Life
Hans Lorbeer was born as the illegitimate child of a worker girl in Lutherstadt Wittenberg in the Province of Saxony and grew up with foster parents in Kleinwittenberg and Piesteritz, both districts of Lutherstadt Wittenberg. After a non-self contained vocational training as a plumber, he was a laborer at different chemical laboratories in and around Wittenberg. He would become a member of the Freien deutsche Jugend (Free German Youth) in 1918, then the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) in 1921 and then a co-founder of the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors in 1928. He wrote for the KPD newspaper Klassenkampf (Class Struggle) in Halle and Die Rote Fahne after 1927. He was sacked from the Nitrogen factory in Piesteritz for political agitation and remained jobless until 1933. His exclusion from the KPD in 1931 because of violation of party lines that would be annulled in 1945. In 1932 he joined the Communist Party of Germany (Opposition). Because of anti-fascist resistance and contacts to the group Weise, he would be in a concentration camp in 1933 and 1934, then the Zuchthaus and Emslandlager, after which he was a laborer under Gestapo supervision.
From May 8, 1945 until July 31, 1950, Lorbeer was mayor of Piesteritz and then a freelance writer until his death.
Hans Lorbeer was a member of the Akademie der Künste. For his literary works, he was awarded the 1959 Heinrich Mann Prize, the 1961 National Prize of East Germany, the 1963 Mündel Prize of the Halle Bezirk and the 1971 Lion Feuchtwanger Prize, as well as the gold Patriotic Order of Merit and the Order of the Banner of Labor. On August 8, 1976, the city government of Lutherstadt Wittenberg agreed that Hans Lorbeer would be named an honorary citizen of the City. On the basis of the then legally valid position, he is viewed as the last Honorary Citizen of that city.
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Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Poor vaunt of life indeed,
Were man but formed to feed
On joy, to solely seek and find and feast:”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)
“Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man’s life if he has the weight and cares about the words.”
—Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)
“You must not eat with it anything leavened. For seven days you shall eat unleavened bread with it -the bread of affliction -because you came out of the land of Egypt in great haste, so that all the days of your life you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt.”
—Bible: Hebrew, Deuteronomy 16:3.