This sentiment was particularly prevalent in the literary community of East Berlin. Having taken seriously Honecker’s declaration of 1971 that there would be “no taboos in the area of art and literature” as long as artists proceeded “from the firm position of socialism,” writers such as Christa Wolf, Stefan Heym, Heiner Müller, Reiner Kunze, and Ulrich Plenzdorf began exploring the inadequacies of “real, existing socialism” in the daily lives of ordinary East German citizens. They soon discovered that what the government expected from the country’s writers was affirmation, not fault-finding. Hermann Kant, president of the GDR Writer’s Association, warned his more independent-minded colleagues that they faced expulsion from the association, and hence a ban on publication, if they did not show restraint in their treatment of political subjects.
The regime itself showed some restraint in its dealings with errant artists in the early 1970s because it was then mounting a major campaign for international recognition and could not afford to be seen as disrespectful of human rights. Following the Basic Treaty with Bonn, the GDR, along with West Germany, applied to join the United Nations (UN) and other international bodies. In 1973 both states were admitted to the UN and became signatories to the Helsinki Final Accords. In that same year East Berlin hosted the World Youth Games, another sign of its “arrival” on the international stage. But these very achievements allowed the Honecker government to contemplate a harsher stance vis-à-vis its most difficult intellectuals. In this regard, as in so many others, the USSR showed the way by expatriating Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974. If Moscow could summarily expel one of its best known troublemakers, could not East Berlin do the same?
The GDR’s Solzhenitsyn turned out to be the folksinger Wolf Biermann. From a public relations standpoint, Honecker could not have chosen a worse target. The son of a Communist dockworker who had been murdered by the Nazis, Biermann had moved from Hamburg to East Berlin in 1953 to document his preference for the socialist East over the capitalist West. His early songs reflected the fervor of his belief in humanitarian socialism. Yet he also began to chastise the Ulbricht regime for its attacks on intellectual freedom and its disregard for the concerns of ordinary citizens. Singing in a hoarse, off-pitch voice that rendered his biting lyrics all the more poignant, Biermann soon achieved cult status as the troubled conscience of communism. Hoping to muzzle him, the government banned him from performing in public in 1965, but this only increased his standing among local dissidents. Honecker’s men found Biermann just as unpalatable as the Ulbricht cadres had, and resolved to kick him out of the country. The opportunity to do so came in November 1976 when the singer received an invitation to perform in Cologne. To his surprise, the authorities not only allowed him to go, but immediately arranged the necessary travel documents. As soon as he was in the West, the GDR government denounced him as an “enemy of socialism,” revoked his citizenship, and banned him from returning to East Germany.
If the Honecker regime thought that by expelling Biermann it would silence all questioning of its policies, it was badly mistaken. Immediately after Biermann’s expulsion a number of East German writers took the unprecedented step of sending an open letter of protest to the government, claiming that the singer “had never, including in Cologne, left any doubt over which German state he supported.” Biermann might be “an uncomfortable poet,” the protesters added, but his barbs were just what the GDR needed: “Our socialist state, in line with the words of Marx’s
