Der deserteur wolf biermann biography wikipedia

Wolf Biermann is one of the best-known songwriters in Germany.

Wolf Biermann is one of the best known songwriters in Germany — East and West. His expulsion from the GDR in represents a political turning point in the post-war history of divided Germany and an admission of helplessness on the part of the SED leadership. Unlike less well-known artists, Biermann had become too popular to be arrested and too unpredictable to be allowed to perform in public.

Many of his songs, ballads and poems have outlasted the original circumstances of their making.

Wolf Biermann is one of the best known songwriters in Germany – East and West.

His life and work are dialectically interwoven with the history of Germany. In a state without free media, the field of culture took on the function of the public sphere. That provided art with visibility and recognition, but also made it the object of state control and coercion. Born in Hamburg in , he grew up in a working-class, communist-oriented milieu.

While still in school, Biermann moved to the German Democratic Republic in on the strength of his political convictions. In the wake of the 11 th plenum of the Central Committee of the SED, Biermann was banned in the mids from performing and publishing in the GDR and subjected to almost unbroken surveillance by the State Security.

As is now known, the expulsion from the East Germany that followed had been decided before the concert took place. This kind of open protest was unprecedented in East Germany. For Wolf Biermann, the forced resettlement from East to West presented a challenge to his artistic and political self-understanding. How was a songwriter to redefine himself in the Federal Republic, an artist who despite all criticism of the SED leadership still saw himself as a communist and an exile?

In West Germany Biermann supported the peace movement, the anti-nuclear protests, and the founding of the German Green Party.