In 1979 Fritz Rudolf Fries received the Heinrich Mann Prize for Literature, the highest literary honor of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The award acknowledged Fries's twenty years of activity as translator, critic, novelist, and author of travelogues, radio plays, and short stories. In conferring the award, the poet Karl Mickel emphasized Fries's role in introducing Spanish and Latin American literature to GDR readers. Mickel lauded Fries as the modern heir to a centuries-old German fascination with the Iberian peninsula, as an artist who fused German and Spanish literary traditions, and as a "Prosadichter, der in zwei Kulturen lebt" (poet of prose who lives in two cultures).

Fries's cultural duality is central to his work. In interviews and speeches he has expressed his indebtedness to both German and Hispanic writers. The German literary figure who had the greatest impact on Fries is the eighteenth-century novelist Jean Paul (Johann Paul...