Documentary “Biermann” in the cinema | “The collective has isolated itself from me”

Biermann didn't actually want to be a guitar singer. Photo: Majestic We see a man who will be 90 this November on the Baltic Sea beach. He takes off his bathrobe and throws himself into the water. He swims – freestyle! Like an ageless professional. Wolf Biermann preferred freestyle in all situations, especially because it always gives you the best look as a swimmer.

The old bard also makes a bella figura in front of the camera in Jens Meurer's two-hour documentary "Biermann". Despite all the objections one has against him, one must immediately admit that he is still able to fascinate, especially with the guitar in his hand. You have to do it first – for over 60 years!

He didn't actually want to be a guitar singer, or at least on the side. Wolf Biermann came to the GDR from Hamburg in 1953 at the age of 16, sent by his mother to the promised land of socialism to build communism there. Ultimately, father Dagobert Biermann's mission had to be continued. The Jewish-communist shipyard worker was murdered in Auschwitz. “I thought the GDR was the better Germany,” says Biermann.

After not long in the East, Biermann came to the Berliner Ensemble, became assistant director to Helene Weigel and wanted to become successful as a playwright and director. With Brigitte Soubeyran, he initiated the Berlin workers' and student theater b.a.t., where he first published his play "Berliner Brautgang" (about love in times of the Wall). The production was banned, the theater career he had just begun was already over - and Biermann only had his guitar to hold on to.

Brigitte Soubeyran, who came to the Berliner Ensemble from Paris, got him to sing songs in a way that sounded different than usual. Not like Brecht's moral singer Ernst Busch, but also not like Hanns Eisler (who supported him) imagined Lied singing. Or yes, a little of everything.

In France it was Georges Brassens who Soubeyran recommended to him as a role model. More of a bard from the streets than one from the drawing rooms. With a deliberately dirty charm, just as you would imagine François Villon. Nothing like this was previously known in Berlin. Of course, he is always close to the aggressive tenderness of Vladimir Vysotsky in Moscow, but Wolf Biermann is not talking about him.

Of course he writes his own lyrics, which makes him the prototype of the songwriter. Also a disruption, a nuisance for the officials, who couldn't stop the constantly blaring loudspeaker. After his Cologne concert on November 13, 1976, he was no longer allowed into the country.

The protests against his expatriation that began immediately in the GDR were enormous; Led by Stefan Heym and Stephan Hermlin, it was artists who first joined the serious signatories of the protest letter. So that “expatriation doesn’t become naturalized,” says Heym. The expatriation was not revoked, but the signatories were harassed - and so the great exodus to the West began and with it the end of the GDR.

All of this left a lasting impression on those who witnessed it, including me as an eleven-year-old pioneer at the time. I still remember that as an agitator for the group council I had to go to a training course where they said that this Biermann (whom we didn't even know) had betrayed the GDR and that's why he had to be punished. But that's not a bad thing for us, says the training manager, we don't need a grouch like this beer man. It would be worse, she suddenly added in a cheerful tone, if a great guy like Manfred Krug left the GDR. Less than a year later, the “great guy” Krug also left the GDR in sad anger. The GDR lost its identification figures.

Biermann doesn't become a real popular figure with this film either.

That's what Jens Meurer's cleverly constructed film revolves around, which focuses on a modern-day beer man who always comments on himself in his voltes. This film project is like a “ghost train ride through his life,” says Biermann. He is one of those people of whom it is said: As long as they speak, they are right. Armin Mueller-Stahl, a few years older than Biermann, speaks about Biermann in his carefully considered, calm manner, calling him an "egomaniac" but one who has something to say.

Meurer follows chronology in his film and rarely allows himself to be lured into polemical side paths. A few voices from friends of yesteryear. Biermann and friendship are a sensitive topic. Stephan Hermlin, who discovered Biermann at the poetry evening at the Academy of Arts in 1962 and was later insulted vilely by Biermann, stated that Biermann had a tendency to treat his friends like enemies.

Every kind of reform socialist idea in the GDR was associated with the name Wolf Biermann. Biermann's main enemy was probably the SED General Secretary Erich Honecker. His wife Margot Honecker, GDR education minister, had found refuge in the Hamburg communist Biermann family during the Nazi era, which is probably why she later held a protective hand over him for a long time.

Today, Biermann still curbs his polemics when it comes to Margot Honecker. When, in a television conversation with Peter Voss, he once made a dismissive comment about Margot Honecker, who was not particularly appreciated in the GDR because of her dogmatism, and Biermann was supposed to agree with this, Voss responded noticeably brusquely: She was far too clever for that! Does the “big sister, little brother” principle apply here?

Biermann is so full of contradictions that one is amazed at how he himself is apparently able to live with them so well. Is this a dialectical philosophy of life? Biermann had already ended the competition over who were the real and who were the false communists in the 1980s when he lived in Paris. Suddenly he found this German-German bickering disgusting.

The film repeatedly uses scenes from the four-hour Cologne concert in 1976 as leitmotifs. That day, when he was able to perform in front of over 7,000 people, was probably the happiest of his life, he says today. Finally get out of the living room! Here he also played the song about “Prussian Icarus” for the first time.

The high was followed by the crash after the news of his expatriation. He couldn't do anything with the western left any more than they could do with him. And when he was finally able to perform again in the reunification GDR in Leipzig on December 1, 1989 and sang: "Don't sell the entire bankrupt GDR," he must have felt that there was a strangeness between him and the audience. In any case, he began very quickly - even before his attack on the "asshole Anderson" (the Prenzlauer Berg poet Sascha Anderson had been the Stasi's IM) - to insult the Easterners, as you can also see and hear in the film. Now they could finally learn to walk upright, because so far they had only crawled and been cowardly. And so on until today.

No, Biermann doesn't become a real popular figure with this film either. He probably never wanted to be. He defended the war in the Balkans as well as the war in Iraq, praised Helmut Kohl as chancellor (so that even Friedrich Schorlemmer called him a "turncoat"), is a welcome guest at the CSU, and generally insults the left as incorrigible Stalinists.

But can you seriously blame him when there are so many meters of Stasi files on him? Apparently a chapter has finally closed. But his bon mots still have something to them, as when he sums up his life: “I am the individual. The collective has isolated itself from me.«

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