What’s that for? Wolf Biermann’s diaries in the “soup pail”

Buried beneath a wooden shed in the peaceful little village of Brodowin in Brandenburg in the 1980s slumbered a treasure that many eyes in the GDR would like to have caught a glimpse of – above all the eyes of the Ministry for State Security. For what was hidden below ground were the most intimate memoirs of the perhaps loudest critic of the GDR state: the diaries of Wolf Biermann, buried in an old food container from the time of the German Wehrmacht. Dirk Schreiber, project assistant on the exhibition “Wolf Biermann. A Poet and Songwriter in Germany”, writes about one of the oddest objects in the exhibition.