“Don’t be intimidated in this terrible time / This is what they want us to surrender before the big battle,” sings legendary German bard Wolf Biermann in the song “Ermutigung” (“Encouragement”). He hopes that this song will be able to become a balm for the souls of the advocates of change in Belarus who are behind bars. On September 21, Wolf Biermann announced that he wanted to hand over the literary prize named after Ovid, which was awarded to Maria Kolesnikova, who was imprisoned for 11 years, whom he called “an icon of civil and peaceful resistance.”
The award, which bears the name of the ancient Roman poet Ovid, who, by order of the Emperor Augustus, was sent into exile for his freedom of thought for the rest of his life, was established in 2017. It is awarded by the PEN Center for German-speaking Authors Abroad for contributions to literature. But in this case, it is not so much how significant this award is important, but the person who was awarded it and decided to transfer it to the Belarusian oppositionist. Wolf Biermann is a special phenomenon in Germany. He is a poet and reformer, a bard and a dissident, a rebel and adherent of socialism. Birman is a man who became a myth during his lifetime. Let’s talk about it in more detail.
Originally from a dictatorship
Wolf Biermann was born three years after Hitler came to power in a family of workers at a shipyard in Hamburg. Birman’s father – a Jew and a communist – participated in the resistance against the Nazis, was arrested and died at Auschwitz in 1943. In the same year, seven-year-old Wolf miraculously escaped the terrible bombing of Hamburg. Until 1953, Birman attended gymnasium, where he was known as “the radically worst student.”
Wolf Biermann took part in more than one protest against violations of democratic rights. Hamburg, 1978
Following his adherence to the ideas of socialism, at the age of 16, he moved to live in the GDR, but very soon became objectionable there: in 1963 he was expelled from the party, in 1965 he was banned from publishing and speaking, and in 1976 he was deprived of his citizenship. Since then he has lived in Hamburg. Birman has four children, he loves to hit on women, is very vain, but not devoid of self-irony. Birman works nonstop: writes poetry, songs, essays, polemic articles, pamphlets, translates Bob Dylan and Shakespeare, and travels around the country with concerts. He is 84 years old, but for Wolf Biermann this is not an age!
In search of real socialism
The Birman myth will forever remain young. The legend began in the mid-1960s in an apartment at the address known far outside Berlin: Shossestrasse 131. There, Biermann, persecuted by the regime, created his own world, into which friends and comrades entered, like Wolf himself, who believed in socialism, but did not who found him in the SED regime.
Wolf Biermann at a meeting in the Bundestag on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall
Birman’s lyrics and songs circulated in illegal recordings throughout the GDR, then gradually gained popularity in the FRG. Since 1965 Biermann has become a famous figure in western Germany, his collection of poems “The Wire Harp” (“Die Drahtharfe”) and the disc “Wolf Biermann (from the east) visiting Wolfgang Neuss (in the west)” caused a real sensation. The legendary Wolf Biermann has always been a common German phenomenon. His tandem with the scholar and critic of the East German regime, Robert Havemann, inspired hope in the West for a political thaw in the GDR. In the East, Birman embodied the socialist version of the student movement of the late 1960s.
Symbol of the beginning of the end of the GDR
It is believed that Birman created his best works before 1976 – the year of exile from the GDR. Both the music and poetry of the rebel of that period have stood the test of time. This is especially true of those poems that combine current political themes with the eternal motives of poetry – love and frailty. “How close are those that have gone to us, and yet / How dead are sometimes for us those that have remained,” sings Birman in the famous song “Cemetery of the Huguenots”. He received his first literary prize shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall. And in 1991, in a speech on the occasion of the Buechner Prize, the bard opened a difficult and painful, but necessary discussion about the cooperation of writers with the state security in the GDR.
On November 13, 1976, Wolf Biermann gave a famous concert in Cologne, which was followed by the revocation of his GDR citizenship. For Birman’s colleagues, the concert became a symbol of “the beginning of the end of the GDR”. And if so, then Wolf Biermann, poet and bard, managed to defeat the dictatorship.
The Ovid Prize ceremony will take place on 5 October at the German National Library in Frankfurt. Thanks to the deed of Wolf Biermann, this time it is also dedicated to freedom of thought in Belarus.
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