Text Crimes against the GDR’s Revolutionary Heritage: The Differing Fates of Wolf Biermann and Wenzel and Mensching

Abstract

The song-writing of Wolf Biermann alongside that of Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching in their group Karls Enkel undermined the GDR's assumption that it represented continuity with the revolutionary tradition. But because the state's historical self-image was so inextricably bound up with this notion, there was only limited freedom for artists to tackle the subject head on. Biermann was banned outright for his directness, while Wenzel, Mensching and Karls Enkel played a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities, concealing their criticism of the present day behind ambiguous historical allusions and clownish comedy. Both, for all their differences, serve as enlightening illustrations of political song-writing under the threat of prohibition in a period of ideological struggle.From the 1960s right up until the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, political song was a popular and important cultural force in the GDR. In the absence of an open media, political singer-songwriters ('Liedermacher') enjoyed elevated status as the bearers of unofficial tidings. Concert halls, student clubs, and informal gatherings were invariably packed. Editions of the records released on the state record label Amiga were snapped up immediately. The attraction for many fans lay in the singers' exploitation of a basic contradiction within GDR cultural policy. On one hand political song was nurtured at an official level as a proudly coveted revolutionary heritage. On the other hand it was constantly viewed with suspicion due to its potential as a means of subversion.Political singers in the GDR could be prohibited from publishing or performing if their songs were deemed unsuitable. Although there were intermittent political thaws and clampdowns at different periods over the state's 40-year history in which the leniency threshold of the authorities would vary,1 the singing of texts that were deemed not supportive of the GDR was forbidden. As will be later explored, censors were in operation on several institutional levels - cultural functionaries of the Free German Youth, other agencies involved in the state entertainment industry, managers of performance venues, and of course agents of the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) - all looking for instances of deviation from the Party line. At the same time, this case study will also reveal instances where more open-minded cultural functionaries would intervene on behalf of critical artists to enable performances to go ahead.This chapter looks at the cases of Wolf Biermann in the 1960s and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching in their group Karls Enkel2 in the 1980s. It will particularly focus on how these artists - while differing in approach, degree of celebrity, and the decades in which they performed - both exposed the shortcomings of socialism in the GDR by reinvigoradng a relationship to the state's literary and revolutionary heritage ('Erbe') in their work. While Biermann was criminalised outright for his political directness, the lesser known Wenzel and Mensching achieved a more tongue-in-cheek historical ambiguity in their work, which for the most part escaped the wrath of the censors. At the same time, as Stasi files bear testimony, the secret police was well aware of the game that Wenzel and Mensching and their song-theatre ('Liedertheater') group Karls Enkel were playing. While Wenzel and Mensching's own individual poetry collections appeared with the Mitteldeutscher Verlag,3 albeit only after long delays and protracted discussions with the publishers, the texts of their Liedertheater productions were never published in the GDR; most have remained a well-kept secret amongst the initiated few. The popular Hammer-Revue of Karls Enkel, Wacholder and Beckert & Schulz from the year 1982 was only released as a recording in 1994, after the fall of the GDR.Wolf Biermann is the most famous example of a singer who dared to write critical songs mocking the political practices of the GDR. …