There may have been more famous actresses, more successful singers in this country - but there was no other who has become so beautiful and coherent even in literature, in music: In Wolf Biermann's "Don't see - don't hear - don't shrine", which is printed in volumes of poetry and which he also set to music and sang atmospherically on what is probably his best record, "Don't wait for better times", on the one hand it's about how bad the world is and how cowardly people are.

And on the other hand, that one person can save the singer.

It is Eva-Marie whose name each of the five stanzas boils down to.

And to show that it wasn't just the rhyme, which is why the end of the first verse was about "the pale, pear-soft knees of Eva-Marie", you could also see these knees on the cover of the record.

Claudius Seidl

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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However, this also made the power and interpretation relationships between Eva-Maria Hagen and her partner at the time, Biermann, visible.

It was just the knees that you saw, in the middle, but in the background.

And in the foreground, self-confident and defiant, Biermann sat at the home organ and demonstrated his authorship.

The attention of the Stasi

That was in 1973, three years before Biermann's expatriation, against which Eva-Maria Hagen protested, which is why she had to leave the GDR, in which she had been rebellious and bohemian on the one hand.

On the other hand, she was a star of television and popular cinema, dyed her hair blond and didn't mind dancing and singing her way through entertainment films as a blonde and cheeky Prussian bombshell.

She made her debut as an actress at the Berliner Ensemble in Erwin Strittmatter's “Katzgraben”.

When the more mature Eva-Maria Hagen sang more serious songs and accompanied herself on the guitar, one naturally heard that, musically and poetically, she drew from the same sources as Wolf Biermann - and now that she has died, one becomes aware aware that she should have been asked long ago what this Biermann owed her.

Except for the sight of her knees.

And the health insurance contributions that she paid when Biermann had hardly any income because of the ban on performing.

Which then also got her, the TV star, the attention of the State Security.

Eva-Maria Hagen, born in East Brandenburg in 1934, grew up in Perleberg, trained in East Berlin. Even after she was expatriated and moved to the West, she worked more for television than for the cinema, and in contrast to her exalted daughter Nina and her granddaughter Cosma Shiva she usually had a cooler, more matter-of-fact presence, but no less impressive.

And now is probably the best time to read the book "Liaison amoureuse", with all the letters and poems that Eva-Maria Hagen and the poet Peter Hacks wrote to each other when they were, briefly but intensely, a couple.

Eva-Maria Hagen died on August 16th.

She was 87 years old.