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Heinrich George | Helmut Kind | Karl Heinrich | Ewald Ernst | Kurt Müller | Alfred Weiland | Arno Wend | Helmut Brandt | Georg Dertinger | Max Fechner | Karl Wilhelm Fricke | Wolfgang Harich | Walter Janka | Walter Linse | Paul Merker | Sigrid Paul | Rudolf Bahro | Heinz Brandt | Jürgen Fuchs | Gerulf Pannach | Michael Sallmann | Hans-Joachim Helwig-Wilson | Bärbel Bohley | Freya Klier | Stephan Krawczyk | Vera Lengsfeld | Ulrike Poppe
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 The musician and songwriter Gerulf Pannach was one of the famous East German artists imprisoned after the expatriation of songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976. Born in 1948 in Arnsdorf near Dresden, he began studying law. After he discontinued his studies, he worked for the so-called singing movement and various music groups. As the keyboardist in the GDR’s extremely popular music group "Klaus Renft Combo," he wrote many SED critical lyrics from the early 1970s. In 1975, the group was banned from performing, which was personally endorsed the State and Party chief of East Germany, Erich Honecker. With the “Renft”-musicians Christian Kunert and the Thomas Schoppe and lyricist Jürgen Fuchs, Pannach secretly continued to write songs. To intimidate the protest movement against Biermann's expatriation, they were arrested by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) in November 1976. After eight months of detention in the prison in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen they were shunned to West Germany. There Pannach and Kunert played as a duo and recorded five albums. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 Pannach performed with the newly formed Renft combo. As a lyricist, he also worked for the Puhdys and Veronica Fischer. Pannach died from kidney cancer in Berlin in 1998. Due to his early death, the assumption was expressed that the Stasi exposed prominent dissidents in the GDR, negligently or intentionally, to radioactive rays. |
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