The life of East Germany’s most prominent dissident singer-songwriter, Wolf Biermann, is being celebrated for the first time in a major exhibition that examines his pivotal role in the country’s divided postwar history.
Biermann’s banishment from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1976 by communist authorities – who were unable to tolerate his outspoken criticism – not only fuelled his own popularity but helped spread his lyrical, incisive ballads, songs and poems to a far wider audience. It also spawned a mass protest movement, leading to the exodus of some of the GDR’s most popular artists and actors and the imprisonment of scores of freedom of speech campaigners.
The German Historical Museum’s (DHM) exhibition in Berlin, which opened last week, examines his life and times, starting with the unusual decision of the 16-year-old Biermann, the son of a Jewish communist and Nazi resistance fighter who was murdered in Auschwitz aged 38, to move from Hamburg in the west to the communist east in 1953. At the time, tens of thousands of people were travelling in the opposite direction. The exhibition looks at later events, including the 1965 ban on Biermann performing and his expulsion from the GDR 11 years later, which occurred while he was on a trip to West Germany.
It examines the widespread belief that Biermann’s expulsion was a turning point in postwar German history – a self-destructive act from which the GDR regime never recovered.
Artefacts include Biermann’s guitar, the Nazi army mess box he used to hide his diaries from the GDR’s secret police, the Stasi, and the irreverent handwritten note pinned to his front door addressed to the state security officers who spied on him, reading: “Good day, you Stasi pigs.”
Samizdat, or self-published, versions of his works copied by hand or produced on private printing presses to avoid the censorship apparatus are also displayed as well as a three-and-a-half-hour extract from the Cologne concert that led to him being stripped of his citizenship.
At a packed opening party, guests included the former German chancellor Angela Merkel and east German dissidents, many of whom had served time in prison as punishment for campaigning for Biermann’s repatriation. The 86-year-old singer performed several songs in his trademark gravelly voice, including Ermutigung (encouragement), which became an unofficial anthem for East Germany’s political prisoners, as well as Was Du Erinnerst Warst Du Nicht, (what you remember was not you), a biting attack on the “Hitlerstalin-Monster” Vladimir Putin who has a “deadly fear … of freedom”. In it, he refers to his guitar, a “wooden sword with six strings”, as his only weapon in his attempt to “slay dragons”.
Raphael Gross, the head of the DHM, called Biermann’s life a “stroke of luck for writers of German history”.
Biermann, who gave his blessing for the exhibition – which drew considerably from his intellectual estate that he donated to the state library in 2021 – but was not involved in its creation, said it was “luck” rather than his own merit that he was old enough to be considered a part of German history.
“I cannot be given credit for having survived two German dictatorships,” he said on the sidelines of the opening. “In the Nazi era I had the perilous luck not to hail from a Heil-Hitler family, rather to [have] come from a communist-Jewish family. I was lucky that my mother escaped the Hamburg inferno (the firestorm of July 1943 created by the allied bombing of the city) by swimming through a canal with me, like a rucksack on her back. And I’m just as lucky to have got away with my brazen songs even though each verse was enough to have had me sent to Bautzen prison (considered the GDR’s worst) for four years.”
Biermann was perceived as too famous to be thrown into jail, and was helped also by the high regard in which his father Dagobert’s Jewish heritage and role in the anti-Nazi resistance was held. He lost about 30 relatives in the Holocaust.
Biermann said he had had no choice but to learn to live with the fear of what might happen to him. “Because the question is – as it has been since the stone age – always the same: Do I have angst or does the angst have me? Over and over again there are horrendously good reasons to be fearful.”
A powerful account of the GDR’s systematic method of Zersetzung (to “disintegrate”) its opponents is given in a witness interview by Gabriele Stötzer, recalling how, aged 23, she, her then husband and Thomas Wagner, were imprisoned for typing up the protest letter and gathering signatures against Biermann’s expatriation. Stötzer was held in custody for five months before being sentenced to a year’s incarceration in the notorious women’s prison of Hoheneck.
At the opening of the exhibition, the writer and artist explained what had first drawn her to Biermann’s music.
“Biermann spoke plainly. With poetry and above all humour, he was able to artistically transform the mood of unease that existed at the time into an accessible way of thinking, into a truth with which you could easily sympathise. His words and music went straight to the gut and we learned the songs off by heart,” she said. “He was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.
“Later, when I was in jail … sitting at the hosiery sewing machine, I often took strength from singing, ‘Hey you, don’t get embittered’,” she said, quoting a line from Ermutigung.
Having once believed in the socialist GDR dream, she said: “As soon as they put me in prison, I knew it was doomed to fail.”
