Lewald was born in 1860; his aunt was Jewish novelist Fanny Lewald. Lewald became a civil servant in Prussia in 1885, and became the acting Reich Commissioner in 1903. In that role, Lewald attended the 1904 Worlds Fair (held along with the Olympic Games), where he disagreed with Kaiser Wilhelm II over whether the Deutscher Olympischer Sportbund, of which he was the President, should be politically independent. After Berlin won the right to stage the 1916 Summer Olympics (which were later cancelled due to the outbreak of World War I), Lewald encouraged the German Reich to invest in the games, arguing that it was comparable to a World Trade Exhibition. By the end of World War I Lewald was so well connected as the highest civil servant of Imperial Germany that he personally wrote the abdication speech of the last imperial government. At the time of the Kapp Putsch Lewald was the acting Head of Government as all ministers had left Berlin. He refused being forced at gun-point to provide government funds for the revolting military. Lewald, a conservative, was getting into more and more difficulties with the Social Democratic governments and eventually retired from Civil Service in 1923, but stayed on in more that ten honorary positions, e.g. in charge of German international student exchange, the board of several prominent museums and the National Olympic Committee; he had been the under Secretary of State. In 1935, Lewald recommended that Pierre de Coubertin be awarded a Nobel Prize.