Heinz Winfried Sabais was born in 1922 in Breslau. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Jena. During the war he was a pilot. He fled to the West in 1950 and settled in Darmstadt, where he was active in politics as a moderate Social Democrat. From 1954 he was in charge of the city’s cultural affairs; he was elected Chief Burgomaster of Darmstadt in 1971. He published four main collections of poetry in his lifetime, and a literary-ideological study of power, Götter Kaiser Diktatoren. A selection of his poetry and prose, Fazit, appeared in 1982 with a foreword by Karl Krolow.