A noted German poet who begs to differ
By John Vinocur/IHT (International Herald Tribune)
March 11, 2003
HAMBURG: Like politicians, in the face of history, poets donât always get it right. Gerhard Schroeder voted against the treaty enabling German reunification. Guenter Grass opposed his countryâs unity, suggesting it was an unfitting reward after Auschwitz.
They were brave then perhaps, certainly in the German minority. Schroeder later wanted to put off the euroâs introduction indefinitely, and tried as a provincial governor to stop the Gulf War. Now, with the vast majority of opinion-polled Germans, the chancellor will have nothing to do with a strike on Iraq, rejecting the possibility of United Nations approval months before it was proposed. Grass, the countryâs dominant literary figure, turns up (again) on the same page.
The poet who sees things differently these days is Wolf Biermann, lyricist, balladeer, an incontravertible figure of respect in Germany. Hard to classify, this lank-haired man with washed-out blue eyes who writes poems, sings songs, and offers up an occasional, enormously readable political essay. ââGreat poetââ: So says, very judiciously, a man from the chancellery, having just heard, a couple of days later, what Biermann thinks of his boss.
Biermann, 66, is sitting at a little table, near the window of his house in Altona, a nice suburb, close to downtown, a good place for his small children.
Schroeder is not his main preoccupation. It is his country, its ââharte deutsche Vaterlands-Mus,ââ or, roughly and inadequately, ââthe hard must of the German Fatherland.ââ But with his name slipping into the conversation, Biermann contrasts the current chancellorâs soft position on Saddam Hussein with a Churchill battling appeasement, or Tony Blairâs treading against the flow.
ââSchroederâs opportunism is the worst,ââ Biermann says. ââHeâs a victim of a democratic pratfall. All this guy wanted to do was get elected, and he turns out morally to be under Chamberlain and Daladier. Their appeasement policy was wrong, but at least they were serious. There was no historical experience to go on then.ââ
He slashes on, turning to Goethe and Brecht for verbal flanking fire.
ââEvery error has its time,ââ Biermann insists, calling on phrases from the two German giants as witness. ââThere are mistakes that are on the level of history, and those that are under the level of history. Schroederâs appeasement policy is under that level. Itâs worse than a mistake, itâs a crime.ââ
Schluss. Case quickly closed on Schroeder. Biermann goes to the core. Democracies, regrettably, cannot only fake threats and hope for success against regimes that have total contempt for humanity. In both France and Germany, there are amnesiac people who will never excuse the Americans for having liberated them. But in Germany, he goes on, the movement against the war has been co-opted from honest pacifists by old Reds, frustrated â68ers, former East German functionaries, and disillusioned Christian Democrats, whose single register bares the mark of German nationalism.
This is minority stuff here; Biermann can think of none of his friends, in Hamburg at least, who agree with him. But like Grass, he has the exceptional German bonafides to sustain his view and have it heard in a society that craves riskless consensus.
The son of a Communist murdered by the Nazis, he left West Germany at age 17 for East Berlin, where he became a writer whose renown and eventual role as a dissident grew together. In 1976, he was expelled from East Germany to in stant elevation as a cultural hero in the West. His poetry remained a source of vast admiration, but his politics gradually changed. From someone, after coming West, who joined demonstrators blocking U.S. Army bases (and remembers, he says, ââhow good it feels to be part of the Oh So Very Goodââ), he returned to the dissidentâs role as a German who sees ââvulgar hatredââ and paranoia in the ââthe propaganda bogeymanââ that has been projected here onto the White House.
In fact, with a German press, like Britainâs, that has much more a pro and con division on Iraq than the single, missionary position of French newspapers, Biermann hardly speaks from persecuted isolation.
But what he says is tougher, more direct, and comes with the whip-stroke of his rage. He calls the meld of Germans now challenging the use of force against Saddam ââNational Pacifistsââ â no small damnation in a language where the word national, as in National Socialists, shakes with the sound of abjectness, a curse.
The movement against a war on Iraq, Biermann says, is bringing together into a ââmacabre,ââ nationalistic community, a nation that is in many ways even more divided now than before the fall of the Wall.
In defining the German state of mind, Biermann makes reference in part to the legacy of Nazism.
ââThe Bible says youâre damned until the fourth generation. I didnât understand this before. Whatâs the deeper meaning? The first (postwar) generation goes against the fathers in a process of opposition. The next goes against that opposition. The Germans are now in the second phase.
ââThere are power vectors all pressing in the same direction. The first is the reflex against the postwar generation. The second is the panic-reflex against globalization. You see it everywhere. As the world gets closer together, you hang on to whatâs smallest. The third is confronting European unification, a kind of two-front war â the first against America, and the second to see whoâs top monkey in Europe.ââ
But the bombs, the deaths to come? Biermann tells a story of he and his mother surviving the storms of fire that devastated Hamburg after British air raids in 1943. Down the street from the flames, his mother told him then that these ââterrible, terrible bombers are going to free us from evil, evil people who took Papa away.ââ
Who will listen in Germany, a visitor in Biermannâs house asks him?
He replies: ââThe muses say, âCome here little Biermann. You write the prettiest poems.â The rest can kiss my ass. My poems will last longer than Schroeder. I only stay in power when I follow my muse. The Schroeders last only as long as they follow the rabble.ââ
