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Verwandte und Bekannte #2

by Willi Bredel, 张威廉 (translator)

German

550 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1949

About the author

Willi Bredel (May 2, 1901 – October 27, 1964) was a German writer and president of the Akademie der Künste. Born in Hamburg, he was a pioneer of socialist realist literature.

Soon after the Nazis seized power in 1933, Bredel was imprisoned at Fuhlsbüttel concentration camp. He was released in spring 1934. After fleeing from Nazi Germany to Czechoslovakia and Moscow, where he lived at Hotel Lux. He published Die Prüfung (1934), a novel describing the Nazi concentration camp, which was reprinted several times and translated into other languages. He also published accounts of his experiences in the Deutsche Zentral Zeitung, a German-language newspaper published in Moscow.

Bredel took part in the Spanish Civil War as commissar of the Thälmann Battalion as well as the Second World War, in which he fought on the Soviet side. After the war, he returned to Germany as part of the Sobottka Group, sent to lay the groundwork for the Soviet occupation of Mecklenburg. He later lived in East Germany and died in Berlin.