Wolf Biermann's anniversaries | The self-proclaimed dragon slayer

Wolf Biermann back on stage – on November 13, 1976 in Cologne. The motto of the concert actually referred to the state, which no longer wanted him: "I would like to be gone - and I would like to stay here." Photo: IMAGO/United Archives Even if Wolf Biermann developed differently than many leftists would have wished - the self-proclaimed dragon slayer and GDR conqueror skillfully transformed the zeitgeist of the radical left opposition in the 60s and 70s into songs that stand for themselves. He sang what many thought, hoped and felt. He turns 90 this Sunday.

How much Biermann suffered from the repression in the GDR and the nomenklatura in the Soviet Union can be seen in the first volume of his diary excerpts, which have now been published under the title “You put out the fire with gasoline”. They cover the period from 1961 to 1990 and are about “ban, expatriation and the fall of the Berlin Wall”.

On May 17, 1968, it was said about the reform movement in Czechoslovakia called the Prague Spring, which wanted to build a “socialism with a human face”: “Prague will be slaughtered. They will kill us few communists here, without any major show trials... The suppression of the Prague revolution by the SU association will be the beginning of the suicide of the human species." On the day of the invasion of Soviet and allied troops, August 21, 1968, he writes: "Today the international Stalinists have committed the most pathetic atrocity against the revolution... People who are not afraid to trample on a people, as the Americans are doing in Vietnam Ready for any murder, any torture against his own people." Not all of the diary entries are so pathetic, but they are the oppressive thoughts of a persecuted man who had been banned from appearing in the GDR since 1965.

The diaries are worth reading, especially for anyone who accuses Biermann of being a turncoat who sided with the victors after 1990, when the Federal Republic of Germany incorporated the GDR. The relentlessness with which Biermann verbally attacked everyone who had privileges in the GDR or belonged to the nomenklatura also led him to seek proximity to the political class in the FRG. Anyone who reads the diary excerpts understands where this anger comes from, which he almost seems to consider sacred.

A good opportunity to put Biermann back on his feet as a political artist who was active in the GDR from a radical left-wing opposition is, in addition to the new documentary "Biermann" by Jens Meuer, the double DVD "That's his socialist gang". It is the concert recording of the Cologne concert on November 13, 1976, which led to his expatriation from the GDR. It was his first public appearance since the 1960s and was broadcast live on the radio by WDR. Biermann played at the invitation of IG Metall, initiated by Jakob Moneta, a radical socialist who was editor-in-chief of the members' magazine "metall" at the time.

8,000 western leftists, some of whom were themselves victims of professional bans and union exclusions, heard and saw Biermann exhaust himself, rejoice and become melancholic.

Biermann actually came from Hamburg and moved to the GDR in 1953 at the age of 16 out of political conviction - as the son of the communist resistance fighters Emma and Dagobert Biermann. The father, like the mother, a member of the KPD, had sabotaged warships that had been built for the Franco putschists at the German shipyard in the port of Hamburg during the Nazi era and, with Emma and others, gathered evidence that the Nazis supported Franco. He was arrested and gassed as a Jew in Auschwitz. Emma Biermann narrowly escaped arrest for having four-month-old baby Wolf.

In the GDR, Biermann graduated from high school, first studied economics and then philosophy, became an assistant director at the Berliner Ensemble and was supported by Hanns Eisler and Stephan Hermlin. He was considered a great lyrical talent, but the longer he lived in the GDR, he developed a left-wing criticism of it, together with Robert Havemann, Jurek Becker, Christa Wolf and many others. He himself became a songwriter, but from 1965 he was neither allowed to perform, publish, nor travel abroad. In 1976 he was surprisingly granted permission to leave for a tour in the Federal Republic of Germany.

The first concert took place in the Cologne sports hall in front of 8,000 people. Western leftists, themselves partly victims of professional bans and trade union exclusions by the West German authorities, heard and saw Biermann exhausting himself, singing, rejoicing and becoming melancholic.

Three days later, the GDR news agency announced that "Biermann's right to reside in the GDR has been revoked." There was widespread protest in East and West. Anyone who showed solidarity with him in the GDR got into trouble, was arrested or forced to leave for the West. The SED tried to get rid of its socialist opposition and to silence it, but had greatly underestimated Biermann's popularity.

WDR recorded the concert in Cologne with several cameramen. A one-hour program on regional television was planned. Werner Höfer, then WDR director, called Biermann over and explained that he wanted to broadcast the entire concert. It was "like being in court," Biermann recalled to "Welt" in 2011: "As evidence against the class enemy in the East: Look, he was expelled for something like that." Four hours, directly after the "Tagesschau." Nothing came of this because the Bavarian Radio objected: communist propaganda could not be broadcast at prime time. It was broadcast on ARD from 10.30 p.m., which meant that you could also watch it in the GDR.

Due to the systemic competition between the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic, it was suddenly possible to do something that was otherwise not well-liked on television in both countries: an independent communist songwriter who, at the beginning of his concert, quoted the Jewish communist Rosa Luxemburg with her criticism of the lack of democracy in the Russian Revolution. It was breathtaking, it was good. Biermann was not only a challenge to those in power with this concert, he is still a challenge to this day if you get involved with him. Anyone interested in the left-wing opposition in the GDR cannot avoid him. This is what he wrote in his diary in 1989 on the day the Wall fell: "But if the GDR is swallowed up by capitalism as the bankrupt mass of Stalinism, then the refugees are fine, they are already where the bankrupt GDR is headed... And if, after all the real socialism of the Stalinists, real socialism were to succeed in little Germany, then that would not only be an encouraging example for humanity, it would also benefit the singing dreamer that I am."

Forgotten everything, is it all yesterday’s news? It's worth listening and looking closely at Biermann. Then contradictions become visible in his political adaptation and things get crunchy. When he appeared in the Bundestag in 2014 at the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, swearing and singing, he didn't say a word about the guilt of history that lies on the building: the enabling laws had been passed in the Reichstag, according to which not only his parents had been persecuted, and the racial laws, as a result of which not only his Jewish family had been killed in the concentration camp. He wrote in his diary: “Germany is a blot on the earth, it is the rotten hole into which worms crawl, it is said to be cursed. I am a Jew. And elsewhere that every smoking chimney reminds him of his murdered father Dagobert.

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