On his business cards, he referred to himself as a "provincial writer," a "specialist in rural matters." However, Oskar Maria Graf (1894-1967) was much more than a poet of the provinces. Recently, Tilman Spengler described "The Life of My Mother" as a "classic of world literature." Graf's successful book "We Are Prisoners" (1927) was translated into English as a representative post-war work just a year after its publication. The author sought his path through a destructive century - pacifist, authentic, and contradictory. His spontaneous protest against the book burnings of May 10, 1933, was read worldwide: "A hunted poet, one of the best," judged Bertolt Brecht. In exile in the US, he was one of the spokespersons for the authors expelled from Germany.