GERHARD
GUNDERMANN
The aim of this website is to introduce the songs of Gerhard Gundermann to an English-speaking audience. Relatively unknown outside of East Germany, his highly original songs and fascinating story deserve to be made known to an international public. Gundermann was a protest singer and excavator driver in the Lusatian coal-mining region of south-east Germany. In his early adulthood he performed in the state-controlled singing club movement. He also spent two unsuccessful years as a trainee officer in the GDR army and became an unofficial collaborator with the Stasi secret police. Due to his constant disparaging of the top-down command structures of GDR society from the late-1970s onwards, he was expelled from the ruling Socialist Unity Party in 1984. His musical theatre productions with the group Brigade Feuerstein in this period reflect his bitter disillusionment with the GDR regime. Gundermann subsequently became a prominent singer in the protest movement leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. In the 1990s his popularity in the East grew considerably with the release of four highly acclaimed solo albums. These reflected the voice of the ‘have-nots’ – the so-called losers of German unification and also his growing concern with the plight of the natural world. During this time he continued working in the coal mine. He performed his two occupations side-by-side, regularly going straight from playing gigs to his shift work. He died in 1998 at the age of 43 at the height of his popularity.
25 years after his death the cultural fascination with the figure of Gundermann remains strong in East Germany. Tribute bands regularly perform his songs; the Gundermann Seilschaft e.V., an organisation based in Gundermann’s hometown of Hoyerswerda, promote musical and cultural events in his memory. He recently came to international attention with Andreas Dresen’s award-winning film Gundermann (2018).
THE SONGS OF GUNDERMANN
The songs I chose to translate and record come from the period 1990-98 in which Gundermann responds to themes such as society’s winners and losers, deindustrialisation, immigration, and the environment – all themes that are equally as relevant to our times today as they were back in the 1990s.
NEWS & ARTICLES
HAVE YOUR SAY
My name is Dave Robb. I am a Reader in Music at Queen’s University Belfast. As part of an AHRC-funded Fellowship I have written research articles and translated and recorded ten songs by the East German protest singer Gerhard Gundermann. I am using this questionnaire to measure the impact of this work. I intend to draw on this data for an Impact Case Study to go forward for the Research Excellence Framework 2029. Any responses used will be quoted anonymously. Some may appear in online material published by Queen’s University. By submitting this you are agreeing to its use as described above.
Queen’s University Belfast’s AEL Ethics committee has approved this research project.