During the Bundestag's commemoration of 25th the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall there has was unusual appearance: At the invitation of the President of the Bundestag, Norbert Lammert, songwriter Wolf Biermann, who was expatriated from the GDR in 1976, had come to the commemoration. His appearance had caused a stir beforehand.
Biermann attacked the Left Party head-on. "It is the wretched remnants of what has fortunately been overcome," he said in the Reichstag, to which he was actually invited to sing. With reference to his designation as "dragonslayer" the songwriter said, he could "not subdue the remains of dragonspawn, they are already subdued."
Lammert said to Biermann's unusual appearance with a reference to the parliamentary law: "As soon as you run for the Bundestag and are selected, you can also talk. Now you are here to sing." Biermann replied: "I never gave up free speech in the GDR, and I am certainly not going to do it here." Addressing the Left party he said: "You are doomed to endure this, and I do not begrudge you."
In regard to an interjection by the Left faction, they had been elected, Biermann said, an election is "no judgment of God". The Left Party is in actual fact "reactionary". Following the slugfest Biermann sang his song "Ermutigung" (encouragement), which was popular with the opposition in the former GDR. Biermann himself called it "a piece of soul's bread", especially for the inmates of the GDR prisons.
At the beginning of the celebration Lammert had declared, without the civil rights movement, without the popular movements resulting therefrom, and without the peaceful mass demonstrations there had been no November 9, 1989. "A miracle, however, the fall of the wall was not, but the result of a - not only in the history of Germany - unprecedented peaceful revolution."
Video of the turmoil:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUheTVZTPNI
