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 satiric 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 fairytales, 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.
