19 Facts About Heinz Kahlau

Heinz Kahlau is remembered as one of the best known lyric poets in the German Democratic Republic.

Heinz Kahlau was particularly well known for his popular love poems.

Heinz Kahlau was born into a working-class family at Drewitz, a small town at that time just outside Potsdam.

Heinz Kahlau later wrote, that his first poems were "written by a nineteen year old whose relationship to poetry, up to that point, had been the worst imaginable".

Heinz Kahlau's stepfather thought that reading made you stupid and threw any printed material that came his way into the fire.

However, in 1949 Heinz Kahlau was sent away for half a year to a TB clinic at Rathenow where he had "his first pleasant encounter with poems" and wrote his own first verses.

Heinz Kahlau studied between 1953 and 1956 at the Academy of Arts, where he was picked out as a "Master student" and taught by Bertolt Brecht.

In 1957 the authorities determined that verse written by Heinz Kahlau had been critical of the fraternal invasion of Hungary.

Heinz Kahlau had already stirred serious controversy a couple of months before the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest with a speech delivered in June 1956 to a Congress of Young Artists at Karl-Marx-Stadt.

Heinz Kahlau condemned "what he called the fascist methods used by the supposedly anti-fascist authorities".

Heinz Kahlau advocated "thoroughgoing deStalinization and complete transparency" at the level of the national leadership.

Heinz Kahlau is listed in the Stasi records under the code name "GI Hochschulz".

Heinz Kahlau became a member of the German section of PEN International in 1965.

Heinz Kahlau worked with the rock bands Karat and Bayon, producing song lyrics.

Also in the aftermath of reunification, between 1990 and 1992 Heinz Kahlau served as a PDS local councillor in Berlin's Pankow quarter.

When he was 75 Heinz Kahlau moved with his family from Berlin to Usedom where he spent his final years, still working as an author.

Heinz Kahlau died in a clinic, but his body was buried at the cemetery of Stolpe auf Usedom near his island home.

Heinz Kahlau's best known compilation is "Du", a volume of love poems.

Heinz Kahlau was one of East Germany's most read poets, which was only partly because of the official backing his work received from the state.