Karl Krolow

Krolow came from a family of civil servants, and grew up in Hanover where he attended grammar school. From 1935 to 1942 he studied Germanic and Romance languages, philosophy and art history at the universities of Göttingen and Breslau. Krolow, who had been a member of the Hitler Youth from 1934, joined the NSDAP in 1937. From 1940. Krolow began having poems published in Nazi propaganda journals such as the Krakauer Zeitung. From 1942 he was working as a freelance writer based in Göttingen. In 1943/44, he published in the Nazi weekly journal Das Reich. Krolow moved to Hanover in 1952, and in 1956 to Darmstadt, where he lived working as an independent writer until his death. From the 1950s, Krolow was considered one of the greatest poets of the postwar German literature. He was also a translator from French and Spanish, and author of works of prose. From 1951, he was a member of the PEN Center of the Federal Republic of Germany, from 1953 a member of the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung in Darmstadt (temporarily as president), from 1960 a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz, and from 1962, a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. For his extensive and varied work he has received numerous awards, including 1956 Georg Büchner Prize, the 1965 Great Lower Saxony Art Award, 1975, the Goethe-Plakette des Landes Hessen, the Grand Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the literature prize Stadtschreiber von Bergen and Rainer Maria Rilke Prize for Poetry in 1976, an honorary doctorate from the Technische Universität Darmstadt, in 1983 the Hessischer Kulturpreis (Hessian Culture Prize), in 1985 the Großer Literaturpreis der Bayerischen Akademie der Schönen Künste and in 1988 the Friedrich-Hölderlin-Preis of Bad Homburg. Krolow is buried in the family grave of his parents and grandparents in the Municipal Cemetery Engesohde (division 13) of his hometown of Hanover.