Background
Kirsch was born in Döbeln in 1934.
Kirsch was born in Döbeln in 1934.
He studied after graduating from high school at the Klosterschule Roßleben in 1953 in History and Philosophy at the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg and the University of Jena. From 1963 to 1965 he studied at the German Institute for Literature in Leipzig.
In 1957 he was expelled from the 1958 SED. After that he worked as a laborer in a print shop, as a chemical worker, and in agriculture. Since 1960 until his death in 2015, he was a freelance writer and published his first poems. He was considered a representative of the Saxon School of Poetry.
In 1973, he was excluded from the SED from disputes over his comedy Heinrich Schlaghands Höllenfahrt for the second time.
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). Kirsch died in Berlin on 4 September 2015 at the age of 81.
Sächsische Akademie der Künste]
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. Cherry was also a member of the Saxon Academy of Arts.
