Born in Pirna in 1909 to a Jewish family from Galicia, Max Zimmering joined the moderate Zionist youth movement at an early age, eventually joining the Communist Youth Organisation as a young adult and the KPD in 1929. Even before his apprenticeship as a window dresser from 1930, he had already made a name for himself with poems and prose in left-wing newspapers. His youth story "The Hunt for the Boot", for example, was published in numerous editions up to the present day.
Zimmering emigrated in 1933 - the start of an odyssey that took him to Paris, the Mandate Territory of Palestine, Prague, England, an internment camp for Germans in Australia and back to Great Britain over the next twelve years. He returned to Germany in 1946, where he joined the SED. Zimmering initially worked as an editor and was also the regional chairman of the VVN in Saxony from 1949 to 1953. In the 1950s and 1960s, he worked partly as a freelance writer and partly as director of the "Johannes R. Becher" Institute for Literature in Leipzig. Honoured many times for his wide-ranging work, Zimmering died in Dresden in 1973.
