Commemorative stamp series - Germany / German Democratic Republic 1989 - 10 Pfennig

Important personalities The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications of the German Democratic Republic publishes five multicolored special postage stamps with illustrations of important personalities. Special cancellation from February 28 to April 27, 1989 Ludwig Renn In April 1989 we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the writer and journalist Ludwig Renn, to whom German and above all socialist literature owes a substantial part of their great international resonance. Arnold Vieth von Golßenau, so his real name, or Ludwig Renn, as he called himself after the first-person narrator in his first book "War" (1929) since then, had already achieved a worldwide success with the book "War". As a literary document on the First World War, the author sought not only to fathom the causes of the failure of the imperialist war of robbery, but also focused on the transformation of his war-loving hero to antimilitarist. His style of narrative became characterized by an analytically accurate and at the same time epistemological approach that was binding on the "new objectivity". His life and work was closely linked to essential historical landmarks of our era. Coming from a Saxon aristocratic family, Ludwig Renn, who was born on April 22, 1889, the son of a professor of mathematics and physics and prince educator, was given a brilliant military career. The fact that he turned away from the caste of his origins, that his eyes were opened on a frantic, complicated path of development over the fronts of the class struggle, with his experiences in "War" (1929) and "Postwar" (1930) - that's the title his first two books - to do. From the sense of community with the ordinary soldiers in the First World War, the solidarity thinking of the officer Ludwig Renn has developed. The futility of acting as an individual eventually led him to recognize the need for a disciplined organization of the working class. In 1928 he became a member of the KPD, secretary of the Union of proletarian-revolutionary writers and published his literary magazine "Die Linksskurve". In 1932 and 1933 he was arrested for his anti-militarist stance and eventually sentenced to two and a half years in prison. In vain did the Nazis seek to win over the well-known writer; Dismissed in 1935, he managed a little later escape from Hitler Germany. During the Spanish Civil War he was commander of the Thälmann battalion, then chief of staff of the XI. International Brigade. In 1939, when he won the Spanish fascists, he went to exile in Mexico, where he was a university professor of modern European history and languages ​​and at the same time president of the "Free Germany" movement in Mexico. After returning home in 1947, he became a professor at the Technical University of Dresden, first chairman of the Cultural Association in Saxony and lived since 1952 as a freelance writer in Berlin. He received many awards (including the National Prize in 1955 and 1961). He died at the age of ninety-one, on July 21, 1979.