Claudius, Eduard

Claudius, Eduard 

(pseudonym of E. Schmidt). Born July 29, 1911, in Buer, near Gelsenkirchen. German writer (GDR). Son of a stonemason. Member of the German Communist Party since 1932.

Claudius’ novel Green Olives and Bald Mountains (1945) is devoted to the national revolutionary war of the Spanish people (1936–39), in which he fought. He was a partisan in the Garibaldi detachment in Italy in 1945 and served as a diplomat in the postwar years. The novel Those Who Are With Us (1951; Russian translation, 1953) and a number of subsequent works deal with the problems of socialist development in the GDR. His short-story collection The Maiden “Light Cloud” (1962) depicts the struggle of the Vietnamese people. Claudius was awarded the T. Fontane Prize in 1954 and the GDR National Prize in 1951.

WORKS

Ruhelose Jahre: Erinnerungen. Halle, 1968.
In Russian translation:
Derevnia u reki. Moscow, 1952.
“Chelovek na granitse.” In Nemetskaia Novella XX veka. Moscow, 1963.

REFERENCES

Salikhov, Z. “Geroi-antifashist v romane E. Klaudiusa Zelenye olivy i golye gory.” In Voprosy Russkoi i zarubezhnoi literatury, vol. 2. Kuibyshev, 1966.
Piltz, G. Ed. Claudius: Leben und Werken. Berlin, 1952.