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7 - Wolf Biermann: Die Heimat ist weit

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2013

Peter Thompson
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
David Robb
Affiliation:
Queen's University of Belfast
David G. Robb
Affiliation:
Lecturer in German Studies - School of Languages, Literatures and ArtsThe Queen's University of Belfast
Eckhard Holler
Affiliation:
Retired Teacher, and former organizer of T�bingen Festival
Peter Thompson
Affiliation:
Department of Germanic StudiesThe University of Sheffield
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Summary

Wolf Biermann remains perhaps the best-known and most influential political song-maker in German history: a central figure against whom all other political songwriters must be measured, both lyrically and musically. Peter Graves has commented that “his poetry has a compelling verve and an infectious candor, a power to sting and to challenge, as well as to amuse.” As Sabine Brandt has also said, his “Gedichte mobilisieren das Hirn, seine Lieder auch das Herz. Sie ergreifen den Menschen total […].” For many he was the best example of what David Bathrick has called the almost libidinal attraction of communism and the GDR in all its contradictions. From the time when he first arrived in the GDR from West Germany in 1953 — just as millions were moving in the opposite direction — to the present day, his songs and thoughts have undergone radical change but have also demonstrated quite clear and definable continuities.

This chapter will attempt to trace Biermann's geographical, personal, and political journey, demonstrating how, for him, all three aspects of his life are intimately entwined and represented in his songs and poems. It will also investigate a further intertwining: Biermann's is, after all, a German life expressed in German song, but it is, or was, also a communist life expressed in communist song. And the songs carry within them both the horizontal community of his fellow Germans, communists and Jews as well as the vertical community of the history and genealogy of his family, his class, his nation, and his people.

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Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2007

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