If the Honecker regime thought that by expelling Biermann it would silence all questioning of its policies, it was badly mistaken. Immediately after Biermann’s expulsion a number of East German writers took the unprecedented step of sending an open letter of protest to the government, claiming that the singer “had never, including in Cologne, left any doubt over which German state he supported.” Biermann might be “an uncomfortable poet,” the protesters added, but his barbs were just what the GDR needed: “Our socialist state, in line with the words of Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, should criticize itself constantly and must, in contrast to anachronistic forms of society, be able to bear discomfort calmly and in a spirit of reflection.” The GDR authorities were indignant over being lectured to in this fashion by mere writers. Konrad Naumann, leader of the Berlin SED youth organization, fumed: “It is interesting to observe who is now creeping out of their rat holes. But the working class has only to stamp down on these vermin to send them scurrying back to their hiding places. We’ve seen them in the open, and we won’t forget their mugs. Those who don’t keep their heads down will be crushed.”
Yet, tough as it talked, the Honecker regime could not jail or expel all its intellectual dissenters, since that would have left East Berlin without any credible culture. Therefore—shades of Nazi policy a generation before—the authorities sought to split the ranks of the dissenters, treating some (like Christa Wolf and Heiner Müller) with relative leniency, proceeding harshly with others in order to set an example. Jurek Becker and Sarah Kirsch were kicked out of the party. Eight prominent figures, including writers Joachim Schädlich and Rolf Schneider, were expelled from the country altogether.
This tactic indeed divided East Berlin’s literary community, but it also stimulated a wave of applications from literary artists and other intellectuals to emigrate to the West. Believing that they would cause less harm abroad than at home, the regime allowed many of them to go. Among the émigrés were the writers Reiner Kunze, Jürgen Fuchs, and Sarah Kirsch, the dissident economist Rudolf Bahro, the actors Manfred Krug, Angelica Domröse, and Eva-Maria Hagen, and the producer Götz Friedrich.
Like its literary community, East Berlin’s theatrical world suffered severely from ham-handed governmental tutelage. Brecht himself had grown increasingly frustrated with the cultural bureaucrats’ interference with the Berliner Ensemble, which functioned as East Germany’s unofficial state theater. In the wake of the dramatist’s death in 1956 his company fell under the control of his widow, Helene Weigel, and a group of executors appointed by the Ministry of Culture; soon it degenerated into a theatrical mausoleum, mounting mummified productions of Brechtian dramas. (One cannot help but be reminded here of the Bayreuth Festival under Wagner’s widow, Cosima.) The Berliner Ensemble performed a few seminal dramas by contemporary writers other than Brecht, but many works critical of the GDR, including some by Heiner Müller, premiered in the West. Nothing more clearly illustrated the hollowness of Honecker’s “no taboos” promise than the fact that East Germany’s best dramatists were more likely to get their works performed in West Germany than at home.
In an effort to exploit proven cultural traditions and attract tourist revenue, Honecker’s government made an effort to revive Berlin’s legendary cabaret scene. Government-sponsored cabaret, however, had always been something of a contradiction in terms, as the Nazis had amply proven. The Distel Cabaret, founded in 1953 on orders of the SED, was allowed under Honecker to take a few satirical jabs at the party leadership, but no trenchant criticism was permitted. Attempts to reproduce the famed chorus line productions of the Weimar period proved even more of a farce. The East German dancers who waved their feathered boas at junketing East-bloc visitors were more reminiscent of their Nazi-era predecessors than of the Tingel-Tangel girls of the 1920s.
East Berlin’s film industry had enjoyed a brief bloom in the early 1970s when filmmakers like Heiner Carow experimented with satires aimed at the GDR’s ossified bureaucracy. His Die Legende von Paul und Paula (1973) asserted the right of ordinary citizens to a enjoy free and happy romance amidst the prudish restraints of East German society. But the huge popularity of his films made him suspect, and in the wake of the Biermann affair he was warned to proceed more cautiously. Thereafter, he and his colleagues tended to restrict themselves to safer fare, such as adaptations of the German classics.
Painters and art dealers took advantage of Honecker’s apparent relaxation of cultural restrictions in 1971 to open new galleries and to create a regional art market. In 1976 an art show entitled “Are Communists Allowed to Dream?” took place in the newly opened Palace of the Republic. The paintings represented in the exhibition, all preapproved by the Ministry of Culture, suggested that the answer to the title question was a qualified “yes,” and the surprisingly diverse collection gave evidence of a lively art scene, as lively, perhaps, as that in the West.
Honecker’s regime, as noted above, rebuilt Schinkel’s Schauspielhaus as a concert hall in hopes of putting East Berlin on the map as a world-class center of classical music. However, the orchestra that regularly performed there, the Berliner Symphonie, which had been founded in 1954, never achieved the international status of the older Berliner Philharmonic, headquartered in West Berlin. East Berlin’s Staatsoper on Unter den Linden did enjoy an international reputation, but it could not fully recover from the loss of so many of its best performers following the building of the Berlin Wall.
While classical music was heavily subsidized by the East German government from the beginning, jazz and rock were repressed in the early years of the GDR as an unwholesome influence from the degenerate West. Like Hitler and Goebbels before him, Ulbricht regarded the West’s popular music as a cultural Trojan horse that was best kept outside the walls. It proved impossible, however, to prevent East German citizens from listening to such music on West German radio, or from trying to emulate it at home.
Rock in particular caught on with the younger generation, which, even more than in the West, saw it as a protest against the stuffy culture of their elders. During the Ulbricht era aspiring East Berlin rockers were obliged to play at out-of-the-way venues in the rural hinterland, such as the legendary Rübezahl Gasthaus on the Müggelsee, but their concerts nonetheless attracted large and enthusiastic crowds. Having watched his predecessor fail to beat the rock invasion, Honecker decided to join it. His regime attempted to create an official rock ’n’ roll culture that could more easily be controlled. The Ministry of Culture gave its blessing to a number of bands—among them the Puhdys, Panta Rhei, the Klaus-Renft-Combo, and Elektra—which were allowed to perform inside the city limits so long as they followed certain guidelines. For example, in order that their music contribute to proper “socialist personality development,” the bands were forbidden from singing in English or wearing their hair long unless it was covered in a net. For the officially sanctioned “Action Rhythm” concert at the Friedrichstadtpalast in 1972, participating groups were required to submit all lyrics for preapproval.