Gerhard Gundermann: An Underground Musical Icon Spanning Two Political Systems

This essay tells of how I encountered Gerhard Gundermann in the early 1990s and grew acquainted with his music. It goes on to set out the main themes of his songs and the political twists of his career.¹ Thirty years after this initial encounter I was inspired by his story and songs to embark upon a major research project examining his work.

I first heard Gundermann when I began my PhD research on GDR political song at Sheffield University in 1991. I had already performed in Berlin as a musician myself in May that year at the annual Festival of the Political Song. At this point, less than a year after the demise of the GDR, it had been renamed the Zwischen-Welt (Between Worlds) Festival. I had been invited on account of my connections to the East German folk scene. As a student of German from the University of Edinburgh I had spent my year abroad (1982-83) at the Wilhelm Pieck University in Rostock where, as a member of the university’s Lyrik-Song-Group, I performed extensively in student clubs and festivals. It was there that I gained an insider’s knowledge into the bureaucratic structures of playing live music in the GDR, the artistic evaluation process (“Einstufung”)—effectively a political vetting— involved in gaining a license to perform in public and the constant monitoring of lyrics and repertoire by cultural functionaries.²

Returning for my graduate research, after 1991, I discovered a radically changed landscape. The fall of the Berlin Wall meant the Liedermacher (political singer/songwriters) were now free to write about what they wanted, but many struggled in the search for new audiences and themes to write about. Many of them didn’t make it, the ground having completely shifted from under their feet. The game of couching political messages in metaphorical lyrics—widespread in the GDR due to censorship—was now no longer relevant. Audiences had moved on quickly. Only those singer/songwriters survived who were able to adapt their art form to the new political reality.

I returned to the Zwischen-Welt-Festival the following year in spring 1992, this time primarily to do research. As a result of the festival being shunned by the media as well as funders (having been supported by the Free German Youth up until 1990) there was a hint of a siege mentality, a general atmosphere of “us against the world” amongst the performers, festival organisers and spectators. A great many I spoke to, having lost their jobs, were now involved in government-funded “ABM” temporary jobs to facilitate re-entry to employment. Many felt patronised by the new omnipresent West German politicians setting the economic agenda and the media voices shaping cultural discourse. In a nutshell the festival had no money, and the ex-GDR performers were obliged to play for expenses only. The main goal, which many expressed to me, was to keep the culture of political song alive, which artists, functionaries and audiences alike had nurtured at this festival and in the wider GDR club scene for years. The genre had enjoyed an ambiguous status in the GDR between conformity and resistance: on one hand, promoted by the state as revolutionary heritage, on the other, offering the musicians a means of voicing social critique, albeit often in a veiled way (Robb, 2007). Now the singer/songwriters faced difficulties on several fronts: as well as the issues I mentioned there was the additional factor that the genre of folk and protest song was viewed as passé by the youth: as the music of their parents’ generation that had grown up in the 1960s and 1970s.

It was at this time—spring 1992— that I first came across Gerhard Gundermann. Over the months, I managed to piece together his story: After having failed in his bid to become an officer in the GDR Army (1973-75) he had returned to civilian life, becoming a member of the Singeklub Hoyerswerda before leading the musical theatre group Brigade Feuerstein from 1978 onwards. In this period, he became famous for having two simultaneous careers as a musician/actor and as a “Baggerfahrer” (operator of an excavator) in an open face mine in the Lausatian region of South-East Germany. He released his first solo album Männer, Frauen and Maschinen (Men, Women and Machines) in 1988 and had just completed his second, Einsame Spitze (Out of this World) in spring 1992. On hearing it, I was struck by the natural soulfulness of his voice, quite different from the folk or chanson-orientated singing styles that characterised many other German Liedermacher. Eager to experience him live, a friend of mine, a West German social worker living in East Berlin, warned me that Gundi was visually not exactly what one would expect of an acclaimed musical icon. Indeed, this ordinary-looking, often mumbling performer did not come across as self-possessed as he sounded on record. The East German public, however, was well trained in looking beyond the façade.

I discovered how Gundermann had been cultivating his audience since the late-1970s in his local industrial town of Hoyerswerda, where his group Brigade Feuerstein had regularly hosted their “Spektakulum” productions, concerts and children’s shows at the local youth club that became their resident venue. With a Brecht-influenced conceptual approach they saw their musical theatre³ projects as a “social laboratory” by way of which artists must not separate their problems from those of their audience.⁴ All working in full-time jobs (Dietrich), the group members brought their working experience into their songs and sketches. The spectators—friends, colleagues, local music enthusiasts and the general public—were frequently encouraged to voice their opinions on the GDR-specific problems highlighted in the productions. In this way Feuerstein nurtured a close bond with their audience, one that Gundermann was to grow substantially as a solo Liedermacher in the post-unification years.

His audience was well-attuned to his metaphorical lyrical approach, which he had developed since his early days in Brigade Feuerstein. With the use of intertextuality, for example, he reflected a practice common among GDR Liedermacher and rock groups whereby critical allusions to the present could be couched in motifs or fables from literary works. Wolf Biermann and Bettina Wegner, for example, had both used the “Icarus” analogy in songs to symbolise political impotence and crushed ideals in the GDR (Robb, 2007). In GDR pop music, too, a well-known instance of such intertextuality was in the lyrics written by Ulrich Plenzdorf for the song “Wenn ein Mensch lebt” (When a person lives) for the film of the same year Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973) with its reference to the passage “Everything has its time” from the Lutheran Bible. The text implicitly questions the state leadership’s projected image of the GDR as “champion of history” whose time—in the wake of a growing economy in the early 1970s—had effectively arrived. Such a tension between socialist ideal and reality was the subject of Gundermann’s early theatrical experiments. In 1976 he adapted the Faustian tale of Jurij Brězan’s Krabat or the Transformation of the World for the Singeklub Hoyerswerda’s production “Krabat und seine Geschichten” (Krabat and his Stories, 1976) which, two years later, was further developed into “Geschichten aus den Koraktor” (Stories from the Koraktor, 1978), the group now appearing under the name of Brigade Feuerstein.⁵ The story is set in the fictitious town of Grauingrün and is clearly adapted to reflect present day reality of the GDR. The main figure Franziska, inspired by Brigitte Reimann’s novel Franziska Linkerhand⁶, is characterised by her high idealism. Initially the child, immersed in her imaginary world, is waiting for her kite Anton, to bring her back “a piece of heaven” from the skies into which she has let him loose; slowly she develops into a young working woman who – in keeping with the socialist spirit of the times—feels entitled to her own place in society. In the scenes, influenced by the Brechtian form of “Lehrstück” (instructional play), Franziska functions as a pro-active socialist heroine. In contrast to her boss’s optimism, she chides the complacency of the workers and their lack of direction and revolutionary spirit. Through her words there is no mistaking the passionate belief of the young worker Gundermann in the GDR’s historical mission and his despair at behavioural traits of those who stand in its way:

I don’t like how when you pull your cart your backs are always in the direction of travel. This makes me think that if you saw a wall, every one of you would drop the rope to be the first to rest your arse against that same wall.

[…] You’re always looking behind you […] and you always make sure that we drive cautiously, never so fast that your bones would shudder.⁷

By the early 1980s, however, Gundermann’s identification with heroic figures from literature and mythology was evolving in a more socially critical direction. In “Lancelots Zwischenbilanz” (Lancelot’s Interim Balance) there was already a sense of resignation. Here Gundermann implicitly refers to the top-down approach of the government which excludes his generation from participation in political affairs of the state. The subject Lancelot complains he has waited for fifteen years to be called for action. His utopian dreams have not been realised, there is no genuine news in the state-controlled newspapers and his red carnation has withered:

For 15 years I’ve stood at the world clock And I’m no longer so young And I wait and I wait And I still wear the red carnation on my helmet Although it’s long been withering And I still hold the newspaper in my hand Although I can’t read it any more And stare into the fog when will the man come Who says we need you: now it’s your turn

With its main motif, the song echoes a theme, widespread in GDR literature, of a “passive and alienated waiting”⁸, as expressed in texts of the 1980s such as those of Heiner Müller and Hans-Eckardt Wenzel as well as by the rock group City.⁹ The subject casts doubt on whether he has the will or energy to keep on fighting for the cause:

And I don’t know if I can still sing a song That reaches someone’s soul And I don’t know if I can still jump up And go for someone’s throat And I don’t know if I can still set out Into the wider world And I don’t know if can still wait Till I’m counted by the world.¹⁰

The story of Gundermann’s criticisms of the political leadership in his workplace leading to his expulsion from the Party in 1984 have been widely documented.¹¹ Simon Hain writes how a turning point in the history of Brigade Feuerstein was the production “Eine Macht Schicht” (A Power Level)¹² from 1983 which she describes as “a poetic reckoning with the coal mine’s central control office”.¹³ Hain lucidly describes the rigid hierarchy of the brown coal production system in the GDR with its numerous ranks reminiscent of the army which provided the political background for Gundermann’s ideas in the play. The main thrust of the criticism in “Eine Macht Schicht,” the prototype song-play that grew into “Eine Sehfahrt, die ist lustig” (A Seeing Journey, that’s funny)¹⁴ in 1984, is the difference in power levels between above and below in society, as discussed in the dialogues between Big and Little Klaus.¹⁵ The song “Demokratischer Tango”, for example, laments the contradiction that those in power have left their people behind. In the final verse – one of the main jokes of the show – the Party’s centralist way of governing is lampooned: “That’s the thing about democracy / She’s a young woman, not yet in bloom, / She has a pal called centralism, / But she doesn’t marry him because he always bites her.”¹⁶ With the scathing critique of the Party in songs such as “Bruttosozialprodukt” (Gross Social Product) where achieving targets is prioritised over safety in the work place, or “So muß es sein” (It has to be this way) which demands an end to spineless bureaucrats who do not answer to the public, Gundermann cemented his reputation as a songwriter with the interest of the working people at heart.

Typical for agitprop, this production contains a strong didactic element. One sung, for example, sung to the tune of a famous T. Rex song, lambasts the ruling elder generation, who had always viewed themselves as the “Children of the Revolution”, for living in the past and implicitly challenges them to hand over power to Gundermann’s own younger generation: “How do you want to be victorious when, with amputated brains, / You produce the past in the factories.” Similarly to Franziska’s speech from the earlier production “Koraktor,” the song derides the people’s passivity and lack of direction: “I see you turn around with your arse to the wall, / And you move, with your own dick in your hand. / Where do you want to go, children of the revolution, where, where?”

For those who knew the GDR and were acquainted with the rigid rules, restrictions and vetting processes concerning what was allowed to be performed in public,¹⁷ it is perhaps startling that the directness and vehemence of the criticism of “Eine Sehfahrt” was tolerated. What would have clearly been to the group’s advantage was, in a formal sense, their artistic self-orientation within the socialist tradition of the battle song, agitprop and instructional plays. As Klaus-Peter Schwarz has described, Gundermann was well connected to the Akademie der Künste in East Berlin which promoted the GDR’s revolutionary artistic heritage and supported such “independent theatre projects”¹⁸ as Brigade Feuerstein and their contemporaries Schicht and Karls Enkel. Indeed, the legendary Brecht singer Ernst Busch had even requested that Brigade Feuerstein play at his funeral in 1980.¹⁹ Corresponding to such credentials, the group was one of the GDR elite cadre singing groups who were allowed to perform in the West.²⁰ Conceptually, too, the fact that Gundermann, up until this point, had not yet relinquished his communist utopianism, as expressed in some of the aforementioned songs and scenes, was also a source of political protection. Here his inner conviction, despite his rift with the Party, that socialism would still be victorious, is very evident.²¹ In this respect, the productions of Brigade Feuerstein provide a valuable historical documentation of Gundermann’s thought-processes during this period.

Brigade Feuerstein performed three further productions before Gundermann departed to pursue his solo career in 1988. His album Männer, Frauen und Maschinen was followed by his lyrical collaboration with the rock group Silly on their acclaimed album Februar (February) in 1989, which considerably increased his cudos amongst music fans generally— his reputation previously having been confined to Liedermacher circles. Alongside Pankow’s Aufruhr in den Augen (Riot in their Eyes) this was one of two albums that summed up the sense of endgame in 1989, as the disaffected increasingly applied to leave the GDR. Gundermann’s biting texts on Februar vented his generation’s fury at the GDR government’s intransigence as it doggedly resisted the glasnost and perestroika reforms Gorbachov had introduced in the USSR. The song “SOS” uses the metaphor of a boat, a “Narrenschiff” (ship of fools)²², sailing to its doom, while “Ein Gespenst geht um” (A Ghost is going round) parodies the famous quotation from Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto: “There’s a ghost going round / In the Mitropa / It spits / On the cemetery of dreams.”²³ The song “Traumteufel” (Dream Devil) portrays a land bereft of inspiration with its metaphor of winter and the dying forest. Here Gundermann links his observations on political mismanagement to mankind’s misuse of nature, which was to become a more prominent theme in his songs of the 1990s:

I dreamt. That the Kaiser had been dead a long time Only his double sits on the throne. He looks good, Although he is an idiot And likes to play with a red telephone […] I dreamt. The winter had passed And the minister who yesterday still laughed, Hanged himself At his desk, Because the forest no longer knew how to make leaves²⁴

As the events of the Wende (turning point) in autumn 1989 had unfolded, Gundermann had taken an active part in the demonstrations, supporting the newly formed civil rights organisation New Forum and reading out the political demands of the so-called “Resolution” before concerts. In 1990 he toured with the Berlin rock group Wilderer as his backing band. Due to his straddling of the genres of rock music and political song it was apt that Gundermann enlisted Uwe Hassbecker and Ritchie Barton from Silly to produce his 1992 album Einsame Spitze as a return favour for his work on Februar. With its immaculate production, musicianship, and high level of song-writing this album stood out starkly amongst Liedermacher offerings of that time and set the tone for a series of CDs Gundermann was to release throughout the 1990s up until his premature death in 1998.

A major theme that he grapples with on these albums is that of the winners and losers in society. In the Brigade Feuerstein years, the identification with literary action heroes such as Franziska, Ilja Muromez²⁵ from Russian folklore, and Lancelot had been an intrinsic part of Gundermann’s narrative role-play. In interview he explained the attractiveness of such figures: the public identified with their heroism but also understood the aspect of illusion, namely that these characters were also flawed.²⁶ In a separate interview he presents this problem from a slightly different perspective. On one hand he himself had always been fascinated by people who seize the moment and do things, “the ones whom everything depends on, who also take on the burden”. On the other hand, this should not lose sight of the actual heroism of people who “quietly and softly do their own laborious thing”. These people are intrinsic to the working of a healthy society, but are left on the scrapheap by the political system.²⁷ This contradiction provided the background for Gundermann to address the “Sieger und Verlierer” opposition in the early 1990s where his songs spoke to the so-called “losers” of unification: East German workers who had been doubly let down, firstly by state socialism and now by the empty promises of capitalism. However, this was not a despondent, self-pitying position, but rather one that challenged the social status quo in a life-affirming way that displayed alternative philosophical approaches to viewing and understanding the world.²⁸

In the spring of 1992, the discussion about the winners and losers of unification was already in full swing in the public realm. Performers such as Gundermann as well as the duo Hans-Eckardt Wenzel and Steffen Mensching (former members of the Liedertheater group Karls Enkel) encapsulated this problem, similarly to their approach in the GDR, by the use of creative intertextual techniques. In May 1992 in the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin Wenzel and Mensching performed a production inspired by Rimbaud’s A Sojourn in Hell entitled “Aufenthalt in der Hölle.” Here a world is portrayed in which everyone tries to act like a winner, but all are in fact prisoners of a hellish existence. Wenzel and Mensching sang: “He is but a lost man / who can dance in the skin of the winner.”²⁹ Gundermann, too, dealt with this subject in the song “Der siebente Samurai” (The seventh Samurai) from 1993. Using the metaphor of the warrior from Akira Kurosawa’s epic film Seven Samurai (1954) who, having found love and harmony working in nature, is reluctant to return to battle, Gundermann sings: “I’m pulling on my fighting boots again / Outside my last day’s howling loud / How I’d love to come back home to you / cause’ you don’t care if I’m not a winner.”

Another theme Gundermann deals with is the dashed expectations of past and present. In this respect his song “Pferd aus Holz” (Wooden Horse) functions as a parable as it relates the story of a boy who wanted a real horse for Christmas only to receive a wooden one: “This one’s no good / I don’t want a horse of wood.” In referencing the refrain “Such horses I never wanted” from Margot Eskens’ popular hit “Mamatschi” (1956) this song offers another example of intertextuality. Another song “Herzblatt” (Petal), sums up the singer’s upbeat resilience in the face of disappointment with lines like “My petal why are you so sad / Just because once more / the times didn’t deliver what they promised.”

For my network of friends and contacts based around the Festival in East Berlin in 1992 it was clear that Gundermann was a kind of hero. In a time where cultural solidarity was imperative, in the face of media outlets that disregarded the validity of the East German experience, he was someone who poetically embodied their situation. He was their mouthpiece, voicing defiance through witty responses, offering lyrical (if not practical) solutions as one negotiated one’s way through everything new. The flip side of the “hero” coin revealed itself in 1995 when Gundermann outed himself as having been a Stasi informer. This unexpected revelation unleashed a huge controversy in the media. He did not attempt to exonerate himself, rather leaving it up to his audience to draw their own conclusions. For many it was difficult to imagine such a perennial rebel choosing to cooperate with the hated secret police. If one is to consider, however, his ardent belief in the original mission of the GDR, which comes across in the early Brigade Feuerstein productions, it is possibly less difficult to reconcile these two competing images.³⁰

Gundermann’s last two albums, Frühstück für immer (Breakfast for Ever) from 1995 and Engel über dem Revier (Angel above the Colliery) from 1997, continued to embrace a style of music that helped cement Gundermann’s nickname “Springsteen of the East” in the media. Lyrically, songs such as “Krieg” (War), “Hier bin ich geboren” (Here’s where I was born) or “Und musst du weinen” (And if it makes you cry) offered fascinating personal insights into the life and culture of a section of society that could be described as comprising of the East German post-industrial have-nots. At the same time these insights were couched within a wider philosophical vision of society and the world. While Klaus Peter Schwarz noted the apparent placidness of some of the post-unification texts such as “Ich mache meinen Frieden” (I make my peace) from 1993, in contrast to Gundermann’s politically militant offerings of the GDR years, the song “Krieg” (War) showed how his analysis of inequality and injustice was as sharp as ever.³¹ If during the Cold War the image of the “enemy” had become blurred amidst realisation of the pointlessness of the conflict— “I was full of hate / If you’d asked me I couldn’t say why”—now, in view of the unambiguous power relations re-emerging in capitalist Germany of the 1990s, the class conflict is clearly defined again. Gundermann may have lost his own urge to physically fight, but still warns of impending social conflict:

It’s come so far, the two of us now Have cleared the decks once again At long last I have work of my own But for you someone else takes the strain When the ship rolls you crook your finger I crick my back in return You take the helm, I tackle the sails If you asked me now I’d know why.

That’s why, brother, there’ll be war We dumped it at our front door. But I still sing and don’t kill any guy If you asked me now I’d know why.³²

Written in the period when Gundermann was finally laid off as a an excavator driver amidst the decommissioning of most of the pits in the Lausatia region, both albums are fascinating in terms of how they deal with issues surrounding the deindustrialisation of the East at the hands of neo-liberal politics. As Simon Hain states, in addressing themes such as “rootlessness, loss of utopias, responsibility fatigue”, their lyrics were forerunners of the widespread international media discussions of the 2000s on the effects of globalisation on the work force.³³

Since 2018 I have been involved as a musician and translator in the “Gundermanns Lieder in Europa” project. This first took place as part of the activities marking the twentieth anniversary of the singer’s death in June 2018. Organised by the Gundermann Seilschaft association that promotes his legacy, it took the form of a symposium on 17 June, followed by a week-long workshop in Großräschen and culminating in a concert in Hoyerswerda. Musicians from around Europe took part, translating selected Gundermann songs into their own languages. They included George Leitenberger singing in French, Pier Angelo (Italian), Johan Meier (Dutch), Jan Řepka (Czech), Aleksander Trąbczyński (Polish), Zhenja Oks (Russian), Pittkunings (Sorb), Hugo Dietrich and Carmen Orlet (Low German), Jos Koning (Swedish), Claudio Herrera (Spanish) and myself (English). The musicians all had varying musical styles often reflecting the folk music of the countries they came from. Their adaptations were, however, not confined to folk, other influences seeping in from rock, blues and jazz. Subsequently we recorded the CD Gundermanns Lieder in Europa which was released by Gundermann’s label Buschfunk in 2019 alongside a booklet documenting the proceedings of the symposium.³⁴ The CD was voted album of the month by the magazine www.liederbestenliste.de in October 2019. The whole experience allowed me to rediscover the full depth and range of Gundermann’s work, it documented the boundary-crossing, universal qualities of his songs, and set up a strong international network for future collaborations.

The experience also jogged my memory of my last encounter with Gundermann. This had taken place at a Liedermacher event organised by Lied und Sozialbewgung e. V. in Berlin Weissensee in spring 1997. I had spoken to him briefly, requesting an interview for my Liedertheater research on Brigade Feuerstein. He was polite but reserved, saying that he didn’t do interviews very well and asking if I wouldn’t mind just sending my questions to him in a letter. Possibly a neat fob-off from a notoriously busy person, I never got round to writing to him. But over twenty years after Gundermann’s death, I began listening to his songs again and thought about a new project that would properly investigate these old Brigade Feuerstein productions. That culminated in my present AHRC-funded Fellowship, the results of which are documented on this website.³⁵

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 1. A version of this article was first published as “Utopia and Disillusion in the Songs of Gundermann: from the Brigade Feuerstein Productions in the GDR to his Solo Albums of the 1990s”, in Otago German Studies 30 (2020): Special Edition: Imperfect Recall. Re-collecting the GDR, edited by Cecilia Novero; https://otagogermanstudies.otago.ac.nz/ogs/issue/view/45
2. For more on these structures and processes See David Robb, “Censorship, Dissent and the Metaphorical Language of GDR Rock,” in Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm, edited by Ewa Mazierska (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 109–28.
3. The so-called Liedertheater (song theatre) was a hybrid form between political song, agitprop theatre and cabaret which began as an offshoot from the GDR youth singing movement in the mid-1970s. Its most famous pioneers were Schicht from Dresden, Brigade Feuerstein from Hoyerswerda and Karls Enkel from Berlin. See David Robb, Zwei Clowns im Lande des verlorenen Lachens. Das Liedertheater Wenzel & Mensching (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1998).
4. Personal interview with former Brigade Feuerstein member Hugo Dietrich, 5 February 2020.
5. The unpublished manuscripts for these Brigade Feuerstein productions, all typed by Gundermann himself, have been collected by Reinhard “Pfeffi” Ständer and are available in the Gundermann Archive in the Kulturfabrik, Hoyerswerda. They are kept in folders with no shelf marks or serial numbers. Most are also held in the archives of the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, originally collected by Karin Wolf in the 1980s.
6. Simone Hain also mentions the influences of Brezan and Reimann on Gundermann in her article “Unsereins. Gerhard Gundermann und das wahre Leben”, Berliner Debatte 11, no. 5/6 (2000), p. 176. See also Brigade Feuerstein’s song production “Franziska-Lieder” (1979).
7. “Geschichten aus den Koraktor.” See footnote 3.
8. Karen Leeder, Breaking Boundaries (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 53.
9. See David Robb, “Censorship, Dissent and the Metaphorical Language of GDR Rock.” In Popular Music in Eastern Europe: Breaking the Cold War Paradigm, edited by Ewa Mazierska (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 109–28.
10. “Lancelots Zwischenbilanz” (1981) in Gundermann. Das Liederbuch. Teil 2 (Berlin: Buschfunk Verlag, 1999), no. 21.
11. See, for example, Hans-Dieter Schütt, Tankstelle für Verlierer. Gespräche mit Gerharnd Gundermann (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 2011); Andreas Leusink, ed., Gundermann. Von jedem Tag will ich was haben, was ich nicht vergesse (Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag, 2018).
12. This is a word play from “eine Nachtschicht” (meaning “a night shift”) which plays on the other meaning of “Schicht” as “level”.
13. Simone Hain, “Unsereins,” p. 186.
14. This title “Sehfahrt” is an ironic pun on the word “Seefahrt” (voyage). With didactic associations typical of a Lehrstück it literally means a “journey of seeing”.
15. See manuscript of these productions in the Gundermann Archive.
16. “Demokratischer Tango.” From Eine Sehfahrt ist lustig. See footnote 3.
17. See Robb, as footnote 2.
18. Klaus Peter Schwarx, “…die die Welt nicht bessern können aber möchten… Gerhard Gundermanns Internationalhymnen eines ‘anderen Deutschland’.” Berliner Debatte INITIAL 10, no. 2 (1999), pp. 41–55, here p. 44.
19. Personal interview with Ingo “Hugo” Dietrich, 6 February 2020.
20. See Gundermannn’s interview with Schütt, p. 90.
21. Another quite practical consideration, as Hugo Dietrich relates, was that group member Bernd Nitzsche was Town Councillor for Culture in Hoyerswerda and in this respect a “protection against the state security.” Dietrich, “Viel Arbeit für ein Lächeln. Unsere Zeit bei der Brigade Feuerstein,” in Leusink (2018), p. 51.
22. Klaus Peter Schwarz (1999) lauds the professional quality of Gundermann’s lyrics in this song comparing it to an earlier much less refined version of the lyrics in the song “Schwarze Galeere” from 1980, p. 46.
23. The word “Mitropa” is a pun on “Europa” from Marx and Engel’s original line: “Ein Gespenst geht um in Europa.” Mitropa was the name of the catering company for Deutsche Reichsbahn, the state railway in the GDR. It managed restaurants in railway stations and dining cars on trains.
24. See Gundermann’s comments on this song in his interview with Schütt, p. 114.
25. “Ilja Muromez” (1977) in Gundermann. Das Liederbuch. Teil 2, no. 45.
26. Gundermann in Schütt, p. 121.
27. Gundermann in Schütt, pp. 158-59.
28. In interview Gundermann stated: “Ich möchte gern so etwas sein wie eine Tankstelle für Verlierer” (I’d like to be something like a filling station for losers), Schütt, p. 39.
29. See David Robb, Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960 (Rochester/New York: Camden House, 2007), pp. 259-60.
30. In his third interview with Schütt Gundermann goes into detail about his motivations for co-operating with the Stasi. For example, he talks about how he construed any kind of “petty bourgeois” behaviour as something hostile (p. 92) and also felt duty-bound “to serve” his country. (p. 94). See my more extensive analysis of this in the forthcoming article ‘A Heroism for the New Times in the Protest Songs of Gerhard Gundermann’, Popular Music (2024/25).
31. Schwarz, p. 42.
32. Gundermann, “Krieg”, on CD Frühstück für immer (Buschfunk 1995).
33. Simone Hain, “Gundermanns post mortem: über das Ende der Arbeit, den Kampf gegen das Empire und die notwendige Erziehung der Gefühle.” UTOPIE kreativ, H. no. 177/178 (2005), pp. 688–692, here pp. 690-91.
34. Gundermanns Seilschaft e.V, ed., “Mit einem Lied fang ich erst mal an.” Gundermanns Lieder in Europa. Internationales Liedprojekt. Symposium, Workshop & Audio-CD (Berlin: Buschfunk Verlag, 2019)
35. See also the new publications by David Robb, ‘The Krabat Motif in the Songs and Musicals of “Liedermacher” Gerhard Gundermann’, Music & Politics (2024, forthcoming); ‘The Influence of Brigitte Reimann’s Franziska Linkerhand on the Political Songs of Gerhard Gundermann’, German Life & Letters (2024, forthcoming); ‘A Heroism for the New Times in the Protest Songs of Gerhard Gundermann’, Popular Music (2024/25, forthcoming).