Wolf Biermann turns 90: Two wounds as a mission for life

Portrait Wolf Biermann turns 90 Two unhealed wounds as a mission for a life As of: November 15, 2026 • 8:24 a.m

Born in Hamburg, emigrated to the GDR - and spectacularly denaturalized by it in 1976: Today Wolf Biermann is 90 years old. He is primarily influenced by experiences from his early childhood.

His childhood inflicted two deep wounds on him - wounds that never healed, but which served as his mission for all the decades that followed: to fight for human freedom and to savor this strange, always contested life with every fiber of his being.

"You, don't let yourself become hardened in these hard times. Those who are too hard break, those who are too sharp, sting and break off at once" - this is how he will later sum up his credo in the song "Encouragement", his energetic "Despite everything!"

Karl-Wolf Biermann, born in Hamburg on November 15, 1936 at five past twelve, is thrown into a terrible world. The Hamburg "firestorm" in July 1943 is the one wound: "I haven't forgotten anything from that night of bombings. Not a word, not a face, not a color, not a smell, not a scream - I haven't forgotten anything," he says in an interview with NDR Kultur.

He owes his survival to the presence of mind of his beloved mother Emma: in extreme distress, she jumps with him into the North Canal, so they escape certain death in the particularly badly hit district of Hammerbrook. "The clock of my life stopped in the fire of that night," writes Biermann in his autobiography "Don't wait for better times!": "I was six and a half years old then, and I stayed that old for the rest of my life."

The fact that the father is brutally taken away from the eternal child - that is the other big wound: Wolf Biermann is still an infant when the Gestapo arrests and imprisons the dock worker Dagobert Biermann, a Jewish communist. Years later he was murdered in Auschwitz. "The grief for the communist, the worker, the Jew Biermann is the law according to which I took office," says the surviving son: "The grief for my father remained my desolate hope, my threatened love."

"Don't wait for better times" - documentary about Wolf Biermann in the cinema Benedikt Scheper, NDR, tagesthemen, Das Erste, October 27, 2026 • 9:45 p.m. Singer-songwriter with Brassens mustache in the GDR This grief will play a decisive role in all future life decisions. In active memory of his father, he became a communist - and at the age of 16 took an outrageous step: while hundreds of thousands of people fled the GDR to the West, Wolf Biermann from Hamburg emigrated to the GDR in May 1953. First to Gadebusch in Mecklenburg to get his high school diploma - and then to East Berlin to study. There, says his mother and himself, he can better stand up for his father's ideals.

He studies, works as an assistant director, grows a Georges Brassens mustache and begins to strum and sing on the guitar like the great anti-bourgeois French chansonnier. “Song-writer” is the job title he invented for it. Hanns Eisler, the composer of the GDR national anthem, discovered Biermann's talent and promoted him.

The state power was less enthusiastic and soon found his songs too free-spirited and “ideologically unsound”. Although he is a convinced communist, he is also a non-conformist who doesn't want to be told how to think, write and sing.

At the end of 1965, Erich Honecker, then the second man in the SED dictatorship, accused Biermann of spreading "foreign and harmful theses and unartistic works with strong pornographic features." The consequence: total ban on appearances and publications.

The songwriter is shocked, but doesn't think about leaving the GDR, which he considers his homeland. He gets around the professional ban with wit and cunning: secretly and - despite constant Stasi surveillance - unnoticed, he records songs in his apartment on East Berlin's Chausseestrasse, which - like his poems - spread in a roundabout way in East and West.

For him, the guitar is a "wooden sword with six strings" with which he can certainly spread harmonious euphony. But he much prefers to use the instrument for angular, aggressive, even percussive playing. "The ban didn't make me a dog," he wrote in his recently published diary at the time: "I am a wolf and remain a wolf and howl with the wolves." The writer Günter Kunert calls out to him: "Wolf, my good fellow, you touch the sleep of a miserable world!"

In the cinema documentary "Biermann" you can see many archive recordings from Wolf Biermann's life in East and West. He returns with director Jens Meurer to his former apartment on Chausseestrasse.

This is making the state more and more nervous. He eagerly seizes the next opportunity to strike a big blow. This arose when IG Metall invited Biermann to a concert tour in the Federal Republic in the fall of 1976.

Contrary to expectations, the GDR bureaucracy granted him an exit permit - in the safe assumption that he would behave insubordinately in the West and thus provide an opportunity to refuse him return. Or, to put it with Biermann's penchant for juicy, true-to-life language: throw him out.

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At his first concert on November 13, 1976 in the Cologne sports hall, he played songs such as "Don't wait for better times", "Legend of the socialist gang" or "And when we came to the bank" for three and a half hours with the programmatic verse: "I would like to be gone - and I would like to stay here." They are songs that tell of the longing for a better, more humane socialism.

As expected, the SED state saw this as a "hostile demeanor towards the GDR" and revoked Biermann's citizenship on November 16, one day after his 40th birthday.

With unusual modesty, Wolf Biermann rejects in his autobiography the widespread assumption that his expatriation was the beginning of the end of the GDR. No, he writes: "No GDR could collapse because it chased some young man with a guitar into German-German exile."

But it can be assumed and has now been confirmed by many historians: the weakness that the dictatorship revealed with this draconian step, and the wave of protest that followed the arbitrary act in the GDR itself, caused this state to falter in the long term - and thus at least contributed to its collapse.

"In the protests against expatriation, a nucleus of resistance was formed, which was one of the reasons why the system was overthrown in 1989," says historian Robert Grünbaum, author of the publication "Wolf Biermann 1976. Expatriation and its consequences." The lesson from this story: Even an individual can change the course of history.

Biermann, a trained GDR citizen, finds his way around the Federal Republic with difficulty and settles back in his hometown of Hamburg. There he met his future wife Pamela, his “muse”. He renounces communism because he realizes that only through this "betrayal" can he remain loyal to his father, the communist freedom fighter.

To this day he never stops raising his voice, singing, shouting and laughing, against the villainy of the dictatorships. Because: "You don't break down because of the blows you receive. You break down because of the blows you don't deal in the conflict of the world!"

This topic in the program: NDR Culture | The Conversation | October 31, 2026 | 2:00 p.m