Ernst Busch was hyped as an icon of the anti-fascist class struggle – by the GDR and perhaps a little by himself. He rose to fame as a film and theatre star in the 1920s and never made a secret of his leftist views. His history as a morale-boosting singer for the Communist International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War, his history of persecution under the Nazi regime made him a myth with an immaculate revolutionary pedigree. The portrait dedicated to him by the multi-talented director-poet Peter Voigt reveals the history of Busch’s downfall, for he also regularly went to battle against the SED party bureaucracy. Flattery, disparagement, withdrawn and re-issued party membership books … Sometimes the GDR was maddening.