 He was First Secretary of the German Writers' Association from 1961 to 1963when he fell from grace.Already in his mid-sixties, he was for some time a pensioner doing some freelance translation from Russian.His return to the authorities' good books was evident when in 1964 the ruling party's organ "Neues Deutschland" carried the revelation that the otherwise unknown Li De, involved in the Chinese Long March of the 1930s, had been in fact none other than the German Otto Braun.