The songwriter Wolf Biermann in an interview.

Mr. Biermann, you will be 88 years old. What is the most important insight you have gained about people during this time?
WOLF BIERMANN: The beautiful word “human” has two opposite meanings in our language: the very best and the worst. If someone is cowardly, small-minded and selfish, you say: “Well, human!” Misbehavior is excused as human in the sense of “we are all just human!” At the same time, we demand “humane” living conditions – and by this we mean the highest humanistic goals such as respect for the dignity of the individual and freedom of expression.

What role does writing songs and lyrics play in this? Was it more important to analyze and send messages, or is this some kind of internal valve function?
BIERMAN: If I can write a strong poem or a beautiful song, I can easily withstand the poison and bile in the strife of the world. Then I have a functioning valve for the excess pressure in my heart.

An album with cover versions of your pieces with the programmatic title “Songs for Now” will be released on your birthday. How did this come about?
BIERMAN: It was my wife Pamela’s idea. She is a generation younger than me and was able to convince the music producer Johann Scheerer, who is twenty years younger than me, to initiate this cover album. The artists he put together for this chose their own song.

The Hamburg indie label Clouds Hill has secured the rights to your entire work – around 300 titles. Clouds Hill head chef Johann Scherer will ensure that the songs belong to a younger generation. In the new album, many of your pieces appear in a new look. How did you like the version?
BIERMAN: I am very surprised and positively surprised by what came to light. At the beginning I was rather skeptical and thought of a sarcastic verse by Heinrich Heine that said that he might have liked such newfangled songs if he had “different ears.” But now I know the sound of my younger colleagues and am happy about it the extremely different interpretations. And I rewrote Heine’s mocking quatrain. Heine laughed and agreed with my cheeky reinterpretation: Other times, other birds, / Singing my old songs / I like it because I’m growing / Finally different ears!

Can you still influence society today with songs?
BIERMAN: You’ve always been able to do that. But something like this only works if you don’t try too hard to achieve it. How a song works is often different than you thought and can also take unforeseen detours.

Looking back, what did your expatriation from the GDR mean for your own life?
BIERMAN: In November 1976, after eleven years of total ban in the GDR, I gave my first concert in the West in front of 8,000 people, in the huge Cologne sports hall. Three days later, Honecker & Co. deported me with political fanfare and trumpets. The mass protests in the East against this arbitrary act in the Nazi tradition of forced expatriation not only shocked the GDR dictatorship. My life as a banned poet was over. Why the guitar! I was the trained little dragon slayer with a resounding wooden sword. Suddenly I had to understand the freedoms of the foreign western world. I had to relearn the opportunities and pitfalls of democracy. At the time I was devastated, but today I know it was my great luck.

How do you fundamentally feel about current political developments? It is obvious that parts of the population are tired of democracy. Why is it so pronounced in the new federal states?
BIERMAN: After the World War, the Germans in the East paid dearly for our entire Heil-Hitler people: they fell into a second dictatorship for over forty years. They were suppressed, shaped and of course damaged by the communists. The allergy sufferers went along with it. Such political psychological genetic material is passed on to children. We all quickly automatically play God and shape our future children in our image. Yes, and such influences are passed down more permanently, both privately and politically, than if a dictatorship rules for twelve or 40 years.

Are we facing a renaissance of autocratic systems?
BIERMAN: At the moment the world looks like this in the “Tagesschau”. The war criminal Putin, his quisling Lukashenko, the fake eye doctor Assad in Syria, the fanatical Muslim Ayatollah Khamenei in Iran, the communist emperor in China Xi Jinping, the fat assassin Kim in Korea, the Castro caricature Maduro, the fundamentalist Taliban, the massacre -Machos in Africa, the lying theocrats and self-obsessed autocrats in the Middle East. When this interview is in the newspaper, readers will know what I don’t know: whether the fascist fake-fuzzy Trump won the US elections.

What would you protest against today if you were 20 again?
BIERMAN: Oh, it’s the ever new argument in the world. We all know the answer to your question – and we can quote Goethe. He put these very last words into the mouth of his old Doctor Faustus on his grave: “Only he deserves freedom like life / He who has to conquer it every day.” This maxim applies as long as we humans exist and always anew. It applies just as much to the twenty-year-old as it does to the old man Wolf Biermann.