‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’

Let us begin with the song itself. ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ is a sonic reworking of a visual text: a short film taken during the Tanquetazo,Footnote ¹⁰ a failed coup orchestrated by the Chilean military in June 1973, several months before the ousting of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity administration in September of that year.Footnote ¹¹ The film is alarming in its intimacy. Taken for Swedish National Television by Argentine-Swedish journalist Leonardo Henrichsen and quickly circulated throughout the Western world,Footnote ¹² it captures Henrichsen's murder at the hands of a Chilean soldier. Much of the text's power derives from its first-person subject position, which transforms the viewer into a victim: a truck full of soldiers pulls up near La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace. A soldier takes aim and fires. Then the camera falls and the screen goes black.Footnote ¹³

In Biermann's hands, Henrichsen's film is transformed from the documentation of a singular incident into multi-layered allegory simultaneously describing the events of the film, the reactions of the narrator to these events, and the lessons that can be interpolated from them. These three components of the work are partially delineated by lyrical form. In the introductory stanza, Biermann appeals to his ‘comrades’, provoking them to action through understanding; the following verses describe the details of the provocation (the setting of the film in Santiago in that ‘bloody year’, the violence of the attempted coup, and the murder of the cameraman); the choruses serve to reinforce the lesson to be learned, repeated with escalating intensity through a series of dialectical oppositions (fist and face; muzzle and mouth; gun and camera; gun and guitar). By the end of the final chorus, Henrichsen's film has been re-examined and its oppositions resolved.Footnote ¹⁴ The audience has learned the ‘whole truth’ of Popular Unity: violence must be fought with violence using ‘gun and guitar’ (Figure 1).Footnote ¹⁵

Figure 1

Lyrics to Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as printed on the insert to the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. Translation into English by the author.

Biermann's musical choicesFootnote ¹⁶ both reinforce and extend the structure and content of his lyric, acting not only as accompaniment to but also as commentary on the text. This guitar music comprises a series of musical gestures derived from the repeated two-bar 6/8 phrase that introduces the song: a plunging glissando, followed by a softly strummed Em⁹ and a percussive whack (Example 1). The music of the verses unpacks this semantic kernel to express both affect and context: in verse one, 6/8 drumming on the guitar strings serves simultaneously as a kind of funeral march and an index of South American indigeneity, accompanying the death of the cameraman with a tritone (Example 2); in verse two, rapid alternation between scale degrees 6 and 5 on the bass strings, punctuated by percussive ‘explosions’, indexes fear while describing fleeing crowds (Example 3); in verse three, the music slows as the ‘film’ ends, imitating the slowing of the projector wheel, the murder of the cameraman, and the emotional exhaustion of the narrator. The music to the choruses brings the tenor of the song to its height, reinforcing the violence of the lyrical message with a metrical shift and powerful strumming.

Example 1

Guitar introduction to ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as recorded on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. Transcription by the author.

Example 2

Tone painting in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as recorded on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. The murder of the cameraman is followed by tritones. Transcription by the author.

Example 3

Biermann's musical description of fleeing crowds in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as recorded on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. Transcription by the author.

The lyrical and musical meaning of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ is notably enriched by the sonic and visual content of the West German records on which it was released.Footnote ¹⁷ In the first of these records, the single ‘Chile/Che Guevara’ (1973),Footnote ¹⁸ the song is closely tied to ‘revolutionary’ South America. Musically speaking, the single makes this association through the pairing of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ with ‘Comandante Che Guevara’, Biermann's German-language reworking of Carlos Puebla's ‘Hasta siempre’ (‘Until Forever’). South America is implied in the cover art as well: one side of the record sleeve features a photo of the Chilean military officer from Henrichsen's film, an image that would likely have been recognizable to German audiences of 1973. The other side is dominated by a rough likeness of Che Guevara on a red background.

If Wolf Biermann initially framed ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as a ‘South American’ song, his re-release of the composition in 1976 on his West German ‘Spanish’ LP, Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod (There is a Life before Death),Footnote ¹⁹ recontextualizes it within a larger constellation of largely Iberian signifiers. Musically speaking, most of the tracks on Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod refer in some way to the recently deceased Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, or to the events of the Spanish Civil War; three tracks are songs written for and sung in the 1930s by the International Brigades. The collage of images on the record sleeve mirrors this semantic web, assembling symbols of Spanish ‘fascist’ and ‘communist’ worlds in seeming free association: on the back cover, a small reproduction of the cover art of the ‘Chile’ single is placed alongside a portrait of Franco, an execution scene from the Spanish Civil War, photos of the Spanish Republicans Dolores Ibárruri and Julian Grimau, and a likeness of International Brigades singer Ernst Busch. Biermann plays a central role in his photomontage: images of him, his mother, and his father feature prominently among protagonists of twentieth-century world history.

Wolf Biermann and the GDR

The centrality of Wolf Biermann and his family to the cover art of Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod reflects the importance of this singer-songwriter's biography to his style of musical politics. The power of this persona derived from its congruence with the ‘anti-fascist’ mythology of the GDR. Established in the aftermath of the Second World War under the aegis of the Soviet Union, East Germany saw itself as the antidote to its Nazi past: a non-nation that could serve as a refuge for the world's communist intellectual elite and a nursery for the ‘new man’. The son of German communists, one of them a German-Jew murdered by the Nazi dictatorship, Biermann embodied this imaginary. Volitionally adopting East Germany as his home at the age of 17, the young singer-songwriter was mentored by the GDR's artistic elite, first as an assistant director at Bertolt Brecht's Berlin Ensemble and later the mentee of composer Hanns Eisler. Up until the early 1960s, he was a darling of the new society, a living advertisement for the ‘good Germany’.

But much like many promising minds of the West's post-war generation, Biermann was a cultural contradiction of sorts:Footnote ²⁰ rather than continuing to further the goals and values of the society that had nurtured him, he interrogated them. As in the West, this interrogation was in many respects merited: by the 1960s, the East German idealism of the immediate post-war era had faded, replaced by an increasingly sclerotic state that, led by veterans of the pre-war-era communist establishment, was largely subservient to the dictates of Soviet policy. As the Cold War escalated, the disjuncture between official claims of a successfully realized socialist society and the East German lived experience of ‘real existing socialism’ intensified. Unable to satisfactorily address the new challenges it faced, the GDR resorted to (the threat of) violence: in 1961, the state began the construction of an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’, a measure underwritten by a growing network of secret state police. In the summer of 1968, it condoned the brutal suppression of the Czechoslovakian Prague Spring, disillusioning a generation of young communists.

Biermann's turn to political critique had begun long before the Prague Spring, at which point he was already a persona non grata in the GDR. Indeed, by the early 1960s, the singer-songwriter was a well-established protagonist of the self-identified ‘inner-communist opposition’, a group of East German intellectuals who believed that the democratic reform of socialist institutions could help to prevent the misuse of Marxist doctrine and, ultimately, the rise of a socialist dictatorship.Footnote ²¹ Poems of this period reflect the brashly confrontational – and intentionally offensive – nature of Biermann's initial approach to inducing such communist reform. In the 1962 poem ‘An die alten Genossen’ (‘To the Old Comrades’), Biermann attacks the ‘old men’ of the East German state, questioning the relevance of their pre-WWII experience and demanding immediate change.Footnote ²² In the first chapter of his 1965 ‘Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen’ (‘Germany: A Winter's Tale’),Footnote ²³ he channels the sarcasm of nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine to proclaim East Germany the ‘buttocks’ of the world, a Nazi successor-state ‘scrubbed red’ with Stalinist ideology.

The GDR establishment had little tolerance for such critique. Ideologically unable to distinguish criticism from treason – and, perhaps equally importantly, haunted by the tragedy of the Weimar Republic, in which leftist factionalism had contributed to enabling the rise of the Nazi dictatorship – the East German state reacted to Biermann swiftly and with increasing severity.Footnote ²⁴ A temporary ban on the singer-songwriter's work in 1963 was followed by a permanent and total ban in 1965. An apparent thaw in cultural policy in the early 1970s masked a change in state protocol from censorship to expatriation: declassified East German secret police documents indicate that preparations for Biermann's expulsion from the GDR began as early as 1972.Footnote ²⁵ By 1976, he had been forced into West German exile.

The decade of East German censorship between the total ban on Wolf Biermann's work in 1965 and his expatriation to West Germany in 1976 provides the context for the emergence of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’. This period in Biermann's career was marked by a paradoxical combination of isolation and publicity: although confined to his closely monitored apartment in East Berlin, Biermann enjoyed seemingly unfettered access to Eastern and Western culture, maintaining close contact with activists on both sides of the Iron Curtain.Footnote ²⁶ And although absent in East Germany's ‘official’ public sphere, Biermann's music was well known across the German-speaking world. Wildly popular in West Germany, where the singer-songwriter's work was published in both written and recorded form,Footnote ²⁷ this repertoire circulated in East Germany as samizdat, illicit copies distributed by underground networks of students and intellectuals. As Biermann wrote with customary irony in his 1965 ‘Das macht mich populär’ (‘That Makes Me Popular’), East German efforts at suppressing his critical voice had only broadened his audience: ‘You put out the fire with gasoline … you create what you mean to prevent: You make me popular!’Footnote ²⁸

But if GDR state censorship failed to silence Biermann, the decade following his blacklisting did witness an important shift in the singer-songwriter's tactics of inner-communist opposition. In a manner similar to other East German intellectual contemporaries, Biermann developed a Janus-faced form of artistic expression in which symbols and narratives of communist ideology were simultaneously re-articulated and deconstructed. A degree of ventriloquism was central to this operation: speaking with the voices and the musics of ‘Others’ – including those of South American Nueva Canción musicians – the singer-songwriter both disguised and reinforced his calls for socialist reform.

Wolf Biermann's ‘critical solidarity’

In an open letter to Biermann published shortly before his expulsion from the GDR, West German radical Rudi DutschkeFootnote ²⁹ characterized songs such as ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as acts of ‘critical solidarity’,Footnote ³⁰ texts that, through rigorous self-critique, broke down the ideological barriers dividing the socialist community, thus opening the way for a successful socialist future.Footnote ³¹ Dutschke's formulation aptly captures the complexity of Biermann's political positioning, for if Biermann condemned ‘real existing socialism’, he did so in the hope of preserving, not dismantling, the East German experiment. Indeed, the official East German ban on Biermann's music in no way lessened the degree to which it was shaped by – and committed to – socialist thought. Songs such as ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ embodied a deep-seated belief in the transformative political power conferred on artists by socialist ideology. Equally importantly, their materials were drawn largely from the GDR's rhetorical terrain. Written with East German audiences in mind, they re-articulated discourses and symbols integral to the East German cultural imaginary.

The GDR's tradition of political song is among the most important sources for Biermann's musical expression of critical solidarity. Embracing the experiments in ‘didactic’ and ‘fighting’ music launched by German-speaking communists during the 1920s and 1930s, GDR cultural institutions actively promoted a corpus of songs intended to mould ideal socialist citizens. Biermann's work was an outgrowth of this effort. Abstractly speaking, central aspects of the formal structure and musical style of songs such as ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ can be traced to Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, including the Lehrstück-like didacticism of its lyric and its montage of popular and avant-garde sounds. More concretely, a great deal of Biermann's repertoire was itself drawn from the ‘classics’ of GDR political song. This was particularly true of the album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. Prepared for the fortieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War – a conflict celebrated in the GDR as a symbol of international resistance to fascismFootnote ³² – the content of Biermann's ‘Spanish album’ paralleled that of the contemporary East German Aurora record catalogue, which included a series of Ernst Busch re-releases that paired songs such as ‘Freiheit’ (‘Freedom’), ‘Jaramafront’ (‘The Jarama Front’), and ‘Die Herren Generale’ (‘The Generals’) with biographies of Spanish Republican heroes.Footnote ³³

The political subject matter of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ also ran parallel to the protest songs popularized by the GDR's Singing Movement,Footnote ³⁴ a state-sanctioned musical community that, established in the late 1960s, reached its apogee around the time of the release of Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. A reaction to the popularity of protest song among Western youth, the Singing Movement strove to modify the genre to make it more appropriate for an East German society putatively free of class conflict, stipulating that songs be optimistic with respect to the socialist present and, accordingly, that calls for rebellion ‘of the oppressed classes against the exploiting classes’ be replaced with ‘expression(s) of the common interests of the workers’.Footnote ³⁵ In line with both communist ideology and the more prosaic geopolitical interests of the East German state, internationalism was a central component of the Singing Movement. In 1970, the GDR established the first Festival for Political Song,Footnote ³⁶ an annual event held in East Berlin ‘in the spirit of anti-imperialist solidarity, freedom, and friendship’.Footnote ³⁷ Over the course of the subsequent two decades, the event brought hundreds of protest singers from all over the world to the capital of the ‘good Germany’.

Chile and Chilean Nueva Canción musicians played an oversized role in the early years of the GDR's Singing Movement. Perceived as a symbol of emergent Third World communism during the Allende years and a Latin American re-enactment of the Spanish Civil War in the aftermath of the 1973 coup d'etat,Footnote ³⁸ Chile was second only to Vietnam as an international subject of East German musical production, and the 1970, 1973, and 1974 editions of the Festival of Political Song were dominated by Allende-affiliated protagonists of the Chilean Nueva Canción movement, including Quilapayún, Inti-Illimani, and Isabel Parra. As is explored in greater detail later, the musical fruits of the Nueva Canción movement – a repertoire of leftist, socially engaged folksong that flowered across South America in the late 1960s – were stylistically and ideologically diverse. That said, East Germans seem to have been more likely to be ‘officially’ exposed to those songs congruent with communist state orthodoxy. The 1973 Eterna label single ‘Solidarität mit Chile’ (‘Solidarity with Chile’),Footnote ³⁹ a reproduction of a live performance at that year's Festival of Political Song, gives a sense of this situation. On side A, the iconic Chilean group Inti-Illimani sings ‘Venceremos’ (‘We Will Triumph’), an upbeat, march-like anthem written in an effort to rally support for Allende during the 1970 election campaign. On side B, they join the GDR's flagship Singing Movement ensemble, the Oktoberklub, in a multi-lingual rendition of ‘El pueblo unido’ (‘The People United’), a similarly march-like anthem written in order to raise morale within the Popular Unity Party. Lyrically, at least, the parallels between this latter song and Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ seem self-evident: both advocate for solidarity with the socialist cause, the former within the Chilean community, the latter in the East German one.

But if Biermann re-articulated aspects of East German rhetorical and musical culture in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’, the style of this re-articulation simultaneously served to defamiliarize them for listeners in the GDR. A comparison of Biermann's composition with ‘Chile tanzt’ (‘Chile Dances’), a Nueva Canción-inspired solidarity song written by Oktoberklub co-founder Hartmut König, highlights the lyrical and musical dimensions of this defamiliarization. Released in 1972, a year before Biermann's ballad, ‘Chile tanzt’ draws on both the lyrical stipulations of the Singing Movement and the musical aesthetics of Nueva Canción groups such as Quilapayún: optimistic Allende-led peasants dance their way into a syncopated, D major communist utopia, achieving political transformation through exuberant footwork.Footnote ⁴⁰ Biermann's sombre, dirge-like depiction of the Chilean Popular Unity Party is a radical departure from this song. Musically, the aggressive tenor of Biermann's minor-mode ballad suggests sadness and anger – not celebration. Lyrically, it attacks the East German state on both international and domestic fronts. On the one hand, Biermann's retelling of the collapse of the Popular Unity administration is a powerful condemnation of the Soviet Bloc's foreign policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’. On the other, it is an exposé of the internal failings of state socialism. By focusing on a victimized South American rather than the triumphant Chilean collective, Biermann transforms the Chilean allegory from a symbol of hope into a cipher for the pitfalls of communist state governance, particularly its disregard for the individual and for independent, critical thought.

A more-detailed look at the lyric of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ highlights these two aspects of Biermann's attack on the East German state. First, there is Biermann's defamiliarization of the Soviet Bloc rhetoric of solidarity with the Third World. On the one hand, this rhetoric is glibly re-articulated in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’: outlining a black-and-white geopolitics in which ‘good’ Third World socialism (the cameraman) is pitted against ‘evil’, ‘fascist’ power (the Nazi-like soldier), Biermann asks his listeners to express their support for an anti-imperialist state. And yet, woven into this re-articulation of Soviet Bloc orthodoxy lies a bitter critique, for the kind of militant solidarity of ‘gun and guitar’ that Biermann demands was much more akin to revolutionary Maoist – or, perhaps more precisely, revolutionary Cuban – discourse than anything underwritten by the GDR. Indeed, in an effort to maintain détente with the United States and curb China's influence in South America, the Brezhnev-era Soviet Bloc held back on financial and military aid to the Allende administration and denounced ‘adventurist’ armed struggle in favour of a ‘peaceful transition’ to socialism involving broad coalition building and economic reform.Footnote ⁴¹ ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ overtly condemns this policy of ‘peaceful coexistence’. In what can be heard as a paraphrase of Che Guevara's 1966 Message to the Tricontinental, the chorus of the song reads the demise of Chilean socialism as further proof that only violence can repel the (military) might of capitalist imperialism and that, accordingly, true solidarity is not merely ‘a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate; one must accompany him to death or victory’.Footnote ⁴²

Such critique had dire repercussions for a celebratory Soviet Bloc historiography that portrayed the collapse of socialist Chile as a cipher for the defeat of Republican Spain; a temporary setback on the inexorable path to communist utopia.Footnote ⁴³ As is often the case during this period of Biermann's work, this critique is masked by a rhetorical re-articulation: the very inclusion of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ on the ‘Spanish’ album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod indicates a fundamental agreement with the central tenets of Soviet Bloc discourse. That said, Biermann's focus on the victimization of the (Chilean) cameraman inverts the indexes of its future-oriented triumphalism, replacing celebration with tragedy. The same critique is launched in other songs on Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. In his bitterly satirical rendition of the GDR's de-facto national anthem ‘Freiheit’ (‘Freedom’), for example, Biermann all but omits the word ‘freedom’ from the chorus and whispers the triumphal ‘we fight and die for you’ that proceeds it, condemning the rhetorical hypocrisy of Stalinism and – equally importantly – the East German establishment.Footnote ⁴⁴ In ‘Ballade von den Spaniern im Dresdener Exil’ (‘Ballad of the Spaniards in Exile in Dresden’), meanwhile, the Iberian catastrophe repeats as languishing Spanish Republican exiles, betrayed by the ‘world revolution that never came’, are replaced with Chileans: ‘What can I do / and what can you do’, asks Biermann in a Lehrstück-like moment akin to the introduction of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’, ‘so that these comrades here from Chile … / aren't abandoned for forty years / … because Pinochet was stronger / than our good, strong word: solidarity’. In Biermann's songs, Spain and Chile are not so much first steps on the inevitable road to world socialist revolution as they are repeated and avoidable socialist failures with real – and terrible – consequences for socialist individuals.

As outlined earlier, the lyrics of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ can be heard to simultaneously re-articulate and deconstruct discourses surrounding the GDR's engagement with Allende's Chile. But it can also be understood as a highly personalized critique of the internal features of Soviet Bloc society, one in which ‘anti-fascist’ East German rhetoric is instrumentalized to critique the GDR's treatment of its own citizens. The first of the Janus-faced symbols worthy of note in this hearing is the Chilean Tanquetazo, at once a symbol of the brute power of ‘fascist’ sectors of the US-backed Chilean military and, simultaneously, an evocation of the Soviet occupation of Prague in the summer of 1968.Footnote ⁴⁵ The second is Biermann's cameraman. As explored earlier, the cameraman in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ can be heard as a Third World victim of Western imperial violence. That said, as Jesse Freedman documents, it was also understood as a metaphor for the Biermann's own fate at the hands of the East German establishment. Blacklisted by the GDR for his songs – aesthetic objects that, like the cameraman's footage, documented the trespasses of an authoritarian police state – Biermann implies that he has been metaphorically ‘murdered’, physically removed from the East German public sphere.Footnote ⁴⁶ In appealing to his audiences to remember the cameraman, then, Biermann can be heard to ask them to remember him, and to join him with ‘gun and guitar’ in opposition to the misused – and perhaps even ‘fascist’ – power of communist institutions.Footnote ⁴⁷

Biermann's decision to end the final chorus of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ with the announcement that he is telling the ‘whole truth’Footnote ⁴⁸ of the Popular Unity Party provides a fecund point of departure for encapsulating the messages of critical solidarity that can be heard in his song. This phrase seems significant in two respects. The first is that Biermann does not necessarily claim to tell the truth. Rather, faithful to the dialectical tradition, he presents his listeners with theses and antitheses in an ongoing cycle of oppositions,Footnote ⁴⁹ arriving not so much at a formula as to an approach: to reject dogma (communist or otherwise) and embrace independent, critical, and above all, public thought. This direct and open engagement with political life constitutes the second aspect of ‘truth’ that Biermann can be heard to explore. For in telling the ‘whole truth’ in his song, Biermann is openly condemning the decision of Soviet Bloc opposition writers to ‘live in truth’ through retreat to the private sphere.Footnote ⁵⁰ On the contrary, Biermann seems to assert, ‘truth’ is not to take flight to the world of ‘good strong words’,Footnote ⁵¹ but to act outwardly – to engage politically in Hannah Arendt's understanding of the term – even in the face of overwhelming power. In this sense, ‘Chile – Ballad vom Kameramann’ may be heard not only as inner-communist critique, but also as an inner-communist call to action, an appeal to Biermann's ‘comrades’ to pick up their ‘guns and guitars’ and continue to struggle openly and outwardly for communist reform.

Wolf Biermann's ‘revolutionary’ South American sound

The ‘South American’ musical content of Biermann's vocal and guitar style plays an integral role in shaping the ambivalent lyrical content of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’. This music was intentional. ‘With the right music’, Biermann related in a 1974 interview, ‘it is possible to say things that cannot be said in a poem’, adding that it was the emotion communicated by sound – not necessarily the thoughts communicated by words – that made song such a potent political tool. ‘That is why rulers fear songs’, he explained. ‘They don't fear the songs themselves, but rather the latent passion provoked and brought to the surface by them.’Footnote ⁵² Later in life, Biermann would elaborate on these general ideas in a more technical vein. In his 1997 Wie man Verse macht und Lieder (How to Make Verses and Songs), he suggested that music could relate to text in four ways: carrying the text, copying the text, interpreting the text, and contradicting the text.Footnote ⁵³

‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ evidences several of the facets of the music–text relationship outlined in Biermann's book. As explored earlier, Biermann's use of word painting is particularly notable. Sometimes, as in the pairing of the cameraman's murder with a tritone, musical description borders on cliché, quite literally mimicking specific actions or concepts. In other instances, as in the gradual rallentando in the guitar part at the end of the third verse (‘Then the image shudders, the film breaks off / That is what I have seen’), such musical description plays a subtler role, reinforcing the multi-layeredness of the lyrical metaphor. But, as Biermann himself noted, the central power of his music is affective: for this listener, in any case, the distinctively raw grain of Biermann's voice combined with the timbral and harmonic dissonance of his guitar playing communicate across linguistic boundaries, reinforcing that his is a song of confrontation and protest, an urgent – even desperate – demand shouted and splatted into the listener's ear. It is perhaps self-evident that the same text sung by a different voice, and/or set to different accompaniment, could have a very different meaning. The paucity of recorded covers of Biermann's most popular songs may attest to just how essential his musical style was to the perceived authenticity of his message.

The singularity of Biermann's sound illuminates another role that music plays in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’, for if one of Biermann's greatest virtues was to sound like ‘himself’, he was also skilled in using music to reference – and perhaps even to attempt to embody – strategic subjectivities not precisely his own. When listening to a voice, writes musicologist Nina Eidsheim, a listener asks the ‘acousmatic question’: who is this?Footnote ⁵⁴ For (East) German Biermann listeners of the 1970s, the answer to this question would have been multifaceted. Most fundamentally, perhaps, Biermann's solo voice and guitar style identified him as a musician in the ‘Bob Dylan at Newport’ mould: a ‘lone fighter and social outcast’ whose ‘I-songs’ contrasted with the ‘we-songs’ of establishment groups such as the Oktoberklub.Footnote ⁵⁵ But, in some of his songs, Biermann's ubiquitous countercultural alterity was accompanied by sonic representations of ethnic communities whose oppression at the hands of Western society gave their voices a certain critical legitimacy. In his 1966 ‘Preußische Romanze’ (‘Prussian Romance’),Footnote ⁵⁶ for example, Biermann compares the power of his guitar – a ‘six-shot machine gun’ that keeps him company in the cell where his ‘brothers’ have imprisoned himFootnote ⁵⁷ – with a ‘Spanish Jewess’ singing the ‘blackest blues’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The recording of the ‘Romanze’ included on Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod (it is the last track of side A) embodies this comparison musically. Here, Biermann begins his song with a guitar solo that moves from a flamenco-inspired E Phrygian dominant riff to a blues-like E minor pentatonic, inventing a fusion of A minor pentatonic/A Phrygian along the way. The intentionality of this meandering improvisation is reinforced with the entrance of the vocals, in which Biermann sings the words ‘the blackest blues’ to a descending pentatonic line (followed by a ♭5 riff in the guitar) and ‘Ay, the Jewish blues’ to a Phrygian melody featuring a portamento between E and F♮ (Example 4).

Example 4

Examples of Biermann's musical embodiment of alterity in ‘Preußische Romanze’ as recorded on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod. Note (a) the pentatonic descent accompanying and ♭5 guitar riff following the words ‘the blackest blues’ and (b) the Phrygian portamento to F♮ on the ‘Ay’ of ‘Jewish blues’. Transcriptions by the author with reference to Biermann's 1968 score in Mit Marx- und Engelszungen, 71–2.

As in ‘Preußische Romanze’, Biermann's musical references to ‘South America’ are closely tied to his political critique. This connection is particularly overt in his ‘Comandante Che Guevara’, an adaptation of ‘Hasta siempre’ that pairs ‘a very free translation’ of Carlos Puebla's lyric with a flamenco-inspired reworking of his ‘Latin America harmonies’,Footnote ⁵⁹ thus transforming a celebration of Che Guevara's contributions to the Cuban Revolution into a condemnation of the East German establishment (Figure 2).Footnote ⁶⁰ ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ can be understood to attempt a similarly politicized sonic reference to the South American Other. Biermann's adaptation of the South American ‘sound’ is especially evident in his 1973 version of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’, in which a charango (or charango-like strumming on a guitar) bursts in at climactic moments, lending the ballad an Andean flare. But it can also be heard in the percussive guitar techniques common to both his 1973 and 1976 versions: a drum-like pounding on the bridge of the guitar that would seem to evoke indigenous traditions iconic to the South American altiplano – or at least the South American guitar styles that evoked this sound.Footnote ⁶¹

Figure 2

Lyrics to Biermann's reworking of Carlos Puebla's ‘Hasta Siempre’ as sung on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod and printed in Fliegen mit fremden Federn, 35. Translation into English by the author.

There is also an argument to be made for a more abstract set of musical references to South America in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’. Indeed, in addition to his efforts at emulating South American instrumentation, Biermann clearly shared – and perhaps was even inspired by – a musical ‘language of dissent’Footnote ⁶² characteristic of certain anti-establishment branches of the Nueva Canción. As is highlighted earlier, this was not the language of the Nueva Canción repertoire celebrated in the GDR, which seems to have been largely limited to songs whose optimistic socialist lyrics and harmonious, upbeat accompaniment resonated with the party line. Rather, the lyrical statement of critical solidarity in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ is accompanied by a dissonant, highly intellectual musical style that bears resemblance to a Nueva Canción less familiar to East German ears: the Marxist anthems that came to represent Cuban-inspired militant groups such as the Uruguayan Tupamaros and the Argentine Montoneros, organizations which, ambivalent about institutions on both sides of the Cold War political spectrum, harnessed the threat of indigenous ‘savagery’ as a vehicle for liberation.

More than perhaps any other figure of the Nueva Canción, Uruguayan singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti incarnated the romanticism of the South American ‘good savage’ turned ‘good revolutionary’,Footnote ⁶³ an imaginary with powerful currency in the global counterculture and Third World movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Having witnessed the remarkable impact of his songs in mobilizing the Uruguayan student protests of the late 1960s,Footnote ⁶⁴ Viglietti turned his sights to challenging injustice in the entire South American continent, returning from the 1967 International Protest Song Conference in Havana, Cuba with a repertoire of songs celebrating violent anti-imperialist revolution.Footnote ⁶⁵ His music reached European audiences soon thereafter, with the singer-songwriter himself in hot pursuit: fleeing to Paris in the wake of an internationally publicized incarceration in Montevideo,Footnote ⁶⁶ Viglietti crisscrossed the Iron Curtain, touring Europe's major cultural capitals. By 1974, he had reached East Berlin, where he shared the stage with Inti-Illimani in the Festival of Political Song and, according to Biermann's memoires, rubbed shoulders with the ‘prohibited’ singer-songwriter at his Chauseestraße flat, teaching him the chords and words to ‘Hasta siempre’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Biermann would have been aware of the Uruguayan singer-songwriter long before this encounter: the international attention gleaned from his incarceration notwithstanding, recordings of Viglietti performances had been available to Europeans at least since Le Chant du Monde's release of Uruguay. Chansons pour mon Amérique in 1968,Footnote ⁶⁸ and his poems and scores had been published in the widely distributed 1967 protest song compilation Basta ya! Footnote ⁶⁹ as well as the Casa de las America's 1968 booklet Canción Protesta.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some had appeared in German translation in East German publications.Footnote ⁷¹

The lyrical parallels of Viglietti's poetry with Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ suggest similar political perspectives, if not direct influence. The common emphasis on the necessity of anti-establishment violence is particularly notable: ‘paper against bullets / cannot be effective / the unarmed song / cannot confront a gun’, writes Viglietti in his 1971 ‘Sólo digo compañeros’ (‘I Just Call Them Comrades’),Footnote ⁷² re-articulating the messages of earlier militant songs such as his 1967 ‘Canción para mi América’ (‘Song for My America’), which calls for the ‘doors to be broken down’ with ‘screams and guns’, and his 1967 ‘Canción del hombre nuevo’ (‘Song for the New Man’),Footnote ⁷³ which paints a vision of a society led by Che Guevara-like guerrillas.Footnote ⁷⁴ Similar lyrical parallels to Biermann's composition can be identified in the 1972 song ‘Por todo Chile’ (‘For All of Chile’), in which Viglietti describes Chile as a nation in which ‘hundreds of thousands’ of armed farmers, miners, and students reclaim the ‘entire country’ by force, taking back the Andean copper mines from the grip of global imperialism.

Similarities between the sonic aesthetics of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ and those of Viglietti's oeuvre also reflect a shared musical ‘language of dissent’ – perhaps even an effort on Biermann's part to reconstitute a specifically South American ‘revolutionary’ identity. This is not just a question of instrumentation. Granted, Biermann's ‘lone rebel’ stage persona was very much congruent with Viglietti's, and his use of a nylon-stringed guitar (as opposed to a steel-string) could be understood as a reference to ‘Iberia’ or ‘Ibero-America’. That said, more convincing similarities can be found in the musical approaches of the two singer-songwriters, both of whom gravitate to folk-like genres less as vehicles for popular transmission than as materials for deconstruction.Footnote ⁷⁵ Take, for example, Viglietti's ‘Canción del hombre nuevo’, a ‘chacarera’ (or something similar) which sonically ‘makes’ the ‘new man’ from the clay of a minor second,Footnote ⁷⁶ launching into a recognizable folkloric groove only when describing the (socialist) creation's militant character (Example 5). Or ‘Cruz de luz’, a eulogy for the revolutionary priest Camilo Torres that approximates a traditional ‘zamba’ dance form, but defies both choreography and collective song, weaving a text-centric musical fabric studded with harmonic dissonances and cadential shifts from minor to major (Example 6).Footnote ⁷⁷ A similar harmonic adventurousness is found in the early Nueva Trova,Footnote ⁷⁸ which could also be construed as an effort at finding a new musical language for the ‘new man’. Formally and timbrally, it bears resemblance to the work of Nueva Canción father-figure Atahualpa Yupanqui, whose ‘cannibalization’ of popular genres I have discussed at some length elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁹

Example 5

Viglietti moulds the new man from the ‘clay’ of a minor second in the opening bars of the guitar part to ‘Canción del hombre nuevo’. The interval expands gradually over the course of the first line of text (‘We will do it, you and I / we will do it / we will take the clay / for the new man’), culminating in the perfect fifth of an A minor chord at ‘new man’. Transcription by the author from Canciones para el hombre nuevo (1968).

Example 6

Excerpt from Viglietti's ‘Cruz de luz’ evidencing harmonic dissonances and a cadential shift from minor to major. Note that this shift occurs on the word ‘revolution’. Transcription by the author from Canciones para el hombre nuevo (1968).

There is an argument to be made that, more than simply sharing a ‘language of dissent’, the similarities in Viglietti and Biermann's oeuvre were in fact the result of direct influence, perhaps even emulation. Indeed, a historical contextualization and musical comparison of Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ with Viglietti's 1967 ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico’ (‘Song of the Heroic Guerrilla’) suggests that Biermann may have intentionally referenced Viglietti's oeuvre. Written in Cuba in response to Che Guevara's death, ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico’ was published in score form alongside Carlos Puebla's ‘Hasta siempre’ in the Casa de las Américas’ 1968 Canción Protesta booklet,Footnote ⁸⁰ a coupling that may very well have inspired Biermann's pairing of ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ with Puebla's song on his 1973 ‘Chile’ single. The lyrical and musical congruencies between the two songs reinforce this thesis. First, there is the emphasis of Viglietti's lyric on the necessity of revolutionary violence and the martyrdom of a Third World insurgent, a theme that is quite similar to that of Biermann's song (Figure 3). Second, there are pronounced musical parallels. Like Viglietti's Che Guevara anthem, the vocal line of Biermann's ballad is in a sombre, minor-mode 6/8.Footnote ⁸¹ The opening melody, a long-held, almost liturgical, chant characterized by the leap of a perfect fifth, is surprisingly similar to Viglietti's. So are the tonic minor ninth chord of Biermann's guitar introduction and some of his percussive techniques (Example 7).

Figure 3

Lyrics to Daniel Viglietti's ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico' as performed on track 3 of the 1971 album Canti al Che. 'Know this' is replaced with ‘listen closely' in the lyric printed in Canción Protesta (1968). Translation into English by the author.

Example 7

Similar phrases in Daniel Viglietti's ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico’ as included on the 1971 album Canti al Che (a and b) and Wolf Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as recorded on the 1976 album Es gibt ein Leben vor dem Tod (c). Compare (a) with the guitar introduction in Example 1. Compare (b) and (c). Note that the key of Viglietti's song is closer to E♭ minor in the digital copy of Canti al Che procured for me by the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. Despite the fingerings on Viglietti's 1968 sheet music, which suggest standard guitar tuning, the resonance of the guitar on this recording indicates that Viglietti likely performed ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico’ in open D, possibly with a capo on the first or second fret. Transcriptions by the author with reference to Viglietti's score in Canción Protesta, 8–12.

Whether or not Biermann intended to emulate Viglietti in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’, he was clearly inspired by the Uruguayan musician and his work, revelling in his open contempt of authority and adapting several of his songs following their initial meeting in 1974.Footnote ⁸² Viglietti's recollections of his first trip to East Berlin, in which Biermann claims he snubbed the Oktoberklub ‘castrati’ in favour of a visit to his Chausseestraße flat,Footnote ⁸³ reflect the ambivalence of ‘revolutionary’ South American identity to East German life, a liminality that exercised a powerful symbolic attraction to Biermann and others like him. Indeed, as Viglietti recounted to Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti (at a comfortable temporal remove), East German authorities were deeply suspicious of his ‘Guevarism’ during his appearance at the 1974 Festival of Political Song, censoring him for propounding a radical politics that they did not feel had a place in the world of ‘real existing socialism’. ‘I had been invited to the (German) Democratic Republic to sing at the Red Songs festival’ related Viglietti,

As this vignette suggests, Viglietti's ‘revolutionary’ music simultaneously embodied a Third World liberation movement endorsed by the GDR and an alternative to ‘real existing socialism’ that threatened the established Soviet Bloc socialist order. In referencing – and perhaps even emulating – a Viglietti-like musical style, Biermann can be heard to have harnessed and highlighted the ambivalent meanings of South American ‘revolution’ to the East German world, at once re-articulating and critiquing the politics of the GDR.

Wolf Biermann's South America: colonial gesture, provincialized Europe

Returning to the riddle that begins this article, it seems clearer why a song that West German listeners heard as a call to international socialist solidarity was simultaneously understood as an act of treason by the East German socialist state. It was, in fact, both. Indeed, the reception of songs such as Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ reflected Cold War schisms not just between East and West, but also between factions within the communist world,Footnote ⁸⁵ each with very different perceptions of socialist revolution and, accordingly, very different types of ‘revolutionary’ music. At a historical remove, Biermann's resistance to East German institutions in songs such as ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ is difficult to hear. But in contesting the success of ‘real existing socialism’ and, equally importantly, fomenting an ethos of rebellion against the East German state, such songs were deeply threatening to an already unstable – or at very least terribly insecure – governing class. Ultimately, this class proved unable to address Biermann's critique: the expatriation of this singer-songwriter opened a wound in the cultural fabric of the GDR from which it never fully recovered and which, it could be argued, contributed to its collapse.Footnote ⁸⁶ The tragedy for both sides was that neither side won. Biermann and other members of the East German ‘inner-communist opposition’ were ostracized by the East German state; the state itself ultimately ceased to function, precisely the disaster that the ‘opposition’ had been hoping to avoid.

If the ambivalent politicization of South America in Biermann's ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ was problematic for GDR institutions, Biermann's relationship with the continent is at least as difficult to swallow from the perspective of much contemporary scholarship. Indeed, while Biermann's embrace of ‘Chilean’ subjectivity may have been an effective means of questioning one form of political and ideological violence, it can all-too-easily be heard to simultaneously re-inscribe another, re-enacting the European colonial effacement of the South American experience. Such concerns with respect to the German idealization of and identification with Third World subjects have been a staple of recent scholarship in cultural studies. In her work on musical expressions of solidarity in the GDR, for example, musicologist Elaine Kelly has described the East German relationship to the Third World as ‘autopoetic’, a kind of self-referential monologue.Footnote ⁸⁷ Similar arguments have been made across the scholarly spectrum.Footnote ⁸⁸ Quinn Slobodian's commentary on West German ‘corpse polemics’ is particularly condemning. In an effort to mobilize political action, details Slobodian, 1960s-era West German radicals disseminated photographs of suffering Third World bodies, self-identifying with oppressed Others in order to legitimize German voices.Footnote ⁸⁹

Such critiques could certainly be levelled at Biermann's treatment of South America in ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’. Not only is Biermann's commentary on Allende's Popular Unity Party principally an engagement with East German politics, its references to the ‘Chilean’ experience are decidedly abstract: the use of the short film at the heart of the allegory would seem to indicate a confusion of the 1973 Tanquetazo with the coup that toppled the Allende administration later that year;Footnote ⁹⁰ the protagonist of the lyric, Leonardo Henrichsen, was an Argentine-Swede, not a Chilean; one of the song's likely musical references, ‘Canción del guerrillero heroico’, is a work about an Argentine-Cuban revolutionary by an Uruguayan singer-songwriter. Indeed, a particularly harsh reading of Biermann's song could accuse him of latching on to the suffering of South American subjects for his own personal gain, using Henrichsen's ‘corpse’ and a Viglietti-like ‘revolutionary’ style as vehicles for his own self-aggrandizement as a political martyr of the East German state.

That said, such readings may be unnecessarily severe. The intentionally border-blurring vagaries of internationalist discourse notwithstanding, Biermann would not be the first singer-songwriter to have communicated via opaque political allegory, a tactic rendered expedient by Cold War-era censorship. Moreover, the imprecision in this musician's representation of the Chilean experience does not necessarily indicate a lack of engagement with or inspiration in South American politics. As literary scholars Jennifer Hosek and Jamie Trnka argue, (East) German writing about South America was both an expression of First World desires and an attempt to learn from the Third World: unable to embrace their own national past, post-war Germans looked to the non-European world for inspiration. Recognition of the cultural and political provincialization of the post-war Germany in which Biermann came of age shines a more complex light on his acts of ventriloquism, should they be heard this way. As partial and inaccurate as this singer-songwriter's understanding of Chile may have been, he and his East German contemporaries were not necessarily intending to shape it into a European mould. Quite to the contrary, they (however naively) understood Allende's experiment in democratic socialism – and the Nueva Canción experiments in political music – as alternative models for German society. Seen in this way, Biermann's engagement with South America can be understood not only as a colonizing gesture, but also as an effort at recognition – and even emulation.Footnote ⁹¹

Finally, despite the overtly political role that Biermann and his music played in twentieth-century German life, it is worth remembering that this singer-songwriter's work bears at least as much in common with popular song as it does ‘critical solidarity’. In keeping with his outspoken persona, the political has generally been the outward-facing layer of Biermann's self-representation. Following the collapse of the East German state, the singer-songwriter has been fond of portraying himself as a kind of East German Daedalus,Footnote ⁹² an ingenious escape artist who managed to fly away on artificial wings, living to witness the world after the plunge of the GDR into the sea of history. In the foreword to his 2011 book of translations and adaptations Fliegen mit fremden Federn (Flying with Foreign Feathers), however, the escape artist adds an additional dimension to his metaphor, suggesting that the feathers of his ‘flying contraption’ were songs glued together from across time and around the world (sections of the book are devoted to everything from Korean folk music to Shakespeare sonnets). A similar metaphor could be applied to the creative processes of other political and politicized singer-songwriters – Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan come immediately to mind. But the impulse to repurpose is also the province of the decidedly apolitical, the story of twentieth-century popular music and human creation in general. Indeed, in addition to the critical assessment above, it seems worth hearing ‘Chile – Ballade vom Kameramann’ as the product of creative – not just ‘socialist’ – ambition, a work pulled together from a selection of ‘feathers’ Biermann has used in a lifelong quest for artistic flight.