Theodor Kramer

After completing his secondary education with the matura examination he served as an officer in the Austrian army until the end of the war.

His lyrical yet unromantic poetry draws its power and poetic quality from its depiction of outsiders: members of the proletariat, tramps, craftsmen, servants and whores.

Thomas Mann called him, "one of the greatest poets of the young generation," and Stefan Zweig and Carl Zuckmayer promoted his writing.

Yet the eighteen years of his exile in the United Kingdom were sufficient to allow his work to fall into obscurity, at least amongst the general reading public.

In recent years the Berlin singer Hans-Eckardt Wenzel has released two albums of Kramer's poems set to music, which has revived interest in the poet in the German-speaking world.

In her 1996 book, In der Falle, Nobel Prize-winning author Herta Müller analyzed Kramer's autobiographical poetry in the context of dictatorship.