Horst Bienek
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Born in Gleiwitz, Upper Silesia, Germany (today Gliwice, Poland), Bienek was forced to leave there in 1945 when Germans were expelled from Silesia. He resettled in the eastern part of Germany. For a time, he was a student of Bertolt Brecht. In 1951, he was arrested by NKVD and sentenced in a show trial to 25 years of labour for "anti-Soviet incitement" and alleged espionage on behalf of the United States, and sent to the Rechlag Gulag labor camp in Vorkuta and later to construction works in Sverdlovsk, Russia. When he was released as the result of an amnesty in 1955, he settled in West Germany. Much of his writing addressed the theme of his uprooting from his Upper Silesian homeland [1]
Although he was homosexual, his autobiographical writings never discussed openly his own homosexuality, and his novels only on occasion allude gently to homosexual attraction.[2]
Bienek died in Munich in 1990 from AIDS.[3]
