Von Michalewsky was born in Dahlewitz, a town on the outskirts of Berlin. After having earned his living as a dock worker, a coffee harvester in the Congo, and a diver in the Mediterranean, he worked as a journalist in the Algerian war, eventually to start writing fictional works in the late 1950s, mostly juvenile novels. He expanded his field to documentary filming and writing of radio drama in the 1960s, an expertise he became very successful at. At the end of his life he would have more than 500 broadcast radio dramas to his name.