[1] By this time the war had ended, with a large strip of territory in the centre of the country - which included Potsdam - administered, since May 1945, as the Soviet occupation zone.

[6] He later wrote, that his first poems were "written by a nineteen year old whose relationship to poetry, up to that point, had been the worst imaginable" ("Mein erstes Gedicht wurde von einem 19-Jährigen geschrieben, dessen Beziehungen zur Poesie bis dahin die denkbar schlechtesten waren").

He characterised himself as thin-skinned at that time in his poem "Weißer Mann" (loosely: "white/pale Man"): he had "suffered till he was nineteen from depression, delusion and heightened anxiety.

[1] He studied between 1953 and 1956 at the (East German) Academy of Arts (" Akademie der Künste"), where he was picked out as a "Master student" ("Meisterschüler") and taught by Bertolt Brecht.

[7] In later years he would gratefully recall how Brecht had taught him to recognise "life's contradictions", and to write using simple, clear language.

[1] In Autumn 1956 he was participating in the so-called "Thursday circle" ("Donnerstag-Kreis") of young artists and intellectuals that came together following the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising.

He had already stirred serious controversy a couple of months before the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest with a speech delivered in June 1956 to a Congress of Young Artists at Karl-Marx-Stadt (as Chemnitz was then known).

He decried "what he saw as the petty bourgeois attitudes of many functionaries and workers and proclaimed that it was young writers ... answerable only to their own conscience, who [should] shape the future of socialism in Germany".

It was not the only speech delivered at that congress that was, by the standards of an older generation that had learned not to speak out of turn, critical of the authorities, but it seems to have been the most outspoken.

[3] Unlike many who had passed information to the surveillance authorities under similar circumstances, during the changes of 1989/90, in May 1990 Heinz Kahlau was one of the first to make his former collaboration with the Stasi public.