's cultural climate was apparently not ready for native science fiction authors. Ernsting finally managed to get some of his novels published by inventing a fictitious British author, Clark Darlton, and selling his own works as translations of Darlton's works. His first novel, Ufo am Nachthimmel, was published in 1955 as issue 19 of Utopia Großband.

Ernsting published several novels under the Darlton pseudonym and on August 4, 1955, together with other science fiction authors, founded the Science Fiction Club Deutschland. Until the end of the 1960s, Ernsting worked as an editor for the club's magazine, Andromeda, and became an important figure in German science fiction fandom.