With cheeky songs he brought Honecker, Sindermann

The offender heard the verdict from the car radio. On November 16, 1976, East German singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann was driving at 160 km/h in an IG Metall company car, driven by a chauffeur, on the autobahn to Bochum when he suddenly became aware of the current news on the car radio. Because the spokesman announced: "The responsible authorities of the GDR have withdrawn Wolf Biermann's right to stay in the German Democratic Republic."

Biermann was flabbergasted. The day before he had celebrated his 40th birthday and was thus years older than his father Dagobert Biermann was allowed to be - the committed communist and Jew had been murdered in 1943 at the age of 39 in the Auschwitz concentration camp. And three days earlier, Wolf Biermann had given a concert in Cologne in front of several thousand listeners, the first since the end of 1965. The SED Central Committee had given him a concert like a number of other left-wing GDR artists (such as Stefan Heym and Heiner Müller). Performance ban imposed - for a singer-songwriter like him practically a professional ban.

For this reason, he only traveled to West Germany after obtaining assurances that he would be allowed to return to East Berlin after his tour, which included five concerts. But on Tuesday, November 16, 1976, SED party and GDR head of state Erich Honecker surprisingly left the fourth item on the agenda at the regular Politburo meeting (after the formal confirmation of the minutes of the previous meeting, the congratulations on Leonid Brezhnev's 70th birthday). birthday and the approval of the planned broadcast of Honecker's New Year's speech on GDR television) deal with the withdrawal of Biermann's citizenship.

According to the surviving minutes of the results, the SED rulers confirmed the proposal of the “reporter” Honecker. The Politburo even approved the wording of the declaration that “the responsible border authorities should make to Biermann”: “During your stay in the FRG you grossly violated your civic duties towards the GDR. For this reason, their citizenship in the GDR was revoked in accordance with Section 13 of the law on citizenship in the German Democratic Republic. Because of this, you are prohibited from entering the GDR and from transiting through the GDR.”

The SED central organ "Neues Deutschland" (ND) published a more detailed justification. Biermann "with his hostile behavior" towards the GDR "deprived himself of the basis for further granting of citizenship of the GDR". But what was the singer-songwriter specifically accused of? "On November 13, he appeared in a mass event in the Cologne sports hall, which was broadcast on television and radio," said the large two-column on the second page of the party newspaper. "He spent the evening all alone and designed a program that was deliberately and purposefully directed against the GDR and socialism."

The article came from the deputy ND editor-in-chief Günter Kertzscher, who incidentally became a member of the SA in 1934 and joined the NSDAP in 1937, immediately after the (brief) end of the ban on admissions. Kertzscher really got going against Biermann: "The amount of hatred, slander and insults he unleashed there as a GDR citizen and in a capitalist country against our socialist state and its citizens is enough. For years he has sprayed his poison against the GDR to the applause of our enemies.” Kertzscher's formulation was almost funny, after all, that the singer-songwriter pretended to “drive on the left” but was “in fact on the right”.

The attack by the ND deputy chief was indirectly refuted in the next WELT issue. Because Günter Zehm, then the editor responsible for cultural policy at the Bonn-based editorial team and really a very conservative journalist, analyzed the singer-songwriter’s tour through the Federal Republic and subsequent return to the SED dictatorship in the editorial on November 18, 1976, in a way that was both critical and sharp .

“Biermann wanted to wash the fur without getting it wet. He wanted to eat the cake and keep it at the same time. To put it less metaphorically: He wanted to get to grips with the totalitarian dictatorship without hitting the core." Zehm concluded: "Something like that couldn't go well in the long run." That didn't sound like Kertzscher's alleged "applause from our enemies" - and WELT was undoubtedly one of the fiercest enemies of the SED dictatorship.

In fact, Biermann was still a committed communist in 1976. But at the same time he mocked the SED leaders. About the East Berlin party leader Paul Verner, who is also a member of the Politburo, he wrote: "That's the whole Verner Paul, a sparrow brain with a lion's mouth ..." Horst Sindermann, who had just been deported from the meaningless post of chairman of the GDR Council of Ministers the even more insignificant function of chairman of the GDR “Volkskammer” got his ridicule. Biermann rhymed: "Oh Sindermann, you blind man, you only cause damage."

Born in 1936 into a communist family, Biermann grew up after the Second World War as an orphan in his badly damaged hometown. In 1950, at the age of 13, he went to East Berlin to the “Germany Meeting of Young People” and there vowed loyalty to the GDR. At the age of 16, Biermann moved to the GDR in 1953, shortly before the popular uprising on June 17 - on the instructions of the West German KPD, which apparently saw him as a young talent. He graduated from high school and began studying "political economy", i.e. Marxism-Leninism. He later switched to philosophy, but was denied his degree in 1963.

Because Biermann had meanwhile turned into an unorthodox communist, who addressed some of the numerous grievances of the SED dictatorship. As early as 1963 he was banned from performing in the GDR for a limited time. The following year he traveled to the Federal Republic for a concert for the first time, three years after the Wall was built - which shows that Biermann was still privileged. Or maybe the party just hoped he would stay in the West voluntarily. However, when he returned to East Berlin from a second trip to the West, the result was a total ban on performing. Now, at just 29, Biermann was a dissident. He could only publish in Western publishers, no longer appear at all.

The expatriation after the trip to the West in November 1976, which was approved under false assurances, was the logical consequence. Only once, in 1982, was he allowed to travel to Grünheide near East Berlin to say goodbye to his terminally ill friend Robert Havemann. Biermann now confessed to "Eurocommunism"; his manager was the Stasi informer Diether Dehm (IM "Willy"). Biermann and Dehm later argued, sometimes publicly, about the extent of this betrayal.

After reunification, Biermann found references to more than 70 spies in the approximately 50,000 surviving pages of his Stasi file who had reported on him over the decades. Working as chief culture correspondent at WELT from 2000 remained an episode; However, Biermann distinguished himself as an independent voice with always controversial theses. In 2007 he became an honorary citizen of the state of Berlin, which the SED successor party wanted to prevent – ​​after all, the singer-songwriter had reprimanded the red-red coalition in the federal capital: It was “criminal for the SPD to go to bed with the PDS”. On November 15, 2022, Biermann celebrated his 86th birthday.

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