Berlin, November 15th, 2026 (The Berlin Spectator) – Wolf Biermann, one of Germany’s most outspoken poets and songwriters, celebrates his 90th birthday today. Few artists have left such deep marks on the country’s history, and few have been as stubborn about it.
Biermann was born on November 15th, 1936, in Hamburg. Both of his parents were workers and communists. His father Dagobert, who was also Jewish, was jailed for his resistance to the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz in 1943, where he was murdered. Biermann saw him only once, at the age of four, in a prison in Bremen. Even so, he says his father shaped him more than anyone else. His mother told him about the man every morning at breakfast. Decades later, Biermann still talks now and then to this father who stayed 38 forever.
In 1953, at the age of 16, he moved from Hamburg to East Germany of his own free will, convinced he would help build a communist paradise. He studied in East Berlin and worked at the Berliner Ensemble, and from 1960 on he wrote his own songs and poems. In November of 1965, the SED regime banned him from performing and publishing altogether. His work then circulated through handwritten copies and tape recordings, while manuscripts were smuggled west, where they appeared as books and records.
Wave of Protest
After a concert in Cologne in November 1976, the GDR stripped him of his citizenship. The decision triggered an unexpectedly large wave of protest in East and West. Many people see it as the beginning of the end of the regime. Biermann returned to Hamburg, where he lives in Altona with his wife Pamela, whom he married in 1989. In 1990, he took part in the occupation of the Stasi headquarters in East Berlin. He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1991, the Heinrich Heine Prize in 1993 and honorary citizenship of Berlin in March 2007. This week North Rhine-Westphalia announced that it will honor him with its Order of Merit, 50 years after the Cologne concert.
Berlin’s Governing Mayor, Kai Wegner, also congratulated Biermann. In a statement issued by the state’s Press and Information Office, Wegner called him “one of the great voices of German freedom history”, and said Biermann had defied a dictatorship with his songs and his courage and given people hope. “Wolf Biermann never let himself be silenced”, Wegner said. He added that Biermann had stayed uncomfortable and true to his convictions, and thanked him on behalf of the city. Wegner wished him good health, happiness and a voice that remains as strong as ever.
In an interview with the Jewish weekly “Jüdische Allgemeine”, published ahead of his birthday, Biermann describes the cause that has driven him all his life. He borrows a term from Heinrich Heine, who turned the plural “wars of liberation” into the singular “war of freedom”. For Biermann it is the struggle against oppression and injustice, a battle that must be won again and again and is lost again and again. He says he was born into it by chance, as the child of a communist and a Jew in the Nazi era. It took him until the age of 46 to break with his childhood faith in a communist paradise. This had been harder for him than for others, he explains, because he had feared killing his murdered father a second time.
Deep Bond
Biermann calls himself a so-called patrilineal Jew. One of his sons converted to Judaism and lives in Israel. His bond with the country is deep. “Israel is closer to me than all other countries in the world”, he says. He and his wife travel there every year, he has given concerts there, and many of his friends there, among them the writers Amos Oz and Meir Shalev, have died. The Hamas massacre of October 7th, 2023, shook him to the core. It was more than he could bear, he says, and for once it was fear that had hold of him.
He also speaks about politics at home. After the extremist far-right AfD won 43.8 percent in the Saxony-Anhalt state election in September, Biermann said he did not consider the party Nazi but fascist. In his view it belongs to a new fascist current in the Western world.
The interviewer for Jüdische Allgemeine, Tobias Kühn, ended with the traditional Jewish birthday wish of living to 120. Biermann’s answer: “Don’t threaten me!”
