Werner is a Professor, Emeritus, of Dartmouth College. He considers himself a skeptical humanist since he survived torture and five years of the Gulag. He graduated from the College Francais in Berlin, studied history, philosophy, political sciences, classics, and European literatures. His PhD came from the University of Hamburg. He taught at the Sorbonne before coming to Dartmouth in 1965. He is the author of several fiction and non-fiction books.