1968 East – 1968 West

The 1960s was a dynamic decade, a time of upheavals and revolts, as well as a heyday of folk music, engagé singer-songwriters and songs of political protest.

The civil rights and student movements and the anti-war demonstrations in the United States gave rise to a culture of protest music that combined elements of the traditional folk song and contemporary popular music. Folk singers and songwriters like Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs gained international renown and had a formative influence on the music of their epoch.

In the early 1960s, after the erection of the Berlin wall, East Germany underwent a phase of economic reforms accompanied by a short-lived ideological thaw. Literature and cinema dared a critical take on real life behind the Iron Curtain. The “hot music” the regime had formerly stifled was now promoted. With the indigenous folk and protest songs came “left-wing” songs from “the other side”. The new song culture that emerged differed markedly from the songs of struggle and agitprop of previous years.

Western inspiration

The musical protest movement in the West inspired many artists in East Germany. In 1963 Wolf Biermann wrote Ballade vom Briefträger William L. Moore (Ballad of a Mailman), which Fasia Jansen performed to resounding applause at the first West German folkfest at Burg Waldeck in 1964. In July 1966, half a year after being barred from performing and publishing his work, Biermann sent a Vietnam song to Walter Ulbricht (first secretary of the socialist party), declaring that it had “every chance of becoming an important song in the international anti-Vietnam war movement”. Gerhard Schöne, the 15-year-old son of a priest in the Saxon town of Coswig, wrote Sag mir, was ist deine Welt (Tell me what’s your world) to the tune of the West German hit Welche Farbe hat die Welt (What colour’s the world), which made a name for him in church circles. Around the same time an 18-year-old high school student in East Berlin, Hartmut König, composed Sag mir, wo du stehst based on the American song Which Side Are You On: König’s version became the most best-known title at the Hootenanny Club (later called the Oktoberklub). In 1968 Eulenspiegel-Verlag, an East Berlin publisher, put out a collection of protest songs with lyrics by Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Franz Josef Degenhardt, Dieter Süverkrüp, Hartmut König et al. It came with an LP on which Manfred Krug sang songs from Chile, France, the US and a Vietnam song of his own.

In 1960 Perry Friedman, a Canadian folk singer who’d moved to East Berlin the year before, began holding “hootenannys” there, i.e. sing-along folk music parties. He set out to transplant in the GDR the casual style of singing and performing songs that had become an established tradition in American left-wing circles. In 1965, DT 64, the radio station for young people, began promoting these events, and hootenanny clubs sprouted up a year later in Berlin and other East German cities. These clubs attracted both amateurs and pros, including Perry Friedman, Hartmut König, Reiner Schöne, Bettina Wegner, the Beat band Team 4, and many others. The hootenanny movement was neither oppositional nor unofficial. Though government-funded, it was not a campaign decreed from above, but a relatively spontaneous outgrowth that was unusually laid-back and unconstrained by East German standards in those days.

The “Singing Movement”

However, in December 1965 the 11th plenary assembly of the Central Committee of the SED (“Socialist Unity Party of Germany”) launched a frontal attack on dissident art and the new youth culture, blacklisting a number of films and vilifying Wolf Biermann as “petit bourgeois/anarchistic” and Beat music as “decadent”. That was followed in early 1967 by an ideological clampdown on the whole hootenanny movement, henceforth renamed Singebewegung (i.e. “Singing Movement”, officially supplanting the foreign expression hootenanny) and by and large co-opted by the FDJ (Freie Deutsche Jugend, i.e. “Free German Youth”). Time and again, however, songwriters and clubs managed to avoid being co-opted, and eventually fused into a cultural melting pot that was to produce many talents. The “Singing Movement” engineered essentially to impose an artificial socialist culture on the country’s youth, ultimately fell wide of the mark.   Music festivals, on the other hand, played a key role in the dissemination of political folk songs in the 1960s. In den US it was the Newport Folk Festival; in West Germany the Chanson and Folklore Festival, held from 1964–69 at Burg Waldeck in Hunsrück, attracted a wide public with prominent artists like Franz-Josef Degenhardt, Reinhard Mey, Hannes Wader and Dieter Süverkrüp. In East Berlin a "Festival des politischen Liedes" (Political Song Festival) was held from 1970–90. Begun as an anniversary party of sorts for the Oktoberklub, it became one of the biggest music events in the German Democratic Republic. Artists from over 60 countries and every continent played here, including leading lights of the folk and singer-songwriter scenes like Miriam Makeba, Quilapayún and Pete Seeger. The West German contingent ranged from Von Degenhardt, Wader and Floh de Cologne to Zupfgeigenhansel, Heinz-Rudolf Kunze and Konstantin Wecker. The festival was instrumentalized for political PR purposes, but was above all a window on the world, a “political carnival”, as songwriter Hans-Eckardt Wenzel put it, that “briefly suspended the drab monotony of day-to-day life in East Germany”.

A special case: Wolf Biermann

Wolf Biermann, a “government-certified dissident”, was an outlier in the GDR: though barred from performing and publishing his work after mid-1965, he gave private concerts for friends and visitors from East and West in his flat, his records and books were published in the West and circulated illegally in East Germany. He was watched, to be sure, but for fear of international censure the GDR leadership for a long time shrank from taking any further action against him. An artist like Gerhard Schöne, on the other hand, sang at church conventions as well as at the Political Songfest, performing a balancing act between Church and State that former pastor Joachim Gauck likened to “walking a tightrope of dissident thought and conduct just this side of the politically possible”.

East Germans born between 1945 and 1960, who came into their teens between the erection of the Berlin wall and the mid-’70s, were known as the “integrated generation”, for they identified to a fairly high degree with the German Democratic Republic. In the main, they regarded socialism as a matter of course, they undertook the “long march through the institutions” and pinned their hopes on a “changing party elite” (as it was called in the West). Some of the politically and culturally active young people sympathized strongly with the anti-capitalist, emancipatory protest of the left wing in the West and the international culture of protest music. This enthusiasm certainly had quixotic qualities, and the crisis-ridden trend of state socialism increasingly undermined its credibility. But when Stefan Wolle in his book Die heile Welt der Diktatur (The Perfect World of Dictatorship) characterizes the Singing Movement and the Political Songfest as manifestations of an “officially tolerated ersatz protest culture” that availed itself of the “poses and accessories of Western protest movements”, he is oversimplifying the many different facets of this phenomenon.