Poet. Born in Neuruppin to a schoolmaster and washerwoman, he obtained his Abitur and began to study art at a teachers college in Neuruppin. His first poems were published in 1925. He joined the Communist Party in 1926 and became a teacher in Berlin. In 1933, due to his Communist politics and a half-Jewish wife, he fled the Nazis and went into exile, first in Switzerland and then in Spain, where he took part in the Spanish Civil War, and finally in Columbia. He returned to East Germany in 1950; however, he was not allowed to join the ruling Socialist Unity Party and was under surveillance by the Stasi secret police from 1957 on. Disappointed by the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he joined reform socialist organizations and signed the protest against the removal of Wolf Bierman’s East German citizenship in 1976. He died of a stroke in Wilhelmshorst. His poems reflected his experiences travelling and living in foreign countries, and he was the German translator of Pablo Neruda. (bio by: Kenneth Gilbert)