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Christoph Hein
Birth at
8 April 1944
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Christoph Hein was born on April 8, 1944 in a pastoral family in the Silesian village of Heinzendorf and grew up in a small Saxon town. After the war, the family moved to Deblen near Leipzig, where Hein spent his childhood and youth. As the son of a pastor was denied the right to attend a gymnasium in the GDR, he moved to West Berlin in 1958 and, while living in a boarding school, studied there in a humanitarian gymnasium. But the construction of the wall in August 1961 suddenly interrupted his
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Christoph Hein was born on April 8, 1944 in a pastoral family in the Silesian village of Heinzendorf and grew up in a small Saxon town. After the war, the family moved to Deblen near Leipzig, where Hein spent his childhood and youth. As the son of a pastor was denied the right to attend a gymnasium in the GDR, he moved to West Berlin in 1958 and, while living in a boarding school, studied there in a humanitarian gymnasium. But the construction of the wall in August 1961 suddenly interrupted his training and forced him to remain in the GDR.
From 1961 to 1967, Christoph Hine tried himself in a variety of professions: editor, book seller, kelner, journalist, actor in small roles and assistant director. He graduated from evening school, which he had attended since 1964. In 1967, Hein began studying philosophy and logic at the University of Leipzig, then graduated in 1971 at Humboldt University in Berlin.
Under the leadership of the famous Swiss director and theater director Benno Besson Christoph Hein became the head of the literary part at the Berlin drama theater “Volksbune”. Since 1974, he was officially appointed playwright of the theater, and in the same year his play “Schletel, or How to understand it?” was staged. In 1979, Hein left the theater at the same time as Benno Besson and has remained a freelance artist ever since.
He first translated from Greek. In addition, he wrote radio reports on topical topics and continued to compose new plays. The breakthrough came in 1980, when both West and East Germany made his debut as a prose writer – the book Night Trip and Early Morning was published. In 1989, Hein received the Department of Poetics at the Folkwang Higher School of Music, Theatre and Dance in Essen. Since 1992, he has been one of the publishers of the weekly Freitag and is a member of the Academy of Language and Literature in Darmstadt. In 1996, Hein joined the PEN Club of Germany, and in 1998 was elected President of the United PEN Club of Germany. Christoph Hein has been awarded many prizes: in 1982 the Heinrich Mann Prize, the Academy of Arts of the GDR; in 1983 the West Berlin Culture Prize; in 1986 the Literary Prize of the New Literary Society; in 1989 the Lessing Prize in the GDR; in 1990 the Erich Fried Prize; in 1992 the Berlin Literary Prize; in 1994 the Peter Houchel Prize and the Order of Merit to the Fatherland, as well as the Peter Weiss Prize, Bochum; 2000 the Solothurn Literary Prize, Switzerland; 2002 the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.