Background
Helmut Hauptmann grew up in a working-class family in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Helmut Hauptmann grew up in a working-class family in Berlin-Kreuzberg.
Near the end of World World War II, he served as a Luftwaffenhelfer in Berlin and became a Prisoner of war at a camp in Schleswig-Holstein. After the Abitur, he worked with the Magistrate of Greater Berlin. Since the early 1950s, he has worked as a literary editor, journalist, and writer in Berlin.
Hauptmann writes narrative works that reflect the ideological optimism of early East Germany as well as travel journals which captured the experience of the writer in the Eastern Bloc.
Deutsche Demokratische Republik-Reportage, Leipzig 1969.
Hauptmann was a member of the Schriftstellerverband of East Germany since 1956 and the PEN-Zentrums of East Germany since 1972.