Günter Kunert, a German writer who rose to prominence in the 1960s with satirical and increasingly critical works about the repressive Communist government in East Germany before fleeing to the West, died on Sept. 21 at his home in the village of Kaisborstel , in northern Germany. He was 90 .

His family said the cause was complications of pneumonia.

Mr. Kunert settled in Kaisborstel in 1979, drawn by the peace and privacy he had craved during his final years in East Germany.

His searingly satirical voice was rooted in the deprivations he suffered as a half-Jewish child under the Nazis and came into its own in Erich Honecker’s repressive East Germany in the 1970s. “I write to bear the world as it steadily crumbles into nothingness,” he was quoted as saying in the 1979 anthology “The Poet’s Work .”

Considered one of modern Germany’s most profound and prolific writers , Mr. Kunert examined the complexities and contradictions of his country’s post-World War II history through two novels and many poems, short stories and essays. After his emigration, and even after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he continued to limn the differences between the two countries that had opposed each other during the Cold War.