During W.W.II he served in the Air Force and was captured by the Germans. As a prisoner he was forced to clean up cities hit by Allied bombers. He was sentenced to death for his political activities, but that was commuted to imprisonment and hard labor in Siberia. During those years the only reading Dostoevsky was allowed was the New Testament. Wisdom and penetration are the fruit of experience, not the lessons of retirement.
Great necessities call out great virtues.
In 1936, when he was 25 years old he joined the Count Basie Orchestra, and stayed with them until 1943 when he went to play for U.S. Army bands for the rest of the war years. After the war he played swing, leading his own groups on tours across America and Europe, and as a sideman with Benny Goodman. He formed Group 47, a loose-knit organization of writers and critics that influenced German literature for many years. In 1887 he published a collection of erotic stories and poems called Sensitiva Amorosa that shocked Sweden. Shortly after that he left and lived for the rest of his life in Germany, Switzerland, and Turkey.