Helmut Dunk­hase was born in 1944 in a small village in Lower Saxony. At 22, he went to (West) Berlin to study and there he joined the Socia­list Unity Party of West Berlin (SEW) in 1971. After 1989, Dunk­hase was briefly a member of the Party of Demo­cra­tic Socia­lism (PDS) before joining the German Commu­nist Party (DKP) in 1995.

From 1978 to 2007 he worked as a teacher of mathe­ma­tics, compu­ter science and music at a grammar school.

Since the 1990s, Dunk­hase has been working on poli­ti­cal economy and the appli­ca­tion of infor­ma­tion tech­no­logy to social plan­ning. Artic­les on this can be found on his website. In 2006, he trans­la­ted and edited Paul Cocks­hott and Allin Cottrell’s book “Towards a New Socia­lism” into German under the title “Alter­na­ti­ven aus dem Rech­ner”. His book “Plädoyer für Plan­wirt­schaft: Vom Umgang mit Wider­sprü­chen in DDR, Sowjet­union und VR China” (A Plea for a Plan­ned Economy: Deal­ing with Contra­dic­tions in the GDR, the Soviet Union and the People’s Repu­blic of China) was published in 2021.