Werner Bräunig, born in Chemnitz in 1934, was regarded as the great hope of East German literature, until an extract from Rummelplatz was read at the eleventh plenum of the censoring central committee of the SED and met with a ferocious opposition that sealed its fate. He had started writing in the mid-1950s after various short-term jobs including a stint at the Wismut uranium mine. Bräunig studied at the Johannes R. Becher Institute of Literature. He died in Halle in 1976 at the young age of forty-two, but left behind one of the most important works of post-war German literature.