2023-07-07 11:39:13
What is the plural of harmonium? harmonies? Two of the old home organs can be seen in the German Historical Museum in Berlin because of their aura. The harmonium made of dark wood stood in Wolf Biermann’s rented apartment not far from here on Chausseestraße, where he secretly recorded his early works until 1976. The instrument is already immortalized on the sleeve of his second album “Don’t wait for better times”, and the picture is also in the exhibition.
The brighter harmonium was on the stage in Cologne’s sports hall on November 13, 1976, where Wolf Biermann played it while singing in his “Kunze-Lied”, whoever put themselves in danger would die in it.
Wolf Biermann on November 13, 1976 in the Cologne sports hall
Source: Barbara Klemm © German Historical Museum
The debut album: “Chausseestraße 131” by Wolf Biermann, 1969 by Klaus Wagenbach
Source: Sebastian Ahlers, German Historical Museum
He didn’t come around when he, the songwriter from the GDR, performed in the West for the first time and his state wouldn’t let him go back to East Berlin. But the GDR dealt with itself when it expatriated him. The Biermann case was the tipping point, as we would say today, the moment after which nothing could be saved. The last hopes for a perhaps somewhat better German state, which had survived until then through Biermann’s songs, had disappeared from the country with him.
On the wall in the DHM hangs a hand-typed protest note from his colleagues, an open letter in which critical artists and party-affiliated cultural workers took a stand against the government. That was the end of the GDR, 13 years before the fall of the Wall and 14 years before German unity.
The protest note against Wolf Biermann’s expatriation from November 1976
Source: German Historical Museum
The fact that so much is being written about the GDR and debated so loudly than in the 33 years that have followed it may also be due to the fact that it has been so strictly museumized since it left. As a grey, closed prehistory of East Germany. Wolf Biermann opens it as a living legend, as a historical figure of 86 years of age, who is still constantly composing sonnets like “The Punic Putin”, whose manuscript is once again on display under glass in the museum.
“Wolf Bierman. A lyricist and songwriter in Germany” is the name of the exhibition. He had invented and shaped the songwriter as a profession himself, derived from Brecht’s playwright and in the most beautiful dialectic: on the one hand, making songs sounded like a daily craft, on the other hand, like high mass for the cause, in the 1960s for socialism.
Wolf Biermann’s guitar, model La Caprice by Curt Claus Voigt
Source: Eric Tschernow © Wolf & Pamela Biermann, Hamburg
How Biermann became a lyricist and songwriter, a pan-German legend, is shown in the exhibition in its demanding, winding course of gray walls.
The harmonium made of light wood welcomes you like an altar. November 13th was not only the day of the Cologne concert – it was also the birthday of Dagobert Biermann, he died in 1943 in the concentration camp in Auschwitz. Wolf, his son, was seven. When he was sitting at the harmonium in 1976, his father appeared to him and sat down over the keys, Biermann always said.
The death of his father, his own “birth under the yellow star in Germany” and the founding myth of a denazified GDR made the survivors of the family move from Hamburg to the East.
Wolf Biermann reads out a greeting to the President of the GDR, Wilhelm Pieck (2nd from right) in East Berlin on May 26, 1950
Source: : Edmund Thiele © German Historical Museum
You can see a young wolf without a beard as a pioneer at the Germany meeting in 1950 and some of his diaries: he started in 1954 at the age of 17, today there are said to be more than 200 volumes. Importance has never been alien to Biermann, modesty has never been his thing, he refers to Goethe: “Only the rascals are modest, the brave are happy about the deed.”
You can hear his anthems on, his “Encouragement” and the “Ballad of the Prussian Icarus”. But the GDR, which turned away from all utopias and a country for lambs, also needed a wolf, such a singer. In order to finally overcome himself.
Biermann’s spirit, his work and his history have become material in an almost Marxist manner: there is a metal bucket from the Wehrmacht in which his diaries were hidden in the GDR in order to preserve them for later generations. There is a wooden box, labeled in Russian, in which the GDR sent him his belongings after he was deported to Hamburg.
Wehrmacht food container in which Wolf Biermann hid his diaries in the GDR
Source: Eric Tschernow/German Historical Museum
Forwarding box made in the Soviet Union, in which Wolf Biermann’s personal belongings were transferred from the GDR to Hamburg
Source: Eric Tschernow © Wolf & Pamela Biermann, Hamburg/German Historical Museum
There is the entire Biermann with his most famous guitar and the original of his professional ban document from 1965: microphones and recorders for the home recordings, handwritten greetings from the operational process “lyricist” to his spies, “Good day, you dear Stasi pigs”, and posters for the election campaigns of the Greens in the 1980s.
Much of it comes from his legacy, which the State Library acquired through the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation two years ago – hundred boxes with manuscripts, sheet music, letters, photos, documents of all kinds. The price for them remains a secret between Biermann and Berlin as to how it means “protection of the person”.
Wolf Biermann is banned from appearing at FDJ events, East Berlin 1965
Source: : Horst Schumann © Federal Archives/Foundation Archive of the Parties and Mass Organizations of the GDR (SAPMO)
Even if the big exhibition is over in January, Wolf Biermann is officially part of the German cultural heritage. Archived for all time between the Humboldts and the Grimms.
Wolf Bierman. A lyricist and songwriter in Germany. DHM Berlin, until January 14, 2024
This is where you will find third-party content
In order to display embedded content, your revocable consent to the transmission and processing of personal data is required, since the providers of the embedded content as third-party providers require this consent [In diesem Zusammenhang können auch Nutzungsprofile (u.a. auf Basis von Cookie-IDs) gebildet und angereichert werden, auch außerhalb des EWR]. By setting the switch to “on”, you agree to this (which can be revoked at any time). This also includes your consent to the transfer of certain personal data to third countries, including the USA, in accordance with Art. 49 (1) (a) GDPR. You can find more information about this. You can withdraw your consent at any time via the switch and via privacy at the bottom of the page.
#Wolf #Biermanns #legacy #exhibition #DHM #legacy #Berlin #State #Library