On 16 November 1976, during a session of the Politburo of the SED Central Committee, Erich Honecker announced that the poet and singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann was being stripped of his citizenship. The corresponding protocol notes this under item 4 and in that context mentions a directive which confirms that a respective press release will take place. In an annex to the protocol, the measure is explained by referring to GDR citizenship law, according to which “citizens can be deprived of their GDR citizenship due to gross violations of their civic duties.” The specific cause in this case was Biermann's appearance at a concert in West Germany a few days before where his oppositional songs met with a huge media response. In the GDR the artist had been banned from performing in public since 1965.

Today, among many contemporary historians, Wolf Biermann's expatriation is considered to have been a defining watershed in the history of the East German protest movement. On hindsight, his banishment is often judged to have been “the beginning of the end of the GDR”, as the writer Jurek Becker has put it. The protests by many artists and writers had a public impact and heralded in a new phase in the way people thought about the living circumstances under “real socialism”. While before that, despite criticism of the details, the attitude of many artists and intellectuals was mainly one of well-meaning solidarity, after 1976 this transformed increasingly into more disillusioned head-on opposition. After Biermann, many well-known GDR-artists left their country heading for the West.