Albert Hotopp was born in what he would later describe as a "grey quarter of Berlin, on the east side of town, just beyond the city limits".
[2] Albert himself started working when he reached the age of ten, delivering milk and bread products to middle-class homes in the early mornings.
Following a strike he was convicted of preparing to commit High Treason and sentenced to a four-year jail term most of which he served, between 1923 and 1926, in Cottbus.
It was during this time that he began to write, producing narrative pieces that were published in the left-wing Rote Fahne ("Red Flag" newspaper).
[1] He was released early, in 1926, after which he headed up the Party policy team in the Berlin Prenzlauer Berg district and served on the local council till 1929.
He joined the Red Front Fighters and, in 1928, the Association of Proletarian-Revolutionary Authors, through which he formed a close friendship with fellow-writer Willi Bredel.
Till February 1934 Albert Hotopp continued to live, now illegally, in Germany, working as a Communist Party treasurer.
Hotropp himself provided a written report on Herwarth Walden, a fellow teacher at the Foreign Languages Institute who was later arrested.
Three subsequent narrative works that appeared in the Soviet Union had as their principal themes Workers' Life, Experiences of War and Resistance to Nazism.