Gerhard Zwerenz dead: author of Love the dead men – SPIEGEL ONLINE

Gerhard Zwerenz is dead. The author died on Monday morning at the age of 90 years after a long illness, his wife the German Press Agency said.

Zwerenz belonged in the seventies of the most famous writers of the West German Left. His works were among more than 100 books – novels about detective stories and children’s books to erotic-pornographic texts.

His first publications had born in Saxony Gablenz Zwerenz in the East German press (in the “world stage” and “Sunday”), but he also wrote for the cabaret “Die Pfeffermühle” in Leipzig. His critical attitude to government policy resulted in 1957 to his expulsion from the SED, prompting Zwerenz soon moved to West Germany.

Here he made in 1959 with “Love the dead men” sensation, a novelistic design of GDR uprising of 17 June 1953. 1966, he managed a best-seller with “Casanova or The Little Men in War and Peace”.

Two of his works made for greater social attention: In his book “The Earth is uninhabitable as the moon” he created the figure of a Jewish speculators, which earned him the accusation of anti-Semitism. The book was the template for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s controversial play “Garbage, the City and Death”, which in 1985 discontinued due to protests. 1988 sparked Zwerenz ‘essay “soldiers are murderers” a scandal.

For the SED’s successor party, the PDS, he sat from 1994 to 1998 in the Bundestag. His time as an MP he worked in the book “War in the greenhouse or the Bundestag as a windmill”. Only on 3 June Zwerenz had celebrated his 90th birthday.