[3] He came to wider public attention in 2011 as the subject of the documentary film Vaterlandsverräter (English translation: Enemy of the State) by Annekatrin Hendel about his past as a Stasi informer.
[4] After completing compulsory education, he undertook a carpentry apprenticeship from 1952 to 1954, and then did manual work in the Ruhr, in Berlin, in Weimar, and later in the brown coal open-cast mine in Schlabendorf in the Lausitz.
[4] In Weimar, in 1962, he was an official in the local Free German Youth and decided to collaborate with the Ministry for State Security (MfS or Stasi) as an informer.
[6] In 1968 he enrolled at the "Johannes R. Brecher" Institute for Literature at Leipzig University, a creative writing school, but after a short time, by almost unanimous vote of faculty and students, he was expelled.
Although a convinced communist, his unadorned realism, and readiness to tackle taboo themes, for example the East German juvenile re-education establishments (Jugendwerkhöfe), brought him into conflict with the censors.
[3] In GDR literary circles he was, as a worker who wrote, already unusual, but his gregariousness, charisma, and magnetic effect on women, made him one of the most colourful figures.
In 2012 it was broadcast by Arte, and in 2013 awarded a Grimme-Preis in the Information category: Annekatrin Hendel presents her protagonist as a contradictory, sometimes challenging, sometimes repellent character.