Reiner Kunze came of age in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and began his writing career as a hopeful socialist. As conflicts with the authorities increased, his poems lost much of their romantic musicality and acquired a terseness and sarcastic wit modeled on the style of Bertolt Brecht. Kunze's epigrammatic creations contain less rationality than Brecht's, but they have more open emotions and even some light-hearted humor. Kunze is a master of the short form in both poetry and prose, an enemy of superfluous words and of dogmatism. His 1981 collection of poems Auf eigene Hoffnung: Gedichte (For My Own Hope) bears the motto: "Des Fahnenhissens bin ich müde" (I am tired of hoisting a flag).

Kunze was born in 1933 to Ernst and Martha Kunze in Oelsnitz, Germany, in the Erzgebirge region on the Czech border. There had been miners--including his father--and craftsmen in his family, and...