Cover album-“Wolf Biermann Re: imagined”: old songs compatible “for now”

With »Wolf Biermann Re: Imagined. Songs for now! «Have 22 newly sung, newly arranged titles of the songwriter. Or more precisely: 20 titles from several decades plus one in two very different versions. Because “that couldn’t have been everything”, congenially reinterpreted by Jan Plewka and the Black-Red Salvation Army, it is the same song as the “song of the thundering life” by Betterov.

How close do you want to be the original? The “balance sheet ballad in the thirtieth year”, sung by the newcomer Maxim. While Plewka sang a pleasure in rebeling against venison in the capitalist everyday work, Maxim sounds like someone who wants to show that he can intonate like Biermann and otherwise sings down the text. But this is exactly the fascinating, the nice thing about the album published on both vinyl and CD: no interpreter sounds like the other.

With »Wolf Biermann Re: Imagined. Songs for now! ”The Hamburg indie label Clouds Hill has published a surprising compilation of newly prepared songs by the songwriter. It is as if the protest songs from the times of the left opposition in the GDR in a kaleidoscope with newer works appear as a new color pattern, in which there are many new shapes, corners and light fragments in a kaleidoscope in a kaleidoscope in a kaleidoscope in the GLAED movements. gives. This is sometimes surprising, but also disturbing for the singing and lecture by the mustache bearer from the old building at Chausseestrasse 131 in Berlin, capital of the GDR.

The new versions should make the songs compatible “for now”, which means that they should make them more accessible to younger listeners. The compilation with its mixed mix of different interpreters, which is intended as a diversity, makes you curious about further texts and melodies of the songwriter, but on the other hand leaves great perplexity: so good, biting and socially critical and composed the original songs , the radical and melancholic force disappears into almost half of the titles in Wattiger, sometimes sweet diffusity, overlaid by electronic sound carpets.

“That’s how it should be – that’s how it will be” interpreted by Annett Louisan. It is not only irritating that half of the text is simply left out, which shifts the statement. For example, when the dialectical moment of refraction of the revolutionary pathos and the supposed absolute truth falls out, which is expressed in this stanza: »You yourself – finally! -The revolution / she re-vo-lu-ti-o-nen already / she throws the first stone on itself «. Or the nice idea that there is no longer a spy than such, which is not only in the days of the Stasi, but also the West German domestic secret service a longing for dissident, left -wing left.

No, also the lines that are sitting down to the incomprehensible, which express the central message of this song, which is often sung by radicals in the wild 1970s: “Either way, the earth becomes red / either livelihood or desodrot / We mingle down” . The radical statement is really like 55 years ago when she first appeared on a Biermann plate. The Easy listening arrangement can hardly be heard that the climate catastrophe, which is associated with the capitalist use of nature, is on the worst way to become “overrot”. Louisans Tischirpe has a long -term appearance.

On the other hand, it is a pleasure to listen to the singer Balbina, as she sings “soldier, soldier”-an antidote for advertising for the Bundeswehr. Or to listen to the rapper Aligatoah if he gives “the Huguenotten cemetery”. The ballad, which, like so many others,, like almost all good songs from Biermann in the GDR, and without the passionate examination of it and with the history of the communist movement, has not been polished in clear, melodic vocals. A little piano accompaniment, guitar, also a bass. But the melody remains, the text is clear, unabridged on the recording.

The described cemetery visit is a tribute to the dead and not only, as is mostly cited, a criticism of acquaintances in the GDR: “How close are some dead and how dead are some who live”. Only through telling who is lying there and who goes to whom Biermann gets the song completely: »We hook our hand in hand / and stroll to Brecht to Brecht his grave / from gray granite, his tombstone / does not fit for Brecht / And next to him is Helene / The Great Weigel rests «. Biermann learned at the Berlin Ensemble, the Weigel brought him to the theater as the young rebellious communist from Hamburg. Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, Hanns Eisler, John Heartfield … there are many big names that are reminded of this song.

The “encouragement” presented by Bonaparte, probably the best known song by Biermann, sung in prisons of the GDR – as Biermann likes to tell – as the author has experienced by police – as the author has experienced – it sounds well aging. As ever. Even if the meaningful things are too much for some – which led to a colleague in the hallway of the “taz” Hamburg “with tremolo and great pose – it is exactly to fight. Not to add: “We don’t want to keep it silent / In this silence time / the green breaks out of the branches / we want to show everyone / Then you know.”

Many older leftists, who liked to hear their Biermann records 50, 40 years ago, are now rejecting him as a person together with all the songs in Bausch and Bogen, because of his change in the GDR opposition left-wing communists, who, according to his exposure in 1976 FRG first moved in the radical left for years, but then moved quickly to the right, such as Gregor Gysi and Stefan Heym insulted – and ended up in 2000 as a commentator at Springer’s “Welt”. Unfortunately, Wolf Biermann Re: Imagined. Songs for now! “The song” Three balls on Rudi Dutschke “from 1967:” A bloody assassination attempt / we saw exactly / who shot it “begins, and:” The ball number one came / from Springer’s newspaper forest / the man’s penny / also paid for it «.

A second compilation would be nice on which, unlike on the now available, not only a few more or less radically more or less radical left, but many would deal with what is about emancipatory dissidence in Biermann’s songs. Especially in those that have taken the GDR and the FRG into the shortage from the left. Who, as works of art that were created in a specific social rebellion, have existed and are radical – no matter what your Creator is doing today. But Biermann is still good for a nice surprise. In 2009 he sealed “Sol Sajn”, the hymn of the left -So -socialist Jewish “Confederation”, founded in 1897, as the general Jewish workers’ association for Lithuania, Russia and Poland was called, one of the forerunner organizations of the SDAPR, the Menschewiki and Bolsheviki: ” That I am wrong and only confused / may be that I hope and have been lost for a long time / I live the dream of the commune still / my mother born me. «

»Wolf Biermann Re: Imagined. Songs for now! «(Clouds Hill)