Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1973 - 10 Pfennig

Significant personalities, 1973 edition The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes five special postage stamps with illustrations of important personalities. No special first-day cover envelope Important personalities 10 Pfennig value Alongside Bertolt Brecht, FRIEDRICH WOLF is the most important German socialist playwright. From him comes the word "art is a weapon!", Which he realized in his life and work himself. On December 23, 1888, Friedrich Wolf was born the son of a merchant in Neuwied am Rhein. Early on he rebelled against the civil relations surrounding him, wandered through Europe, hired as a ship's boy. After studying medicine in Berlin, he became acquainted with the misery and distress of the exploited as a doctor on emigrant ships. Shaken by the horrors of the first imperialist world war, he refused military service and was transferred to a military hospital near Dresden in 1918. Here Friedrich Wolf found a connection to the political struggle, as a member of the Workers 'and Soldiers' Council he participated in the November Revolution. He joined the USPD and took a leading part in the suppression of the fascist Kapp putsch in 1920 part. In this period fall the first literary works, Wolf's stories, sketches and dramas with humanistic content, still strongly influenced by Expressionism. Disappointed by the betrayal of the right-wing social-democracy in the revolution, he participated in the utopian settlement of left-wing intellectuals in Worpswede, after which he dedicated himself for a long time to exclusively popular medical publications. Friedrich Wolf, who joined the revolutionary labor movement in Stuttgart in 1927, remained firmly attached to the revolutionary workers' movement. He remained there until his escape from fascist Germany in the spring of 1933. This was where the most important drama about the November Revolution "Sailors of Cottaro", the women's dramas, was written "Cyankali" and "Tai Yang awakens". In Stuttgart, Wolf founded a revolutionary working-class troupe for which he wrote three plays. In 1928 he joined the Communist Party of Germany. Even in the years of emigration Friedrich Wolf linked his active engagement against fascism with the weapon of poetry. So he wrote in 1934 the famous literary reckoning with the fascism "Professor Mamlock". After the liberation, in which Friedrich Wolf stood by the side of the fighting Soviet troops, the poet immediately put himself at the disposal of building up the state of the workers and peasants. Until his death on October 5, 1953, he was a leading cultural and social activist, at times as ambassador of the GDR in Poland. As in the past, the revolutionary struggles of the past and present also reflected the struggle for socialist Germany in his plays, as in "Mayor Anna" from the year 1950. The last great drama by Wolf "Thomas Müntzer" was filmed like other of his stage plays , Today, the work of Friedrich Wolf is maintained by the Academy of Arts of the GDR in the Friedrich Wolf Archive Lehnitz near Berlin and made usable for the present.