Background
Hermlin was born on April 13, 1915 in Chemnitz, Kreishauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Germany, in the family of Jewish immigrant and art collector David Leder and his wife Lola.
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1974
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1982
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1983
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1985
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1987
Hermlin was born on April 13, 1915 in Chemnitz, Kreishauptmannschaft Chemnitz, Germany, in the family of Jewish immigrant and art collector David Leder and his wife Lola.
From 1933 until 1936, Stephan worked as a printer's apprentice. After his return to Germany, he worked as a radio broadcaster in Frankfurt am Main. He moved to East Berlin in 1947, and was a contributor to several communist magazines, including Tägliche Rundschau, Ulenspiegel, Aufbau, and Sinn und Form.
As the author of several well-known pro-Stalin propaganda songs, Hermlin soon was working in some of the most important governmental bodies in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. In December 1962 Hermlin joined the initiators of a group dedicated to the reading of young poets at the East German Academy of Arts. Some of the poets featured by this group included Wolf Biermann, Volker Braun, Bernd Jentzsch, Sarah Kirsch, and Karl Mickel. This group, and the Akademie der Künste as a whole, was at the forefront of a spike in the popularity of lyric poetry in 1960s East Germany.
Thereupon, Stephan was relieved of his position of Secretary of Poetry at the Akademie, although he remained a member. He was a critic of the Soviet crushing of the Prague Spring in 1968, although he did not make these criticisms very open. He was much more open in his criticism of the East German government's 1976 expulsion of a contemporary poet, Wolf Biermann, whose poetry Hermlin exhibited some years previously.
In 1931, Stephan joined a communist youth organization.
Academy of Arts of the GDR]He was also a member of the Schriftstellerverband der DDR and the Akademie der Künste West Berlin (English: East German Writer's Association and West Berlin Academy of the Arts, respectively).
Stephan was married four times.
