He invented being a songwriter as a profession. Bertolt Brecht called himself a playwright, his admirer Wolf Biermann made and continues to make songs. A singing craftsman. Now his coquetry can be heard again on the album “Unterm Haar nur Himmel”, his first new album in ten years. He gave it to himself for his 90th birthday.
It starts with a “Morita from the lovers”. Biermann's guitar concerts and builds into a frenzied, artistic flamenco as the song progresses. He also complains and growls, mocks and curses in his baroque poetry. “The blood wedding between Hitler and Stalin in the pact / And now Putin and Trump making love.” Totalitarian couples everywhere, “okay, okay.” In the first five minutes, the entire Biermann is already concentrating: from world history he comes to himself, to his love for women and to wise advice about getting involved in his own life, his internal and external affairs.
“Under the Hair Only Heaven,” his album title, comes from “Frau Freiheit,” a song from 1962. He celebrates seven decades of fervent songwriting. For the 90th on November 15th, his sound retrospective will be part of the Biermann Festival with the publication of his diaries, a ceremony with Angela Merkel in Berlin's Kino International, a soirée in Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie and a film portrait.
“Biermann,” the film, takes him back to his apartment where he recorded his first album, “Chausseestraße 131,” in Berlin in 1968. He looks out the window and tells his story. How the Brecht actress Brigitte Soubeyran wished that he would write songs and poems like the chansonnier Georges Brassens and also grow a beautiful mustache. He complied with both.
Six recordings on Biermann's new and old album come from that time on Chausseestraße. The erotic “Ballad of Biting Barbara”, “Vietnam – The Fuse is Lit” with jazz band, the crackling and ice-learning “Song of the Worst”, “Aah yes! – the Shah!” for the 1968s rebelling in the West, “The John Steinbeck Ballad” over eleven minutes from mice and men to all of humanity with guitar and flute – and “Frau Freiheit”.
The feminine figure of freedom runs through Biermann's life's work. In “My Better Half” from 2023, “humanity savior spasm” rhymes with “class struggle.” “In the workers’, farmers’ and bigwigs’ state/ I had the answer to everything,” remembers the friend of that woman named Freiheit. The album will be released on November 13th, exactly 50 years after his concert in Cologne, after which the bigwigs no longer let him return to his state. The German-German 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 slightly better German state, which until then had still been alive through his songs, had disappeared with him from the country.
His songs became even more powerful. Whether bearded civil rights activists or shaggy punks - everyone clung to Biermann's messages from the deserted East Berlin apartment, recorded from cassette to cassette. “That's how it should be”, “Soldier, Soldier”, “Ballad of the Prussian Icarus”, “Encouragement” and “Don't wait for better times”. In the film “Biermann” he returns to the Cologne sports hall for a concert. With Wolfgang Niedecken and with the Toten Hosen. Of the many fathers who are credited with German unity, he is the one who likes to listen the most. As exhausting as it may be at times, his clapping and shouting.
His album also includes his “Voltaire Chanson,” which he performed in 2009 at Berlin’s Humboldt University for an honorary doctorate. For his teacher Wolfgang Heise, philosopher and, as it is said, “Prometheus of party reason”, who fell apart for the GDR and because of the GDR: “His heart stopped because of rebellion/ He was my GDR Voltaire/ Because he always saw through/ Even his own illusion.” Brecht/Eisler's “Solidarity Song” takes on “Riding the Tiger” from 2018. With “Do you think the Russians want war?” Biermann takes the broadest possible approach in his early work. From 1961 and Yevgeny Yevtushenko's peace poem "Do you think the Russians want war?" about Biermann's memory of this in the Crimean conflict from 2014 to 2026 to his despair about the Russian war.
War is his leitmotif. “A Father's Soul Alone” tells of a 90-year life from the Spanish Civil War, in which his father fought as a Hamburg shipyard worker while he, Biermann, was born, to the Ukrainian War. He is born as an “anti-fascist big cock” and, when his father is murdered as a Jewish communist, becomes a “father’s soul alone”. He suffers. Also about his fatherland: In a talk show at his birthday celebrations, he included the AfD and BSW among the totalitarian lovers of his morality as heirs to two German dictatorships. “And now many a German national-pacifist tail is wagging their Russian dog/For Russian bloodhounds to the right or to the left,” he sings. “Whoever shouts peace and eats away at our freedom.”
“Tsar Vladimir, a Hitler-Stalin monster” rises up in another song against the ghosts of history that have been resurrected as parties and the electorate: “The future shows its ass face/The past is glorified/What you remember wasn’t you/You don’t want to know who you are.” At the end of the ballad, as he sings, his guitar turns from a wooden sword back into a bride whose belly he caresses.
Without his “encouragement”, his life song, Biermann would not be Biermann. In “Late Encouragement,” he looks forward to brighter times. He ends his album with the “encouragement” he shares with Teneke-Trampet, a Turkish band, after 50 years. The job of the songwriter, as Wolf Biermann practices it with his voice becoming brittle, was always dialectical: craft and high mass for the cause. In the sixties and seventies for socialism, then, until today, for his “Mrs. Freedom”.
“Under the Hair Only Heaven” by Wolf Biermann will be published by Clouds Hill on November 13th.
