Though Günter Eich began and ended his career writing pieces for the theater, he is best known for his radio plays. He was born on 1 February 1907 to Otto Eich and Helene Heine Eich in Lebus an der Oder in the eastern German province of Brandenburg. He was the second of two sons. Eich's father, an accountant, served as a tax consultant after moving the family to Berlin in 1918. Eich completed his secondary education in Leipzig in 1925 and then began the study of sinology at the University of Berlin and in Paris. In his first year of university study in Berlin, Eich wrote his first poems; some of these poems were included by Willi Fehse and Klaus Mann in their important anthology of 1927 under the pseudonym Erich Günter. Eich changed his area of study to economics and business and moved to the University of Leipzig...