5 Mark Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock

Issued to mark the 250th anniversary of Klopstock's birth, this coin honors a poet whose reputation has faded so thoroughly that most modern Germans would struggle to name a single line of his work. In his own century, he was considered the equal of Homer. His epic Der Messias, begun in 1748, took over two decades to complete and made him the first German writer to achieve pan-European literary celebrity.

The GDR issued commemoratives in this series partly to claim cultural ownership of figures from pre-partition German history — Klopstock, born in Quedlinburg, fell conveniently within East German borders.