Christoph Hein is considered one of the foremost critical authors to have emerged in the German Democratic Republic in the 1980s. He was also a prominent commentator on the changeover from the communist East German regime to capitalism and unification with the Federal Republic. In the 1990s he established himself as a respected author in post-unification Germany and remains committed to his self-proclaimed role as a “chronicler” of his society and its relationship with its past.
Christoph Hein was born on 8 April 1944 in Heinzendorf, Silesia (now part of Poland), as the third child of a Protestant pastor. At the end of the Second World War his family moved to what would, in 1949, become the German Democratic Republic, …
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