Kurt Barthel (writer)

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Kurt Walter Barthel (June 8, 1914 – November 12, 1967) was a German writer who used the pen name KuBa. Born in Garnsdorf to a railway worker, his father was killed before he was born. He joined the workers’ movement as a teenager and trained as a decorative painter (1928–1932). In 1933 he joined the Social Democratic Party, but after the Nazis came to power he fled to Czechoslovakia, where he met Louis Fürnberg. On Fürnberg’s suggestion he wrote his first poems for Die Rote Fahne and began using KuBa to distance himself from Nazi‑aligned Max Barthel. He worked with Fürnberg in an amateur theatre group and helped other emigrants cross the border. From 1937 he edited the Prague-based Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung. In 1939 he moved to Great Britain, worked as a farm and construction worker, wrote poems in English and joined the Free German Youth. He returned to Germany in 1946, joined the Socialist Unity Party, and worked as an editor at Dietz in East Berlin before turning to full-time writing. He became a prominent party poet, writing socialist hymns and a Stalin cantata. In 1953 he commented on the June 17 uprising, a move that drew criticism from Bertolt Brecht. He held party and state roles, including first secretary of the Deutscher Schriftstellerverband, member of the SED Central Committee, Academy of Arts, main playwright of the Rostock People’s Theatre, and a member of the Volkskammer. In 1967, during a tour in West Germany, he fell ill and died in Frankfurt; he was buried in Rostock. The Kurt Barthel Medal in the GDR honored cultural workers named after him.