Heinz Kahlau

Heinz Kahlau (6 February 1931 - 6 April 2012) was a German writer. He is remembered as one of the best known lyric poets in the German Democratic Republic. He wrote song lyrics, dramas and prose pieces. He was particularly well known for his popular love poems. At the time of his death the Leipziger Volkszeitung (newspaper) reported that around four million copies of volumes of his poetry had been sold. Heinz Kahlau was born into a working-class family at Drewitz, a small town at that time just outside Potsdam. After leaving school in 1945 he worked as an unskilled labourer in various sectors, at one stage as an electrician and at another as a "wood turner". In 1948 he obtained a job driving a tractor. By this time the war had ended, with a large strip of territory in the centre of the country - which included Potsdam - administered, since May 1945, as the Soviet occupation zone. In 1948 he took a job as an official of the Free German Youth ("Freie Deutsche Jugend" / FDJ). The FDJ was in effect the youth wing of the recently constructed Socialist Unity Party ("Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands" / SED) which by this time was well on the way to becoming the ruling party in a new kind of Germany one-party dictatorship. Kahlau became an SED party member in 1948, but sources indicate that he lost his membership in 1949 or 1950, which was a little unusual. In 1949 he relocated to nearby Berlin. He 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" ("Mein erstes Gedicht wurde von einem 19-Jährigen geschrieben, dessen Beziehungen zur Poesie bis dahin die denkbar schlechtesten waren"). His stepfather thought that reading made you stupid and threw any printed material that came his way into the fire. However, in 1949 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.