Wolf Biermann | For Biermann, is Netanyahu an anti-Semite?

Hello everyone, listen up, here is the wolf! Photo: dpa/Marcus Brandt Wolf Biermann intervenes again. He needs that, the cultural sector needs that, marketing needs that. Next month he turns 90 and this week is the book fair, where he is presenting three new books. Recently someone from the CDU nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. That was entirely to his liking. Because Wolf Biermann, a state poet by profession and Prussia's last songwriter, loves the grand gesture.

And that's why he now said in an interview with dpa that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is an anti-Semite. Biermann believes that "the worst and most dangerous anti-Semites" are living "in Israel at the moment," and by this he means the Israeli government because they are in the process of "transforming the country into a reactionary, brutal oppressive state." For him, these are "lemurs", "helpers of the devil" like in Goethe's "Faust" because they commit war crimes in the Gaza war. And that “hurts a lot of people around the world. But to me double and triple." Biermann's pain is also as loud as his singing style: start quietly and then increase his voice. Hello everyone, listen up, here is the wolf!

Netanyahu an anti-Semite? Have you ever heard that? Would this be a case of state-related anti-Semitism? Netanyahu usually describes opponents of his government and military policies as anti-Semites. This is also how the pro-Palestinian and pacifist demonstrators against the Gaza war are often described, who are therefore said to be worse than the war, which is then not so important, purely morally. Including the Jewish people who are against it. There's something absurd about it at times.

Is Biermann changing direction now? He was a socialist until the collapse of real socialism, which deported him in 1976 (one of the GDR's biggest mistakes). And then the opposite, supported by conservatives. He liked that. As have the West's wars since then. But now it's against Israel's government, because that always gets you in the media. Like Günter Grass in 2012 with his poem “What has to be said”. Does anyone else know this? Biermann now has this self-absorbed gesture of the unconditional, but still no Nobel Prize. But what about Netanyahu? He wages wars to avoid going to prison, but we already know that.

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