Wolf Biermann turns 90: from Hamburg bombing survivor to banned GDR singer-poet

Childhood in Hamburg

Wolf Biermann was born in Hamburg on 15 November 1936 into a communist family. His father, Dagobert Biermann, a Jewish communist and dock worker, was arrested by the Gestapo when Wolf was still an infant and was later murdered in Auschwitz. During the Hamburg firestorm of July 1943, his mother Emma jumped with him into the Nordkanal and escaped the fire in the badly hit Hammerbrook district. Biermann has said he forgot nothing from that night.

“I have forgotten nothing about that bombing night, not a word, a face, a colour, a smell or a scream.”

From Hamburg to East Berlin

In May 1953, at 16, he moved to the GDR to help build communism and studied political economy at Humboldt University in Berlin. In 1957 Helene Weigel hired him as a directing assistant at the Berliner Ensemble, and Hanns Eisler discovered his talent as a songwriter four years later. In 1961 he founded the East Berlin workers' and students' theatre (b.a.t.). His staging of the play Berliner Brautgang, which deals with the building of the Berlin Wall, was not approved, and the GDR banned him from performing and publishing.

The 1976 Cologne concert and expulsion

On 13 November 1976 he gave a concert in the Sporthalle Köln before about 8,000 people, after twelve years of performance bans in the GDR. The concert had been invited by the youth organisation of the IG Metall union and a student group from Bochum. The East German leadership had reportedly planned the action well before his departure, and the Politburo used the concert as a pretext to strip him of citizenship for a gross violation of civic duties. Three days later he learned of his expulsion from the radio. Intellectuals protested in a petition, and signature drives in East and West failed. Further repression pushed many other artists to leave, and in 1977 the actress Eva-Maria Hagen and her daughter Catharina followed.

The anniversary year

The 90th birthday coincides with the 50th anniversary of the Cologne concert, which is marked by a jubilee tour titled Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten!. The two-hour cinema documentary by director Jens Meurer, also titled Biermann - Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten, uses archive material and interviews with contemporaries such as Armin Müller-Stahl. It opens with Biermann at home in Neukirchen, where his wife Pamela, also his manager, cuts his hair. Biermann's 1976 remark about West German society is quoted in the film.

“I do not like this society here. I do not like it, I do not know it, and I do not want it at all.”

His diaries, published for the first time under the title Ihr löscht das Feuer mit Benzin, describe his struggles in the East and his break with communism in the West. His papers, held in hundreds of boxes, have been stored in the Berlin State Library since 2021.