December 2001 - Nr. 13
Wolf Biermann at 65 — Germany Celebrates GDR Enemy of the State
TWIG - It’s been 25 years since Wolf Biermann, the rebel voice of the proletariat, was banished to the West by the East German government. Today the songwriter-poet who once sang too well for the communist cause is chief cultural correspondent for the newspaper Die Welt.
From 1965 to 1976, Biermann was little more than a phantom in East Berlin. He lived in relative luxury, in a large, well-appointed apartment not far from the grave of his idol, Bertolt Brecht. He could write and sing to his heart’s content – as long as nobody in the East could read or hear him. His songs and poems were published, but only in the West. Western friends came to visit, recorded his music and smuggled it back over the Berlin Wall. Allen Ginsberg dropped by and declared him an honorary member of the Beat Generation. In 1971, when a reporter from the magazine Der Spiegel interviewed this "enemy" of the East German state, he complained bitterly about the bureaucracy and Stalinist tactics of the German Democratic Republic. "Ich bin selber das Volk," he declared – "I am the people."
Biermann, the son of a working-class father who died in Auschwitz, had moved to the East on his own initiative at the age of 17, in 1953. Young Biermann sought opportunity in the socialist state and found it. He joined the Berlin Ensemble, the experimental theatre company founded by Brecht. He composed songs about communal farming, the end of racism and world peace. But by the mid-1960s, he was rubbing the regime the wrong way. "At first I still thought I had the same dream as the party big shots, and it was just the interpretation of the dream that made us different," Biermann recently told Die Zeit. "Then I realized that it wasn’t just the interpretation…. If by a manipulation of world history Marx had had the bad luck to live in the age of so-called Stalinism – that is, in the GDR – he would have been the first to be axed by the big shots of the SED [the ruling communist party]."
Biermann, who turned 65 this year, hasn’t given up on the left. "I can’t call myself a communist anymore," he concedes. "The dream is shattered. But that doesn’t mean we can piss away our lives in bourgeois comfort." Yet history will probably remember Biermann as the spirit that toppled the East. In 1989, his words became the rallying cry of the peaceful revolution: "Wir sind das Volk." — "We are the people."
