Rainer Kirsch


Rainer Kirsch was a German writer and poet.

Life and career

Kirsch was born in Döbeln in 1934. After graduating from high school, he studied history at the Klosterschule Roßleben and philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Jena in 1953. In 1957 he was relegated, and in 1958 he was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. After that, he worked as a laborer in a print shop, as a chemical worker, and in agriculture.
From 1960 until his death in 2015, he was a freelance writer and published his first poems. From 1963 to 1965, he studied at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig. He was considered a representative of the Saxon School of Poetry.
From 1960 to 1968, he was married to the writer Sarah Kirsch. In 1973, he was excluded from the SED for the second time due to disputes over his comedy Heinrich Schlaghands Höllenfahrt. After the peaceful revolution in East Germany in 1990, he was president of the East German Writers' Association, in the same year a member of the Academy of Arts in Berlin. Kirsch was also a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts.
Kirsch emerged as a writer of poetry, plays, short stories and essays, radio plays and children's books. He also produced numerous translations and adaptations from Russian, Georgian, English and French languages.
Kirsch died in Berlin on 4 September 2015 at the age of 81.

Works