After his parents divorced in 1941, he and his mother Alma Agee, née Mailman, went to live in Mexico where she met and married the expatriate German novelist Bodo Uhse.
[3] In 1948 the family moved to the Soviet sector of Berlin, where Uhse became editor in chief of the cultural magazine Aufbau, a member of the GDR-Volkskammer, and later chairman of the East German writers association.
A small inheritance enabled him to travel around Europe for two and a half years with his wife and daughter in search of kindred souls interested in founding a commune.
He wrote the memoir Twelve Years – An American Boyhood in East Germany (1981), followed by In the House of My Fear (2004).
He has translated works by Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Elias Canetti, Rainer Maria Rilke, Gottfried Benn, Hans Erich Nossack, Jürg Federspiel, Aeschylus and others.