Biermann, the new documentary film from Jens Meurer (An Impossible Project, Public Enemy, Seaside Special), is a portrait of the outspoken political singer-songwriter and poet Wolf Biermann. Through the lens of his life, though, it also offers a cinematic reflection on the 20th-century history of Germany, Europe and the world. After all, Biermann has lived in five different versions of Germany.
Born in Hamburg in 1936, Biermann only met his father once – in prison before the Jewish communist was killed by the Nazis in Auschwitz. The doc shows how this experience gave Biermann his calling: to fight against injustice and for socialism. He moved to East Germany and made a name for himself as a critical and fearless voice in the GDR. To some, Biermann, who is still a close friend of Joan Baez’s, was like an East German Bob Dylan. The GDR regime banned him, forcing him to perform for 12 years in his East Berlin living room. When he played a concert in Cologne, West Germany, in 1976 in front of 7,500 people, the regime banned Biermann again – this time from re-entering East Germany. That saw the political artist live in exile in West Germany until he could visit the Eastern part of Germany again after reunification.
Shot on 16mm film, Biermann follows the critical voice and father of 10 children as he narrates his David-versus-Goliath life, going through his everyday life, to performances and visiting to historic locations. It also features interviews with his contemporaries, including actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, who lauds his fire of rebellion but also calls him a “visible egomaniac,” and archive footage.
Biermann screens at the 64th edition of the Viennale, the Vienna film festival in Austria, which runs through Nov. 3, on Oct. 26 and Oct. 27, following its recent FilmFest Hamburg world premiere. Majestic Filmverleih will release the film in Germany, with Filmladen releasing it in Austria.
The Instant Film, Zeitsprung Pictures, Clouds Hill and zero fiction production was written by Dirk Kämper, Meurer and Biermann’s wife Pamela Biermann, who also appears in the film. Sebastian Ganschow and Bernd Fischer handled cinematography, with editing by Antje Lass, Zenon Kristen and Grete Jentzen.
Meurer talked to THR about how Biermann’s story relates to the Oscar-winning movie The Lives of Others, its timeliness in the age of Trump and why the songwriter’s messages are universal.
Wolf Biermann is well known in Germany, and his work is in German. But his story and work feel quite universal. What’s your take?
Yes, there is even an obvious Biermann pitch for an international audience, namely that the premise of The Lives of Others is based on his situation. It’s not his story, but Biermann’s apartment was the most observed apartment by the Stasi secret police in East Germany.
The original impetus for the film, to be honest, was to look at an incredible life story over a long German period. But as we got into the film, it became clearer and clearer that this is a film for today and about today. Biermann might turn 90 in two weeks, but he’s speaking to us very much also about the situation today.
I firmly believe this isn’t just a German story. At the very least, this is a European story, but it’s really a story for all of us in the world. It’s a story of somebody who stood up to power, who managed to speak his mind, express his opposition and speak for freedom, no matter what. And he did so not just in a brave manner, but also in a very humorous manner.
If I look at Trump, I think, “Where’s Charlie Chaplin!?” We should not be cowed. We should be making fun of these people, and that was Biermann’s biggest secret weapon – he attacked the dictatorship that he lived under with passion and humor. It’s an entertaining film – lots of laughter.
There is a scene in the film where Biermann goes back to East Germany after the fall of the wall and tells people that they didn’t speak out against the GDR regime enough, which underlines that what he tells us can be quite uncomfortable.
Yeah, he’s a real character. He gets a lot of resistance because he’s abrasive and doesn’t mince his words. He is – maybe that word is overused – authentic. It’s the kind of authenticity that we badly, badly need these days. And in that sense, he’s a secret weapon, and not just in Germany.
But what’s interesting is that he touches both people of his and my generation, but also young people who may not have heard his name before, but he speaks to them even more. I think there’s a thirst for that uprightness. His most famous song is called “Ermutigung,” or “Encouragement.” I think it’s what people are longing for and you get that with him, as you see in the film.
In the film, we see a woman mention that people have sometimes called Biermann the “Bob Dylan of Germany”…
The quote you’re referring to is really from the 1970s and from writer Barbara Honigmann, who said that for East Germans, he was their Bob Dylan. What she really means is that he was a figurehead; he was a leader in writing songs that spoke for people, that were original and that found words in a way that Bob Dylan did. They spoke to their generation; in Biermann’s case, the generation of opposition to this gray, boring and really terrible Stalinist dictatorship that they were living under.
Did you and Biermann know each other before you started work on the film? And how long did you film him?
No, it was a bit of a blind date. Somebody arranged for us to meet who thought there had been no documentary about him since 1982. There have been lots of TV interviews, but not a documentary. And somebody thought maybe these two would get along. We were introduced and hit it off very quickly. It was amazing to discover how much life there is in this 90-year-old.
We also hit it off because my approach is different. I shoot on film, and I do not do that for retro reasons or because it looks better or something like that. It’s the tool that I use to very respectfully, but very
respectfully intrusively, get into people’s lives in a way so that we all enjoy the process. It’s very above board because you can’t hide a film camera, but it focuses everyone. That’s something that Biermann really appreciated. So, we filmed over the course of two years, and that led to a lot of time spent together, with and without camera. You have to choose your moments, working on film.
What was the most difficult thing about making Biermann?
The hardest part is that this is a 90-year-old German whose life [covers] a German century. He’s a Holocaust survivor who’s still a public and political force today. He’s currently on concert tour, filling large halls, for God’s sake! He’s somebody who’s had an incredible lifespan as a musician and as a poet. Biermann is actually Germany’s most published poet in the German language since World War II, and he’s still writing songs now.
He’s also on a concert tour, playing three-and-a-half-hour concerts this week. So, he’s still top fit. He is just a really great pianist, but he’s famous as a songwriter on the guitar.
For me, the film was also a discovery of his Jewish roots and of his communist roots all the way to the great role he played in changing German history with this expulsion from East Germany. He has lived in five Germanys. He grew up in Nazi Germany, lived in post-war occupied Germany, and then West Germany. He also moved to and lived in East Germany, and then [was sent back to West Germany] and now has been living in the reunited Germany. So one life, five Germanys.
There is no more German, European or world story in one person than his. If anyone thinks that this is just a German story, I think that’s a huge misunderstanding. This is such a larger-than-life, true-life story, and it’s such a universal message embodied in this extraordinary person.
Is there any particular inspiration that you feel Biermann and the man it is about can provide?
The man is 90, and he’s been through a lot, including having seen his father once in his life before he was murdered in Auschwitz. But he is still exuding a kind of optimism in spite of the shit show we are making our world into at the moment.
Something that I really want to capture in the documentaries I am making is this optimism. There’s plenty of room for films that tell the stories of all the challenges and woes that we are facing. Weirdly enough, it seems that there isn’t a big market for a film that also shows that maybe there is something positive in us, some agency. There’s definitely something in Biermann that also gives us cause for confidence that we are able to stand up, that each of us is able to do something. Biermann has a great line: Get fucking involved in your own life and in your own matters.
Just think of the David-versus-Goliath story of his life. He is a brilliant poet and songwriter but banned for 12 years. He couldn’t perform or be published in his own country for 12 years. So, he just recorded secretly, and his music was smuggled out into the West. So he was banned in East Germany but a best-selling musician in the West.
I think one great moment in the film is when he talks about his old apartment, and outside of it, there were all these trams, and they couldn’t edit them out of the recordings. So he just embraced them and said, “Those trams are my musicians.” And in West Germany, when people listened to these records, they said, “Oh man, that’s the great authentic sound of the East.”
Are you working on a new project?
I just started on a sequel of sorts to my film An Impossible Project. But this time around, it’s a “possible” project. It originates with the same [analogue enthusiast] character from Vienna, “Doc” [Florian Kaps], the guy who saved the last Polaroid factory in the world, against all odds.
He also got involved in saving vinyl, and he’s recently teamed up, after years and years of not really getting it right, to invent a new kind of vinyl recording machine. He teamed up with a totally fascinating Swedish company called Teenage Engineering. Together, they want to fight back and conquer America in a good way with a different kind of approach to what technology can be, namely that technology can also empower us as people, and not just enslave us.