Rainer Kirsch

Rainer Kirsch (17 July 1934 – 4 September 2015) was a German writer and poet.

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 SED. 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 1970, he was married to the writer Sarah Kirsch. In 1973, he was excluded from the SED from disputes over his comedy Heinrich Schlaghands Höllenfahrt for the second time. 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 (like the works of Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova, Sergei Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Daniil Kharms, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Vladimir Vysotsky, and Maxim Gorky), Georgian, English (John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley) and French languages (Molière, Edmond Rostand).

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