Wolf Biermann: Song for my Comrades

For all my comrades now I sing
the song of revolution betrayed
for my betrayed comrades I sing
and sing for my comrades the betrayers
The great song of betrayal I sing
and the greater song of revolution
And my guitar groans with shame
and my guitar whoops with joy
and my unbelieving lips pray devoutly
to MAN, the god of all my believing

I sing for my comrade Dagobert Biermann
who became a wisp of smoke from the chimneys
who rose up stinking from Auschwitz
into the changeable skies of this earth
and whose ashes are scattered for ever
over all the oceans and among all the peoples
and who is murdered anew each day
and who rises again each day in the fight
and who has risen up with his comrades
in my smoky song

And I sing for Eldridge Cleaver
comrade in the concrete jungle of San Francisco
as in black and white he shows the blacks
that the enemy is not black or white but
black and white, that's what I sing for you
when Eldridge plants his monumental nigger arse
above Washington in the White House
And how the BLACK PANTHERS broke out of the ring,
out of the bourgeois circus, panic in the crowd
I sing of the pigs, how they flee from their boxes

And an envoi for Comrade Dubcek
who has gone down the Turkish drain
and who rather should have gone
the straight way under the axe
or the crooked way under the tanks
or should have swum in his people
like the famous fish of Comrade Mao
And that's why I sing of the healthy uppishness
of those cast down in the face of all reaction
in the face of the counter-revolution of August 21st.

And I cry and cry out the prose of Vietnam
I sing of hypocrisy, of exotic compassion
of political bombast about freedom and peace
I sing of the thin beard of Uncle Ho
who was spared from surviving this war
which he'd won long ago, this war
that rages on in the cell of Muhammad Ali
and that's mocked every day in our collection racket
in our official decrees of solidarity
in our indulgences trade in revolutionary sins

And I still sing of my love too
for my night-nightly virgin
for my holy girl comrade
who leads me into battle and saves me
by the higher justice of her smile
who always until now has gently
kissed from my brow every wound that I gave her
Yes, I sing of the class war of the sexes
liberation from the patriarchal clinch
from the bodily possession of our bodies

And I sing of all my confusion
and of all the bitterness between battles
and I do not keep silent about my silence
—oh, in nights full of words how often
I kept silent about my Jewish fear which I claim
to have—and about which I fear
that one day it will have me, this fear—
And I sing out loud into the dark human forest
and beat out the rhythm with my bones
on the singing belly of my guitar

I sing of peace in the midst of war
But I sing too of war in this
three times accursed and murderous peace
that's a piece of the peace of graveyards
that's a peace behind barbed wire
that's a peace under a truncheon
And that's why I sing of revolutionary war
for my three times betrayed comrades
and even for my comrades the betrayers:
In unbroken humility I sing of REVOLT