The Dragon Slayer

A FABLE: The people of a mythical city-state, convinced that the outside world is full of dangerous dragons, believe that they have been spared only because of their protector, whom they lovingly call Dra-Dra. Because of constant brainwashing, the people refuse to admit that Dra-Dra is actually a dragon himself. Playing on their fears, Dra-Dra magnifies the outside peril and thrives on sycophantic praise. A psalm to Dra-Dra consists of the word ja (yes) intoned 36 times.

Enter the young hero Hans Folk. Though the people ridicule him, a small band of animals join his campaign to overthrow Dra-Dra. A dog tells how: "We'll call out 'Dragon, Dragon!'--a word that he cannot stand to hear." As Hans and his animal followers thus taunt Dra-Dra, the monster becomes so enraged that he soars into the clouds and dives onto his own castle, impaling himself on a turret. Dra-Dra's followers gather at a feast in an attempt to perpetuate the old order. Too late, they realize that the banquet is being held in the anus of the deceased dragon. "Must we die?" asks one. "You have already been dead a long time," Hans replies Then he instructs the animals to sew the dragon closed "so that all the lackeys who crept in will forever remain inside." As the animals bury the dragon, an iron curtain falls across the stage.

That apocalyptic allegory is the plot of Der Dra-Dra, the latest work of one of Communism's most controversial artists. Wolf Biermann, 34, a sad-faced East Berlin balladeer, is the spiritual heir of Bertolt Brecht, who spent his last years in the city. But while Brecht directed most of his barbs at the abuses of capitalism ("Don't rob a bank. Own one"), Biermann aims his satire at the political dictatorships of both left and right. Biermann's approach has hardly endeared him to Communist Party Boss Walter Ulbricht and East Germany''s other rulers. For more than five years, they have kept him in limbo. He is allowed to live in peace and runs something of an intellectual salon in his two-room flat. The unorthodox Marxist philosopher Robert Havemann visits regularly, and Folk Singer Joan Baez called on him in 1967. But Biermann is not permitted to publish his works, perform in public, or travel outside the German Democratic Republic. He is never mentioned in the East German press. "I am a nonexistent person," he told TIME Correspondent George Taber in East Berlin. "I have been silenced to death.' Then Biermann, whose hound-dog look is accented by baggy eyes and a drooping mustache, picked up his guitar. In his raspy baritone, he began to sing: "Don't wait for better times."

Parasite Power. Despite his Orwellian unperson status, Biermann continues to turn out songs and poems. He lampoons the Bilroelephanten (bureaucratic elephants), who quake in fear before his guitar, or pokes fun at the effects of the Wall on East Germans ("When I die, I'll become a guard and patrol the border between heaven and hell. Show your pass, please.") In Der Dra-Dra, he attacks what he describes as "parasitic power of all sorts"--which suggests Franco and Papadopoulos as well as Ulbricht and Brezhnev.

Biermann is the most popular living German poet, East or West. In the East, his works reach students who type copies and pass them on to others in chain-letter fashion, so that he is easily the country's best-read unpublished poet. Similarly, his songs are re-recorded again and again until the tapes become indistinct. His written works also find their way to West Germany, where two of his slim volumes--The Barbed-Wire Harp and With the Tongues of Marx and Engels*--have sold more than 100,000 copies. Der Dra-Dra, an eight-act musical that first surfaced in West Berlin, will premiere on April 20 (fittingly, Adolf Hitler's birthday) in Munich's famed Kammerspiel Theater.

The son of a Communist Hamburg dock worker who perished in a Nazi death camp, Biermann voluntarily left the comfort of West Germany in 1953 and went to East Germany. "This country was making a social revolution," he explains, "even if it had to do so at the bayonet point of the Red Army." At first, Biermann was tolerated by the Communist leaders because of his anti-U.S. and antiwar songs. He was given a job at the Berliner Ensemble, the theater directed by Brecht's widow, and earned a doctorate in philosophy at East Berlin's Humboldt University.

Prominent Guest. In 1961, Biermann got into trouble with officials by writing a play that defended the Berlin Wall as necessary to keep in the country's skilled workers. The Communist leaders rejected that sort of defense; the official rationale for the Wall is that it was built to keep spies and provocateurs out. When Biermann challenged the party's reasoning in song and jest, he fell more deeply into disfavor, until the East German Politburo in 1965 decided to muzzle him.

Biermann shares the hope with many other young Eastern Europeans that Communism can ultimately rid itself of stagnant bureaucracy and allow greater personal freedom. He still insists: "I have no interest in leaving here. This is the better of the two German states." But he is aware that East Germany's Communist leaders may lose patience with him. "I am treated like a prominent guest in a good hotel," he says. "I won't get the bill until the very last. The poor guest must pay at once for every little thing. But the prominent guest is not presented with the bill until the end."

*Since Engel means angel in German, the title is a play on St. Paul's statement in I Corinthians 13: 1: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal."

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