Werner Klemke was born in Berlin in 1917. He was a self-taught artist, and was drawing animation between 1937 and 1939. After World War II, he became a contributor to the satirical DDR magazine Eulenspiegel.
He started teaching at the Hochschule für Bildende und Angewandte Kunst in East Berlin in 1951, and was appointed professor there in 1956. Mostly an illustrator of fairy tales, novels and magazines, Werner Klemke did create a few comics, such as 'Burattino im Puppentheater des Carabas Barabas', which appeared with scripts by Dieter Scharfenberg in Der Freien Welt in 1982.
