A very interesting interview...

..I found the 8 year old interview with Wolf Biermann, take your time and read it to the end, it is very interesting and topical.

WOLF BIERMANN

"Putin fears the people's hunger for freedom"

Published 24.05.2014

by Richard Herzinger, Kiev

Singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann warns against Russia's president in Kiev and explores the spirit of rebellion on the Maidan. But he only has mockery for the pathos of some intellectuals. Last week, Wolf Biermann took part in the conference "Ukraine: Thinking Together" in Kiev. On the initiative of the US historian Timothy Snyder, around 50 intellectuals from all over Europe met in the Ukrainian capital to discuss the future of the threatened country. In a conversation on the sidelines of the conference, Biermann strongly opposes attempts to paint the Maidan uprising into a fascist corner and worries about the consequences of Russian aggression. A conversation about freedom, corruption and German penitence.

Die Welt: Is it true that this is your first visit to Kiev?

Biermann: No, the second. My first was shortly after the end of the GDR, a concert I can hardly remember. As befits a whole German and half Jew, I made a pilgrimage at that time to the "Weiberschlucht" Babi Jar, on the outskirts of the city of Kiev. There I found the memorial to the massacre of the Kiev Jews committed in 1941. I still knew enough Russian to read the inscription on the monument: 35,000 Soviet citizens were shot into the pit there in two days. A beautifully ugly example of how elegantly one can lie with truths - because these Soviet citizens were Jews. And as I now know: of the 1500 murderers - policemen, soldiers, SS men - only two or three hundred were Germans. The others were nationalist Ukrainian auxiliary murderers.

Die Welt: Does this knowledge give you pause for thought when you consider today's Ukraine and the Maidan revolution, in which right-wing nationalist forces were also involved?

Biermann: Of course, my anti-fascist warning lights, which my mother and my family built into my mind, went on immediately. But then you also want to be a self-thinker, you want to see and judge for yourself. Whereby it can then get even crazier, because as Hegel rightly knew: "You only recognise what you know." I went to the Maidan with the interpreter Anya and spoke directly to one of these heroes - the locksmith Sergei, in his mid-20s - who walk around there in camouflage uniforms, with the military insignia...

Die Welt: ... so those - unarmed, mind you - volunteers who camp in military tents and guard the Maidan in combat uniforms, which at first glance makes a somewhat martial impression. Biermann: Yes. I sat down quietly with some of them in their tent and of course asked them the embarrassing questions that were bothering me. A tea in a plastic cup, a hot pea soup in the same cup.

Die Welt: What came out of it?

Biermann: The realisation that these are quite normal, so-called simple people, by the way, mostly workers, fathers of families and all kinds of students. They come from all parts of Ukraine - mostly from the West, but also from the "Russian" East of the country. People who want to help somehow. Some with money, some dragging a sack of peas, others bringing wood for the improvised cooking stoves. The squatters then slip into such uniforms and join one of the hundred-man squads. This is how the self-defence force is organised, each with its own specially made badge. It was interesting to note that several veterans of the Soviet army from the Afghanistan war in the 1980s are also fighting on the Maidan. One of them says that he slept in the same tent as a young recruit as he does now as a mature man. Today and here, these young men and old men are defending the values of democracy. These Maidan Square occupiers are not occupiers! Their bitter experiences with the Orange Revolution are the reason to hold out now at least until the presidential elections.

Die Welt: So there is no truth in the idea that the Maidan movement is infiltrated by fascists? Biermann: Plain and simple: nothing at all. Anyone who claims that they are fascists could also claim that Germany is a fascist country because it has the NPD and the NSU murderers. Ukrainian fascists play a minor role in this historical drama. The Maidan guards who continue to hold the fort on the square are also not romantic revolution tourists who want to lick blood at the chaos for once. There is a rotation, the men stay for two or three weeks. Hardly any women. However, such "residents" of the tent village on Maidan Square who have come from eastern Ukraine are afraid to go home again because the pro-Russian terrorists murder such Ukrainian patriots. Germany should know that, too.

Die Welt: Talks like the one in the Maidan tent seem to have interested you more than the discussions of the intellectuals at the conference. Biermann: The top-class discussions of international experts were instructive and are a manifestation of solidarity with Ukraine. You can read about all this in publications. But at least as important as the thinkers are the doers. I also had to check my self-suspicions about whether we global intellectuals might be blowflies on the wound of this country, voyeurs who let themselves be flown in and fed here. At the noble opening reception hosted by the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry to welcome the congress, I spontaneously had the surreal and wicked idea that each of us should fill two plates with the exquisite food offered to us at the buffet and carry the soli-manna barefoot to the fighters on the Maidan. An hour before, I had observed on the Maidan square how tent dwellers were cooking some kind of soup in a burnt tin bucket. Die Welt: Why barefoot? To underline your own penitential attitude?

Biermann: Of course, because I come from a country that is hardly comfortable with active solidarity with Ukraine. But the people on the Maidan would have laughed at us hypocritical penitents for such revolutionary-romantic predatory feeding. By chance, I was standing next to the Ukrainian foreign minister when the fashionable philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy was received. In front of the cameras of the press pack, this elegant Frenchman threw himself into the pose of Napoleon in front of burning Moscow and formulated an English sentence for the poetry album of world history to his generals: "I feel the air of freedom here!!!" I thought: This specialist in the air of freedom from the land of liberty, equality and fraternity thus gave the Ukrainians the Paris certificate, as it were, at the opening.

Die Welt: But pronounced with less theatrical timbre than Lévy, did you also sense a scent of freedom here?

Biermann: Oh, yes. Although this scent is more a stench of freedom, not a perfume. The sublime war of human freedom, as Heinrich Heine pathetically celebrated it, is just as stinking, dirty, repulsive in Ukraine as any war. But let's be clear about this once again: Anyone in the East or West who lies that fascists are in charge here in Ukraine - and that is, after all, the main line of Putin's propaganda - is, in my opinion, not just a banal liar. Putin is the fascist. Putin is acting more and more totalitarian against his own people and in global power politics.

Die Welt: The nefariousness of Putin's propaganda is indeed frighteningly reminiscent of the heyday of Stalinism. How do you see it? Is the old dragon, which was thought to be dead, rearing its head again?

Biermann: The dead dragon is seemingly dead. One could say out of anger: Putin is the bloody afterbirth of Stalinism. We may, indeed we must, compare Putin with Stalin and also with Hitler. Comparing is never equating. When we compare, we are always interested in the difference or possibly the contrast. At the same time, Putin is something completely new in world history.

Die Welt: What is this newness?

Biermann: For example, in the fact that Putin, as a Stalinist KGB officer, crawls under the cross of the Russian Orthodox hypocrites and rolls in the bed of power with the chief popes. Yet such a petty-believing macho believes in only one God: himself. In contrast to Stalin, who justified his crimes by saying that he had to industrialise the Soviet Union in a cruel tour de force, Putin is not modernising his Russian empire at all, but is living only from the sale of Russian raw materials, like an idiotic Third World potentate. From an economic point of view, this is a much greater disaster for his country than imprisoning people like those brave girls from Pussy Riot, having courageous journalists killed or hunting down homosexuals. Putin has not even been able to build an ordinary motorway à la Hitler between St. Petersburg and Moscow. He lives in symbiosis with the corrupt oligarchs. After Boris Yeltsin suddenly pulled him out of a hat like a rabbit with crocodile teeth in 2001, what was the new Tsar's first official act? He exempted not only Yeltsin himself, but his entire clan from any criminal prosecution, so that this rabble can comfortably increase and consume their plunder in the country.

Die Welt: But if Putin is really only interested in skimming off the top, why does he go to such lengths to create an anti-Western ideology with which he serves both the right and the left? Biermann: Because he is afraid - of his people's hunger for freedom. He is a despot, but not at all stupid. He is realistic enough to know that he too is sitting on a time bomb. With his repressive policies, he is giving birth to the tyrannicide and democratic competitors who only need a historical opportunity to blow him away too. I suspect: he is a coward in a judo jacket, hence these omnipotence poses. In my eyes - with the view trained at the theatre of the Berliner Ensemble - he plays his role like an untalented actor: he charades the strongman and is a sissy. Die Welt: So you are rather not afraid that Putin might manage to turn back everything that has been achieved in Europe since 1989?

Biermann: Oh yes, I do! And this fear is not paranoia, unfortunately it is not hysterical at all. I don't think we in the West are overreacting to Putin at all, in fact we are reacting far too unhysterically - also because of all the business interests. Our dangerous dependence on his gas supplies. And because of our military weakness, as it was very rightly and clearly named on the podium here in Kiev by the worldly-wise Karel Schwarzenberg, the former Czech foreign minister.

Die Welt: Let's go back to the fear you expressed earlier of invading Ukraine like a "blowfly". In fact, the Ukrainians are happy that someone is coming at all and is interested in them. The problem is rather the shameful lack of interest in Germany for the Ukrainian struggle for freedom, and at the same time the exuberant understanding of Putin. How do you explain this German ignorance? Biermann: Think of the biblical saying: "Corrupt to the third and fourth generation". That is the misery of the Nazi heirs and children's children, which we almost all are. I am not one, by chance of birth as the son of communist parents. Yet I know that no egg can choose the nest in which it is hatched. I first became aware of this cause-and-effect trap when I was banned in the GDR and thus had to take on the role of dragon slayer. Yet, small and rather timid as I am, I consider myself rather ideally miscast in this heroic role. Power poets, who were possibly more suitable than I, came to terms with our oppressors. They didn't have the courage to take on their superiors because they were ashamed of their Nazi parents, because they wanted to make everything good and better again. I, as a born communist child, appeared with the presumption of the legitimate heir. I said loudly and wrote and sang, "Not you, but me!"

Die Welt: Do I understand you correctly that this can be transferred to the current kowtowing to Putin? In the German debate it is always said that we must not be too hard on Putin, because we invaded Russia during the Nazi era. Whereas in reality the entire Soviet Union was invaded, as well as Ukraine...

Biermann: Yes. The purified Germans are ashamed. They want to prove to themselves and the world that they have learned their anti-fascist lesson well. And they prove it by tipping over into the next, appropriate counter-stupidity. Thus they are tragic-dialectical victims of the construction of history. That excuses them a little, said without ironic winking. That's why we have to bear it calmly.

Die Welt: Well, that sounds unusually humble coming from you ...

Biermann: No, it's more the arrogance of helpless rage. In all this, I think melodramatic self-condemnation is just as wrong as self-congratulation. Incidentally, the more refined ones boast precisely because they vainly contrite themselves. The eternally new question is, of course, in which direction this self-grinding goes. After all, the Germans could also grudge themselves for not standing by the Ukrainians now. It is more comfortable to retrospectively castigate oneself for old crimes that this generation did not even commit. In this respect, we Germans today are beneficiaries of the injustices of our parents and grandparents.

Die Welt: The lack of identification with the Ukrainian freedom movement is also irritating because it was only 25 years ago that such a movement was successful in Germany. Where do you see continuities and differences between 1989/90 and today?

Biermann: Shortly after reunification, when Helmut Kohl's election propaganda lie about the flourishing landscapes had not yet become truth, I wrote to myself in 2000 in my song "Bilanzballade im 11. Jahr": "Die sanfte Spaziergänger-Revolution / In Leipzig gelang ohne Re-vo-lu-tio-näre / Wer weiß, wenn bei unserer Ost-Rebellion / Das Blut in Strömen geflossen hätte"... Namely, as it flowed here on the Maidan. When asked whether the people of Leipzig would have resisted as death-defyingly as the Ukrainians did, I answer my wife Pamela - without thinking: No! Incidentally, my friend Marianne Birthler, the former head of the Stasi documentation authority, is annoyed by this line. She says: A revolution without revolutionaries? Wolf, that's not true, I was there, we were revolutionaries ...

Die Welt: I guess she didn't understand that this is a huge compliment. A revolution without revolutionaries, that's ingenious ...

Biermann: God knows! Since we in Germany have always had revolutionaries for centuries, but never a revolution, we should be grateful that it was finally the other way round! I, for one, feel a bittersweet gratitude for that - although, since I can't believe in God, I don't even know who I should actually thank. Hegel's world spirit? But then, he's just an enlightened substitute figure, a philosopher-god. So let's just thank the goddess of luck. Anyway: if Putin had been the ruler in the Kremlin in 1989, our Leipzig would never have become the hero city, but a martyr city. My German heart rejoices at the realisation that we took advantage of the short historical window of opportunity, since Stalin, Brezhnev and their ilk were no longer in power, but Putin was not yet. My trip to Kiev was worth it if only to learn to understand this more deeply and to appreciate it more fully.

Source

https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article128341196/Putin-fuerchtet-den-Volkshunger-nach-Freiheit.html