He is a German-German poet. The songwriter Wolf Biermann knows his way around the worlds East and West, with and without a wall. Now it is 85 – and hardly quieter.
There are some people who have got to know the different life in East and West. But hardly anyone has written and sung as much about aspirations and realities, contradictions and resistance in the two German states GDR and FRG as Wolf Biermann.
Songs like «encouragement» with the combative introduction «You, don’t let yourself harden / In these hard times» or «Don’t wait for better times» are classics of rebellion against the authorities. The German-German songwriter will be 85 years old on Monday (November 15th).
He lives in Hamburg, celebrates in Berlin. «The subject is unsolvable. The wolf is a Hamburger and Biermann is a Berliner, ”said the poet in an interview with the German Press Agency in Berlin. “The nice thing is that the question of Hamburg or Berlin is no longer a matter of religion for life and death, but has become so beautifully private since reunification. Anyone who is a bore is a bore everywhere. And those who can live alive can do so in Berlin as well as in Hamburg. “
Speaking of religion. Biermann’s latest book “Mensch Gott!” deals extensively with the topic in old and new texts. A question of age for the atheist? “It has nothing to do with my age,” Biermann contradicts. “Since I’ve been writing poems and songs, I’ve been in a dispute with God, but I don’t believe in it.” He writes in the German language, which can only be understood by someone who knows Martin Luther’s work very well. When Luther translated the Bible, many German languages still existed. «He is the creator of our German language. And regardless of whether someone believes in plum jam or in love, he has to read Luther and so automatically gets into this dispute. “
Age is also an indication of finitude. «Since I live alive, I don’t have to think about death all the time. Word has already got around to me that people are mortal, ”says Biermann. He would then like a place in the Dorotheenstadt cemetery in Berlin. Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller, Anna Seghers, Helene Weigel, Hanns Eisler and Stephan Hermlin await him there. “And if at some point I have to be buried, then I would like to live where I really have many trusted friends and also loyal old enemies with whom I can pass the time when I’m dead.”
Friends and enemies are part of his life. Born in Hamburg, Biermann moved to the still young GDR in 1953. The Jewish father, a staunch communist, had been murdered in Auschwitz ten years earlier. Mother Emma sends the child to the GDR boarding school. The move is also intended as revenge, as the boy in the workers ‘and peasants’ state helps implement his father’s dream of socialism.
In East Berlin, Biermann can work at the theater of his great role model Bertolt Brecht, and is supported by Hanns Eisler. Biermann bravely and persistently defied those in power with his poetic and subversive songs. The SED superiors tightened the boundaries, and in 1965 the occupation was banned. The clashes with the state and the party culminated in his expatriation in 1976, which triggered a storm of indignation in both East and West.
A protest resolution against expatriation reads like a top ten of GDR literature: Stephan Hermlin, Erich Arendt, Jurek Becker, Volker Braun, Franz Fühmann, Sarah Kirsch, Günter Kunert, Heiner Müller, Rolf Schneider, Christa and Gerhard Wolf. To this day, the singer’s expulsion – which many should follow when going to the West – is often interpreted as the beginning of the end of the SED dictatorship, even if it was 13 years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He has to digest the system change from GDR to FRG. “When I was thrown into the West, expatriated in 1976, I felt weirdly bad. I whined around, »says the songwriter. “It took me many years to learn the democracy of our society.” Today he has a lot of understanding for the different developments in a unified Germany. “The East Germans have the bad luck that they don’t have one dictatorship behind them, but two dictatorships.” That takes time. “The devastation in people is more complicated, more complex and protracted.”
Over the decades Biermann has created an enormous oeuvre: 24 albums, more than 40 publications of poems, translations, adaptations, essays, sheet music, audio books. Biermann has already bequeathed his private archive to the Berlin State Library in more than 100 large boxes full of diaries, manuscripts, letters, photos and contemporary documents.
«I’ve experienced a lot more than I can write. I also experienced a lot more than I could grasp ». Biermann thinks he is like most people. “I am one of those poets who don’t think up anything.”
Critics often accuse Biermann of arrogance, arrogance, and loud mouthing. “I have never let myself be carried away for reasons of vanity into doing anything stupid,” says the songwriter. “I did something stupid, not out of vanity, but out of real, honest stupidity.” After mistakes “in private with love or in politics”, he always had the courage to correct himself clearly and publicly. “And if I did it, I made a beautiful song out of it.”