A young girl, Bettina Wegner, produced and handed out leaflets against the invasion of Czechoslovakia on the streets of Berlin in August 1968. She received a year and seven months in prison. She was expelled from drama school. After prison she was sent for re-education purposes to the production. So this stupid, inhumane, disgusting system broke the fragile girl with a guitar. But it didn't break her.
Her songs - she wrote poems and sang them with her guitar - were distributed on reels on home tape recorders. Performances in public places were forbidden to her. All the years of the GDR she was under surveillance, spies followed her, her telephone was listened to, it was written in her file that she was a "hostile-negative element". Every day she was threatened with a new arrest, a new imprisonment. She didn't change: her songs were always strong and direct. She pissed them off, not them: in 1983, the Stasi, not knowing how to put her down, offered her a choice: she leaves or they put her in jail. She left.
The vague faces of the dissidents and true heroes of that epoch, almost forgotten in the hustle and bustle of modernity, float through our airwaves today. Anatoly Marchenko in Chistopolski prison, Vaclav Havel, banished from everything but always cheerful, Zbigniew Bujak, who went into hiding the day martial law was imposed in Poland to head the "Fighting Solidarity" - and Bettina Wegner with a straight back and straight soul among them.
She wrote this song a few years ago. The song is called "As It Will Be." Listen to her voice, even if you don't know German, you can still feel that strength and straightness, that energy and passion, that will and courage that is in Bettina Wegner. And if you know German, you'll understand the sharp clarity with which she can speak. This song is about approaching old age. About loneliness. About pensions. About suddenly shrinking wallets. About life at the end.
(Translated from Russian)
Listen to Bettina Wegner on Pirate Radio Franceska:
https://franceska.su/component/k2/item/1331-devochka-s-#
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