Erich Weinert (1890–1953 · artist / eponym)

Weinert was a communist and anti-fascist writer, painter and caricaturist who lived in Falkenberg Garden City, and for whom the central axis on the Carl Legien Housing Estate was named. Born in Magdeburg in 1890, he started out in locomotive construction. After his apprenticeship between 1905 and 1908, Weinert was drawn to study art, attending art academies in Berlin and Magdeburg. He then worked as a book illustrator. After serving in the First World War, Weinert became a drawing instructor, actor and at times unemployed. Beginning in 1921, he began to make a name for himself in cabaret and published his first satirical poems and articles in left-wing newspapers and magazines. Weinert was a committed communist and a popular speaker at German Communist Party events. Persecuted by the Nazis, he was forced to emigrate in 1933. Weinert then served as a Brigadist in the Spanish Civil War and as a translator in Moscow. After the Second World War, he returned to East Berlin in 1946, where he became an administrating vice president of education and the head of art and literature for the new German Democratic Republic, where he helped develop the regime's cultural policy. Weinert died of pulmonary tuberculosis in Berlin in 1953.