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Udo Lindenberg and Erich Honecker
Shawm and guitar
In 1983 Udo Lindenberg, a west German rock musician, sang his song
'Sonderzug nach Pankow' to the melody of Louis Armstrong's 'Chatanooga
Choo Choo'. Lindenberg had many fans in the GDR and wanted very much to perform
there. But the wall hindered him to do so.
Because of that in 1987 he sent a leather jacket to the
Staatsratsvorsitzenden of the GDR and Generalsekretär of the SED
Erich Honecker and received a personal thanks letter, that ended with
the words: "By the way, because you sometimes refer to my musical
past, I send to you a shawm. Have fun with practising it!" During the
Nazi-dictatorship Honecker had played a shawm when being a young
resistance fighter with the Roter Frontkämpferbund.
In the beginning of September of that year Honecker was on a state visit
in the western part of Germany and he met
Lindenberg in the town of Wuppertal. At this occasion Lindenberg presented an
electrical guitar with the inscription 'guitars instead of guns' to Honecker.
More information at
andreadoria.
There you can read too the correspondence between Udo Lindenberg and
Erich Honecker and hear some interesting sound-files.
