Abstract

This article examines the interplay of renegade poetics and conversion semantics in Wolf Biermann’s autobiography Warte nicht auf bessre Zeiten (2016). The autobiographical first-person narrator places himself in a line with famous renegades who legitimize his own renegade status. In the process, the concept of the renegade undergoes a rhetorical intensification into a paradox through attributive extension, modeling the courage and truthfulness of the autobiographical self. Staged orality and a colloquial tone assert the authenticity of the self. The liminal figure of the transition from belief in communism and its realization in the GDR to identification with the parliamentary democracy of the Federal Republic is reflected with close reference to the author’s own artistic-literary work. Intertextual references such as the adoption of Heinrich Heine’s poem title »Enfant perdu« for one of his own poems on the flight of Robert Havemann’s son from the Republic make the change of sides a literary motif.