Stephan Hermlin first gained acclaim in postwar German literary circles with the publication of Zwölf Balladen von den großen Städten (1945). These "twelve ballads of the great cities" of Europe, and other works which followed in the next five years, showed Hermlin to be both a poet of great sensitivity and vision and an adroit adapter of earlier poetry. In one of the earliest appraisals of Hermlin's poetry, the noted critic Hans Mayer praised Zwölf Balladen von den großen Städten not only for its aesthetic quality but also for its prophetic visions of a new social order and, above all, for its expressions of hope in one of Germany's darkest hours.

Drawing on German and French traditions, particularly on the German expressionist Georg Heym and the French surrealists Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, Hermlin wrote poetry during...