Georg Maurer

Born Mar. 11, 1907, in Transylvania. Poet of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Son of a teacher.

Maurer left Transylvania for Germany in 1926. Up to 1932 he was in Leipzig and Berlin studying the history of art, German literature and culture, and philosophy. His collections of verse Eternal Voices (1936) and Songs of Time (1948) have a tendency toward Christian images and motifs. The socialist transformations in the GDR marked a new stage in Maurer’s career. The poet turned from idealism to a materialist consciousness, as exemplified in the collections Forty-two Sonnets (1953) and The Elements(1955) and the book of critical essays The Poet and His Time (1956). He won public recognition with his epic cycle A Poetic Journey (1959) and the collections of verse Variations (1965), Images of Love (1964), and Circles (1970). He has translated into German the works of Rumanian writers of the 19th and 20th centuries. Maurer is the author of a book of critical essays entitled The World of Lyric Poetry (1965). He has been awarded the J. Becher Prize (1961) and the National Prize of the German Democratic Republic (1965).