"The Death of a City" (original "Śmierć miasta") was written by Wladyslaw Szpilman and elaborated by Jerzy Waldorff shortly after the war ended, and first printed in 1946 by publishing house "Wiedza", The book was censored by Stalinist authorities for political reasons. For example, the nationality of benevolent German officer Wilm Hosenfeld was changed to Austrian. As the East German dissident singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann observed in his epilogue for the 1999 English-language edition: "Directly after the war it was impossible to publish a book in Poland which presented a German officer as a brave and helpful man," and an Austrian hero would be "not quite so bad." Biermann added caustically, "In the years of the Cold War Austria and East Germany were linked by a common piece of hypocrisy: both pretended to have been forcibly occupied by Hitler's Germany."