Opening speech at the exhibition “Wolf Biermann. A Poet and Songwriter in Germany”

Monika Boll | 6 July 2023

The Deutsches Historisches Museum’s exhibition “Wolf Biermann. A Poet and Songwriter in Germany” opens to the public on 7 July 2023. On 5 July 2023, the curator Monika Boll held a speech during the festive opening ceremony, which we are publishing here in this blog.

At the centre of the exhibition is Wolf Biermann as an artist whose life and work mirrors recent German history at central points of reference: between East and West, German and Jewish, socialism and democracy, politics and art. After a prologue, the chronologically arranged tour through eight thematic rooms explores the interconnections of Wolf Biermann’s life and career with the history of divided Germany. Born in Hamburg in 1936, he grew up in a working-class, communist-oriented milieu. In 1953, while still at school, Biermann moved to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) on the strength of his political convictions and completed his Abitur at the Gadebusch boarding school near Schwerin.

The exhibition takes a close look at Biermann’s first publications and performances. Theatre work was among his early activities, beginning with a two-year session as a director’s assistant at the Berliner Ensemble under Helene Weigel. How significant this work was for him becomes clear when you read his application for membership in the SED, the Socialist Unity Party, from 1960, which is displayed in the exhibition. In the two-page application there is no mention of his desire to became of songwriter, but several references to theatre, when he writes, for example: “I undertake the study of Marxist philosophy in light of its application to theatre work.” This applies even more to the history of the b.a.t., the Berlin Workers’ and Students’ Theatre, which Biermann co-founded with his first wife, Brigitte Soubeyran, a short time after the Berlin Wall was built. This joint project of workers, students and artists was celebrated in the GDR press as a successful realisation of socialist cultural policy – but not, however, Biermann’s play Berliner Brautgang (Berlin courtship), which deals with a young couple who became separated when the Wall went up. On the very day of the general rehearsal the play was banned, Biermann dismissed, and the b.a.t. closed down. The reasons given were that it showed a distorted picture of the Berlin Wall and exhibited “public behaviour harmful to the Party”. The pattern that emerges here: “first supported, then forbidden” applies to Wolf Biermann’s artistic endeavours in particular and reveals the precariousness of GDR cultural politics in general. On the one hand, culture enjoyed high esteem in East Germany. After the Second World War, the invocation of the “cultural nation” belonged to socialist self-understanding. Culture was considered a precious asset. In a state without free media, culture took on the function of the public sphere. This brought it visibility and recognition, but at the same time turned it into the object of state control and coercion.

In the exhibition we show how this pattern of appreciation and coercion manifested itself in an event called “Young Lyric Poetry” in the Academy of Arts, organised by its director, Stephan Hermlin. “Young Lyric Poetry” stood for a new enthusiasm for poetry that carried over from the Soviet Union to the GDR in the course of de-Stalinisation. Young authors like Volker Braun, Sarah Kirsch or Reiner Kunze celebrated their debut at this time.

But the dilemma of poetry is that it always invites the poet to use the personal pronoun “I”, which in party jargon involved the danger of “bourgeois individualism”. And at this event in the Academy, Wolf Biermann offered the lyrical “I-form” in the poem “To the Old Comrades”, where he dared no less than to recommend that the old-school comrades make way for the new generation, a downright presumptuous claim. In his poem “Reckless Abuse”, which begins with a threefold “I I I”, he is even more explicit when he continues: “… I don’t want to see anyone. Don’t just stand there! Stop staring! The collective is on the wrong track.”

But the leadership of the SED party always had the last word in matters of cultural policy. Artists who strayed from the party line were intimidated and persecuted. The poetry evening in the Academy ended for Stephan Hermlin with the loss of his position as director and his forced self-critical admission of wrongdoing in the party newspaper “Neues Deutschland”. Biermann’s “Reckless Abuse”, which was printed in 1965 by the West Berlin publisher Wagenbach Verlag, led to a decision taken at the 11^th Plenum of the Central Committee of the SED to ban Biermann from publishing or performing in East Germany and to undertake an almost uninterrupted surveillance of Wolf Biermann by the Stasi, which made Biermann, alongside the dissident Robert Havemann, the most intensely monitored person in the GDR.

After eleven years when he was not allowed to perform, Wolf Biermann’s famous concert took place in Cologne, West Germany, on 13 November 1976. His subsequent expulsion from the GDR, it is now known, had been decided before the concert took place. In an open letter to the SED leadership, prominent artists such as Stephan Hermlin, Sarah Kirsch, Manfred Krug and Christa Wolf protested against the expulsion. This kind of public protest, which was even supported by some party members, was unprecedented in the GDR and had far-reaching consequences. In the exhibition you can see, for example, an interview with the artist Gabriele Stötzer, where she reports about her internment in the Hoheneck women’s prison as a result of her protest.

The forced move from East to West represented an immense challenge to Biermann’s artistic and political self-understanding. How should a songwriter redefine himself who despite all criticism of the SED leadership still saw himself as a communist? In West Germany Biermann supported the peace movement, the anti-nuclear protests, and the founding of the Green Party. However, he maintained a reserved opinion about radical pacifism, as he wrote, for instance, in his controversial article “Warmongering Peacemongering” about the Gulf War.

When, in 1989, the civil rights movement in East Germany grew stronger and the government began to totter, Biermann first had to remain a passive onlooker. He was not permitted to cross into East Berlin for the demonstration at Alexanderplatz on 4 November 1989. During the occupation of the central headquarters of the Ministry of State Security in Berlin in 1990, Biermann voted to preserve the Stasi files. He later confirmed this opinion in a discussion about the activity of the writer Sascha Anderson as an informer for the Stasi. Even today, Biermann retains a critical distance to the PDS and DIE LINKE (The Left) which he sees as direct successors to the SED party. This he underscored in his combative and controversial appearance in the Bundestag in 2014, as you can see in the exhibition.

The exhibition also explores the topic of Wolf Biermann and Judaism. This includes a chart of the family tree of the Biermann and Lowenthal families, based on research by Pamela Biermann, and a new German-language adaptation by Biermann of Yitzhak Katzenelson’s poem, “Song of the Murdered Jewish People”.

This brings us back to the songwriter and his music. In the exhibition you can hear Biermann’s songs at the respective thematic stations, as far as they provided a direct occasion for, or reaction to, political events, songs such as “To the Old Comrades”, “The Popular Ballad” or the “Gorleben Song”, as well as the entire Cologne concert. In addition, the interior room in the exhibition contains a large media installation entitled “In the Mirror of the Critics”. It focuses directly on Biermann’s songs as artworks and builds a counterpoint to the usual perception of Wolf Biermann as a political songwriter. It was put together in cooperation with the radio station rbb-Kultur. Here you have the opportunity to listen to 21 different Biermann songs from the time between 1962 and 2016, where they are combined with positive or negative voices by contemporary critics, thus forming a kind of miniature audio collage.

Dr Monika Boll Monika Boll is a philosopher and curator. She has curated exhibitions at various museums on such topics as the Frankfurt School, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Fritz Bauer. For the Deutsches Historisches Museum she previously curated the exhibition “Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century” (2020).