The voice is still full, as is the graying mustache.

His fingers slide easily over the neck and strings of the guitar.

Freely quoted rhymes and anecdotes rush out of him, almost as accurately as ever.

Christian Schubert

Economic correspondent for Italy and Greece.

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For half a decade, Wolf Biermann has been officially “an old man”, as he likes to flirt – now 85 years old.

And adds that Immanuel Kant was promoted to this rank at the age of fifty.

History follows its demographic course.

But the songwriter, singer and poet, who never shied away from semi-ironic comparisons with the greats, is far from tired of old age.

This is one of the messages he left behind during a several-day visit to Rome.

Only the fool is not afraid

However, something oppressive accompanied him during his stations in Rome at the invitation of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, namely in the Goethe Institute and in the Embassy of the Federal Republic and the German Embassy at the Holy See.

The lightness is gone.

This is not to be blamed on him, but on the passage of time.

"For the first time in my life I'm not afraid, but fear has me," he says.

When it comes to fear, it always depends on who has whom.

As Heinrich Heine wrote, only a fool is not afraid because he does not know what is in store for him.

Biermann, the fearless self-proclaimed "dragon slayer" who once took on the entire GDR regime, now feels a loss of control and an overwhelming sense of world events.

In doing so, he became “at a loss”.

There is a real danger that Putin will "press the red button".

He calls the Russian ruler "the legitimate child of the marriage of Stalin and Hitler".

He imagines what Hitler would have done in the last days of the war.

"Would he have thrown the atomic bomb if von Weizsäcker had built it for him?

Of course he would have thrown her, one hundred percent.”

Some of Biermann's words are deeply saddening: "It's war!

Now the circle of my life is closing towards hell,” he wrote in the “Elegy in the 86th Year” just now.

The war child returns to the war as an old man.

"I'm still laughing, do my thing .

.

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and sing .

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me, the liveliest!

I don't like living anymore." In the crowded hall of the Goethe-Institut, he also says sentences like: "My opinion is worth nothing, because I'm an old man.

I've lived my life, I can die very well." But immediately afterwards he yells into the microphone: "Paff." Because the man wants to continue to wake up, to communicate.

It would be laughable if a political head who has survived and experienced two dictatorships and reunification could not give people anything to take with them.