Recipients of the National Prize of East Germany

Hans Grundig (February 19, 1901 – September 11, 1958) was a German painter and graphic artist associated with the New Objectivity movement.
He was born in Dresden and, after an apprenticeship as an interior decorator, studied in 1920–1921 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts. He then studied at the Dresden Academy from 1922 to 1923. During the 1920s his paintings, primarily portraits of working-class subjects, were influenced by the work of Otto Dix. Like his friend Gert Heinrich Wollheim, he often depicted himself in a theatrical manner, as in his Self-Portrait during the Carnival Season (1930).He had his first solo exhibition in 1930 at the Dresden gallery of Józef Sandel. He made his first etchings in 1933.
Politically anti-fascist, he joined the German Communist Party in 1926, and was a founding member of the arts organization Assoziation revolutionärer bildender Künstler in Dresden in 1929.
Following the fall of the Weimar Republic, Grundig was declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, who included his works in the defamatory Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich in 1937. He expressed his antagonism toward the regime in paintings such as The Thousand Year Reich (1936). Forbidden to practice his profession, he was arrested twice—briefly in 1936, and again in 1938, after which he was interned in Sachsenhausen concentration camp from 1940 to 1944.
In 1945 he went to Moscow, where he attended an anti-fascist school. Returning to Berlin in 1946, he became a professor of painting at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1957 he published his autobiography, Zwischen Karneval und Aschermittwoch ("Between Shrovetide carnival and Ash Wednesday"). He was awarded the Heinrich Mann Prize in Berlin in 1958, the year of his death.

Wolfgang Langhoff (6 October 1901 in Berlin, German Empire – 26 August 1966 in Berlin, German Democratic Republic) was a German theatre, film and television actor and theatre director.

Ottmar Gerster (29 June 1897 in Braunfels, Germany – 31 August 1969 in Borsdorf) was a German viola player, conductor and composer who in 1948 became rector of the Liszt Music Academy in Weimar.

Victor Klemperer (9 October 1881 – 11 February 1960) was a German scholar who also became known as a diarist. His journals, published in Germany in 1995, detailed his life under the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and the German Democratic Republic.
The three volumes of his diaries have been published in English translations: I Shall Bear Witness, To the Bitter End, and The Lesser Evil. The first two cover the period of the Third Reich have since become standard sources and have been extensively quoted. His book Lingua Tertii Imperii, published in English as The Language of the Third Reich, studies how Nazi propaganda manipulated and influenced the German language.

Gisela May (31 May 1924 – 2 December 2016) was a German actress and singer.

Wolf Kaiser (26 October 1916 – 22 October 1992) was a German theatre and film actor. He grew up in Switzerland, where he studied chemistry and physiology. In 1937 he was deemed unfit for service in the Wehrmacht, and then went to Berlin where he trained as an actor.

Emil "Ehm" Welk (August 29, 1884 – December 19, 1966) was a German journalist, writer, professor and founder of Volkshochschulen (adult education centres). He became known for his work Die Heiden von Kummerow (The Heathens of Kummerow) and used Thomas Trimm as a pseudonym.

Willi Bredel (2 May 1901 – 27 October 1964) was a German writer and president of the DDR Academy of Arts, Berlin. Born in Hamburg, he was a pioneer of socialist realist literature.

Friedrich Wolf (23 December 1888 – 5 October 1953) was a German doctor and politically-engaged writer. From 1949 to 1951, he served as East Germany's first ambassador to Poland.

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Busch (22 January 1900 – 8 June 1980) was a German singer and actor.