Painter, printmaker, and typographer Walter Buhe was born in Aschersleben, Germany, on May 25, 1882. He studied with Emil Orlik in Berlin and worked as a commerical artist and typographer in Leipzig. He was a member of the Deutscher Kunstlerbund, Deutscher Werkbund, and Verein Deutscher Buchgewerbekunstler Leipzig. His fine art pursuits included oil painting, watercolor, color woodcut, and lithography. From 1920 to 1947 Buhe  was a professor at the Leipzig Academy of Graphic Art and Book Art from 1920 to 1945, and in 1937 he won a gold medal at the 1937 World Exhibition in Paris for his series of woodcuts: 'People of Rosendorf,'

During the First World War Buhe was conscripted into the German Army as a war illustrator for Bildershau der Wilnaer Zeitung newspaper in Vilnius, Lithuania, from 1916 to 1918. There, he documented the fallout of the Russian army's occupation and the German army's attempt to rebuild it within the confines of the German aesthetic and social ideals - precursors to Nazism. The result was a visual examination of the complex and devastating fallout of war on Vilnius, which would later become a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation. Buhe's output is now recognized as possibly the most extensive of that time in Vilnius, and was unusual in his choice of subjects, often depicting everyday people doing everyday things. 

Buhe died on December 22, 1958, in Leipzig.