Peter Horn (poet)

Peter Rudolf Gisela Horn, born 7 December 1934 in Teplice Czechoslovakia (currently in Czech Republic). He is a South African poet, who made his mark especially with his anti-Apartheid poetry. At the end of World War II he had to flee from his home and settled with his parents first in Bavaria and later in Freiburg im Breisgau, where he completed high school in 1954. He then emigrated with his parents to South Africa.

He attended the primary school in Schönau; the Gymnasium in Teplice (1945); Donauwörth (1945–1950); Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg (Brsg) (1950–1954).He studied at the University of the Witwatersrand and the College of Education (Johannesburg). He worked for some time as a packer, builder, lab assistant, photographer, insurance agent, and a teacher. He then taught at University of the Witwatersrand, the University of South Africa and the University of Zululand. He was professor and head of department of German at the University of Cape Town (1974–1999). He is now Honorary Professor and Research Associate at the University of the Witwatersrand. [1]

His poetry has been characterised by Jacques Alvarez-Pereyre as follows:

Totalitarian regimes have the citizens and poets they deserve, those who accept the bayonets upon which order is based and who, by their silence or useless chatter, make themselves the accomplices of those who rule. Peter Horn' is not one of these: he has chosen to be on the side of the oppressed, on the side of the future, of the dream of a multiracial society, in short, on the side of freedom.,

Lionel Abrahams said that his poetry "is overwhelmingly the record of his responses to aspects of the South African system, which he scrutinises not in a nakedly personal way but, rather in the manner of his master Brecht, through the equipment of a revolutionary critique.".

...
Wikipedia