BERND JENTZSCH WAS BORN IN Plauen (Vogtland) in 1940. His parents, social democrats, had previously lived in Chemnitz (Saxony), where his father worked as a typesetter at one of the city's newspapers. In 1933, he was dismissed by the Nazis and banished to Plauen, where he worked at a factory. During those years, both parents lived and suffered under the constant surveillance and harassment of the Gestapo. After the war the family moved back to Chemnitz (1953–90 named Karl-Marx-Stadt), where they were automatically integrated in what was to be the Socialist Unity Party (SED) in 1946. Bernd Jentzsch attended the Gymnasium (1954–58) and served in the National People's Army (1958–60). He studied German literature and art history at the Universities of Leipzig and Jena (1960–65). In 1965 he moved to East Berlin, where he took a position as editor for the Verlag Neues Leben, which he held for nine years. He married — his wife Birgit was a high school teacher of German and Russian — and had a son, Stefan. In 1974 Bernd Jentzsch became a freelance writer.

Not long afterward, his fortunes took a dramatic and unexpected turn. In the fall of 1976, while doing research for an anthology of Swiss poetry in Switzerland, he learned about the expulsion of fellowwriter Reiner Kunze from the GDR Writers’ Union and the expatriation of the prominent poet-singer Wolf Biermann on the order of the GDR government. Stunned and angered by these actions, he wrote a scathing and detailed open letter to head-of-state Erich Honecker, in which he made the demand that the regime reconsider and reverse its decisions. He submitted it for publication to several newspapers in the GDR, the Federal Republic of Germany, and Switzerland, without considering possible negative consequences. The reprisals against Jentzsch, his family, his widowed mother, and his friends were not long in coming. His open letter did not appear in any GDR newspaper but was instead turned over to the State Security Service, which promptly indicted Jentzsch for “hostile agitation against the State.” Faced with the prospect of a mock trial and two to ten years’ imprisonment, he decided to remain in Switzerland. His wife, her brother, his son, and even his retired, staunchly and actively socialist mother were harassed, humiliated, and ostracized by the GDR authorities.