BERLIN (12. May, 2025) — Earlier this month, the German Film Academy made its annual film awards — nick-named ‘Lolas’ — honoring a large group of talented people, all working in the German film industry.* It was a surprisingly beautiful, tasteful & glitzy ceremony, broadcast and recorded by RTL. (Below, you can find all my linked SOURCES.)
For me, the highlight of the ceremony was when veteran German singer/songwriter Wolf Biermann came to the stage and performed his song “Ermutigung.” I was so moved by the performance — and the audience’s response to it — that I had to interpret Biermann’s song, calling it “Take Heart.” [You can download my “Take Heart” lyrics & chords (pdf) from my website. You can also download the sound file (mp3) there. My rendition of the song comes with my apologies to Herr Biermann, who’s a much better guitarist than I am….]
Biermann was introduced as a man who has ‘symbolized the resistance against Evil (Wiederstand gegen Terror)’.
One could write so much about Wolf Biermann, who turns 90 next year. He’s a longtime writer of songs that challenge the status-quo — on both sides of the Cold War barrier, East and West. He was exiled by his own East German government in 1976. That fall, while Biermann was giving a concert in Cologne, the GDR Politburo announced that his citizenship was being revoked. Today, at the 2025 film-awards ceremony, the German folksinger is introduced as a man who “has symbolized the resistance against Evil (Wiederstand gegen Terror).”
For his part, Biermann tells audiences that he wrote “Ermutigung” (“Take Heart”) when he was a young man, visiting one of his inspirations, a brave, outspoken East German poet. Here was a man, Biermann reminds us, who openly confronted the traumas of the Second World War alongside the daily oppression of life in the Stalinist-occupied East. (Biermann’s own father had fought fascism as a Jewish member of the Communist Party and was killed in Auschwitz. While he and his mother went into hiding and survived, some thirty other members of the singer’s family were killed by the Nazis. “As the child of communists and Jews,” the 89-year-old Biermann tells his audiences, “I’ve become surprisingly old.“
Biermann wrote the song to tell his friend, the aging poet, to keep heart — to stay strong in the face of clear state oppression. We all know fear (Angst), as Biermann says in his intro. “But if I let Angst rule over me, then I’m lost….” And so are we.
I am not half the musician that Wolf Biermann is. But I feel it’s important to do a translation an interpretation of his Ermutigung for more listeners today — and, especially, for others who want to sing it.
I hope you like this man’s work — and take heart from it.
As ever,
Topper Sherwood
* I wrote about one of this year’s Lola-winning films, “Eure, Hilde,” here.
SOURCES:
RTL Recorded broadcast of entire 2025 “Lola” awards. NOTE: RTL only provides this link for 40 weeks.
Wolf Biermann is introduced at: 1:51.49 ; Biermann starts the song at 2:01:50. (You can also find his 1976 performance of the song on YouTube.)
Biermann’s website: https://www.wolf-biermann.de
You can download original German text and chords for “Ermutigung” here.
Here, you can download the chords and my English lyrics of “Ermutigung” (“Take Heart”).
Here, you can download a sound file (mp3) of my recorded interpretation, “Take Heart.”
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