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5. The second instance of tension is the case of Wolf Biermann, the 40-years old GDR singer and song-writer, who was deprived of his citizenship on 16 November after giving a performance in Cologne. The official grounds for the decision were that Biermann had used a foreign platform to slander the GDR. The decision provoked great Western, particularly West German, publicity. More interestingly, it provoked a strong reaction within the GDR. A dozen of the most respected and internationally known GDR writers and artists put their names to a public petition for the decision to be reconsidered and were joined by 90 or more fellow intellectuals. Counter-petitions and expressions of support for the Government were promptly organised in intellectual circles and some of the original petitioners were induced to recant and to withdraw their names. Some arrests of minor literary figures have taken place; the well-known dissident, Professor Havemann, whose home has been a centre of intellectual non-conformity, has been placed under house arrest; and, inevitably, Biermann records are now in demand locally.
6. There for the moment the matter rests. The Biermann case is a curious one in a number of ways. The official explanations for his exclusion were hardly convincing. Since the authorities knew his critical views very well—until recently he had after all been prevented from giving public performances for some 11 years because of them-most of his remarks in Cologne can have come as no surprise and it seems likely that the permission to give a concert abroad was only part of a plan to get rid of him. But the next question is then why did the GDR authorities feel the need to get rid of a man who had been silent for some years and was known to a diminishing number, in the GDR at least? A son of a solid Communist family who had voluntarily come from Hamburg to live here in 1953 and a former member of the SED, he remained in general terms a loyal supporter of his adopted country. Although critical of many aspects of its life, he maintained in Cologne that the GDR remained the better half of Germany. Would it not have been wiser and a sign of strength to let him return? To this question a senior official in the Foreign Ministry, to whom some colleagues and I were talking last week, replied bluntly: "We are too weak for that sort of thing." When told that West European Governments tolerated similar and fiercer critics, he said: "Ah yes, but not critics paid for by the Federal Republic." I think this an honest though indiscreet answer: it reveals the régime's feeling of insecurity, their obsession with the Federal Republic and their sense of threat under the constant scrutiny of West German Press, radio and television. But we are still left asking what it was about Biermann that was seen as so dangerous. Certainly it was to some degree his use of West German media; but it was also, I suspect, his impeccable Communist ancestry. He was a critic from the Left, referring to the Italian model and suggesting that the GDR had started on the right road but had somehow got bogged down. It was probably because he was seen as personifying a number of undesirable trends, general intellectual dissent, the more specialised criticism voiced during the recent meeting here of European Communist parties, and recourse to West German media, that the authorities decided to move against him. And they probably intended the case as a warning of a general tightening-up in the cultural field.
7. There are now signs that such a tightening-up is in progress. The leading poet, Reiner Kunze, has recently been expelled from the Writers Union (his latest book, published in West Germany, criticised the regimentation of GDR life and was particularly damning over GDR involvement in the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968). Those who protested against Biermann's exclusion have also been criticised in Party and professional gatherings. But the fact of their open protest
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