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The Return of The Wolf

The Return of The Wolf
By Simon Burnett
Fri 28th Feb, 2003 [updated Tue 10th Jun, 2003]		 Add to favorites email print this article Stumble! del.icio.us digg this

For half an hour, it was like being plunged back into the Cold War. Wolf Biermann trundled into Hamburg's Petrikirche with his trusty acoustic guitar and played some of the old songs which made him an icon of the German left in the days when it mattered.

The drooping walrus mustache is grey and the hair is getting that way, but the voice of the man who was once East Germany's Public Enemy Number One retains its old hitting force. Most of the 300 or so people who turned up were old enough to remember that infamous night in 1976 when Stalinist East Germany, in one infamous move, withdrew his citizenship and dismissed any thoughts that an age of enlightenment was dawning.

In 1976, the world was in the depths of the Cold War. Leonid Brezhnev was the Moscow party boss. Jimmy Carter was elected President of the U.S. Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Tse-tung died. The main thrust of international politics was the SALT arms limitation negotiations.

Memories of the crushing of Alexander Dubcek's Prague Spring in 1968 had not faded--on the contrary, they hung over the East Bloc like a huge, admonishing black cloud. . .

Biermann had been given an exit visa and was making a concert tour of West German cities. He was travelling by car to a concert at Bochum, in the Ruhr, when he turned on the radio and heard that East Berlin had banished him. He could not go back.

The news flashed round the world. For 24 hours the Biermann case was the politics of the divided Germany. The ban was analysed in the world's major languages to see if there were some underlying meaning for East-West relations.

Biermann is the son of a Hamburg communist who had been killed by the Nazis in 1943. He was just 16 years old when he left Hamburg in May 1953 and went to East Germany. A few weeks later, East Germany's workers went on strike to protest against increased production norms and to demand political rights.

He went to work as a theatre production assistant and gained a following as a singer, putting his own acidly worded verse to guitar music and was soon a leading figure among intellectual dissidents.

The regime soon cracked down. In 1962, Biermann helped build a courtyard theatre nestled between tall apartment buildings. The Stasi secret police closed it before it even went live. Biermann was banned from performing publicly and, in 1965, his travel privileges were rescinded. His works could no longer be published in the East, although cassettes of his songs continued to circulate among student and intellectual groups.

The ban on Biermann's concerts was unexpectedly lifted in September 1976. In an equally unexpected move, he was allowed to travel to the West for a concert tour. He began it with a live, televised performance in Cologne on November 13.

When, on the night of November 16, the official East Berlin ADN news agency announced that Biermann's right to live in the East had been withdrawn, the uproar on both sides of the border exceeded the regime's worst nightmares. Writers, musicians and artists in the East distributed handbills and scrawled protests on house walls. In one village, a large sign saying "Biermann hat recht" ("Biermann is right") was painted on the road. Biermann's daughter, the singer Nina Hagen, then 21, protested, and she was thrown out of East Germany as well. Biermann's girlfriend, actress Eva-Marie Hagen, signed a protest petition and was sacked from her television job.

Biermann arrived at the church this cool February Hamburg night clad in a black leather jacket over a sweat shirt, and black jeans. He does not like playing his guitar in churches. This, he quickly added, had nothing to do with God but with the buildings themselves. His complaint is the acoustics. Looking up at those cold, vaulted Gothic caverns 150 feet above, it was easy to see why. The notes bounce around up there far too long.

He does not in fact mind where he plays. The venue is not important. The audience is. When he elaborates, it is clear that his tongue is as acerbic as it ever was: "I would rather play in a pigsty before decent people than in a salon before pigs."

He quickly made clear that this night, he was surrounded by "good people".

Biermann is probably around the same fighting weight of a quarter of a century ago. There is not much of him. But that is like watching Oscar De La Hoya work out at his Los Angeles gymnasium and saying there is not much of him either. Both men punch far above their weight.

A few years ago at a meeting in Berlin, Biermann was approached by an official of the post-communist PDS party. The PDS man had also been a member of the former East German ruling party, which had hounded Biermann. The official, with his six-feet plus, towered over Biermann. He also brought along his six-year-old daughter, presumably as insurance against anything unpleasant happening.

He introduced himself to Biermann and ventured to suggest that both had, in different ways, been victims of circumstances in East Germany. Biermann looked up at him and said: "You're a crook."

As the PDS official moved away, the plaintive voice of his daughter could be heard: "Papa, why are you a crook?"
Article added on Fri 28th Feb, 2003 [last updated Tue 10th Jun, 2003]
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