Wolf Biermann

Origins and early life

Wolf Biermann was born in Hamburg on 15 November 1936 to a Jewish father, Dagobert Biermann, a communist shipyard worker whom the German Historical Museum records as murdered at Auschwitz in 1943 as a Jew and as a member of the communist resistance, and to a non-Jewish mother; under the Nazi racial laws the boy was classified a Mischling of the first degree and was not deported.

Work and career

He and his mother survived the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943. Raised a communist, he moved to East Germany in 1953 out of conviction, studied philosophy and mathematics in Berlin and worked at the Berliner Ensemble. He began writing songs of a kind the state had not anticipated: communist in conviction and merciless about the regime's lies, its wall, its police and its silences. He was banned from performing and publishing in 1965 and spent eleven years confined to his flat in the Chausseestrasse, recording there with a tape machine while the Stasi kept him under constant surveillance.

In November 1976 he was allowed to tour West Germany, and while he was in Cologne the government stripped him of his citizenship; the protest that followed, signed by the leading writers and artists of the country, split the East German cultural world and drove a generation of them into exile, and it is now regarded as the point after which the regime lost its intellectuals. He has continued to write, and he addressed the Bundestag in 2014.