When he was 16, Wolf Biermann emigrated from his hometown of Hamburg to the German Democratic Republic. The year was 1952 and the young man, whose father was a staunch Communist and killed in Auschwitz, was welcomed in the East. Less than 25 years later, Biermann, now a rock star—his apartment, dubbed “the waiting room for the world revolution,” was a meeting point for many of East Germany’s intellectual and cultural elite—was stripped of his citizenship while on tour in the West. He learned about it on the radio.
A Cold War
The politics and solace of “Winterreise”
