Sven Dethlefs

Sven Dethlefs was born and raised in Germany. He studied biochemistry in Berlin and Milan, and received a PhD in immunology from the Pasteur Institute Paris. Sven was a partner at McKinsey&Company and a senior executive at Teva Pharmaceuticals. He is now a Biotech executive based in Boston.

Sven is passionate about history and literature. When he saw that his children in U.S. schools were assigned Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front as the defining World War I novel, he set out to translate Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (Rapid Fire) — a groundbreaking, long-neglected work banned by the Third Reich. His translation revives this modernist classic, bringing its stark, unsentimental view of war to today’s readers with fresh relevance.