The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War

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I paid our bill. Outside the cafe, before we waved our goodbyes, Polinske said something that I couldn’t quite make sense of at the time: “The question mark at the end of a poem is worth a hundred times more than a full stop. I know that now, after thinking about it for a long time. But I didn’t know that then.” It sounds interesting but I found the book quite dry. I'm not sure if part of this was because of the language of the time being discussed, the language of the state. There's also a lot of poetry dissection and analysis - I appreciate you can't get away from this when the central topic is the use of poetry as a weapon but I didn't find it the easiest read. I often found myself having to re-read sections multiple times to understand what was being said. Also, the narrative jumps around in time quite a lot which made it disjointed for me, sometimes we're with Oltermann's own investigations and his attempts to get interviews with people. Other times, we're in the timelines of those people as they're living the events. Also, I didn't feel the real impact of all this spying on people's lives, apart from maybe the case of Annegret Gollin, where the consequences of not conforming to type were very real and serious indeed. Gerd Knauer, who was a junior officer within the Stasi’s propaganda unit when he attended the poetry circle. Photograph: Courtesy of Gerd Knauer The Stasi major who ran the informal poetry meet-ups at the Adlershof compound in the late 70s had an inexhaustible appetite for jaunty ditties (“This song is very popular / In our country the GDR” went one), and the poems produced by his students were often similarly lighthearted. Soldiers in their late teens penned love poetry that paid little attention to political debates. One young member of the secret police fantasised in free verse about being kissed by a young maiden who was unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a “lance corporal of love”. “Patiently I wait”, the lusty teenager wrote, “for my next promotion / at least / to general”. One soldier imagined, in a sestina, writing the words “I love you” into the dark night sky with his searchlight. “An egotist / in love I am”, went another verse. “Want you / to be mine / just mine / and hope never / to be nationalised”. Love poetry could be awkwardly at odds with a state that valued collective ownership over private property.

Oltermann introduces us to some fascinating characters in service to the state who very often wrote crap but sometimes produced thoughtful, high quality work which Ewe Berger, the leader of this sewing circle, promptly reported to his superiors in the Stasi. On 25 October 1984, Berger wrote that Knauer had read out a poem about a dream in which he flew a kite that “escapes from narrow confinement and sails into freedom”. Berger explained that the kite was what poets called a metaphor, and that the poem was a covert call for East German army personnel to cross over to the west. Found that he often went off on tangents not directly associated or relevant to the history/story of the Poetry Circle itself.

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Increased sense of community: Poetry circles can help people to feel a sense of belonging and community. This is because they provide a space for people to connect with others who share their interests. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham. Her second book is The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas But Ruika’s poems voiced existential fears about life as a full-time spy. “Every human / has a craving / for disguise”, he conceded in Masks. The hunter’s instinct may even be a “habit from pre-human times”. But to him, “pretending to be someone else” looked like “courting behaviour / play acting”. His generation had been offered a chance to do things differently, Ruika wrote, to have the “courage to disrobe”:

Weaving unseen archival material and exclusive interviews with surviving members, Philip Oltermann reveals the incredible hidden story of a unique experiment: weaponising poetry for politics. Both a gripping true story and a parable about creativity in a surveillance state, this is history writing at its finest. If it feels a bit odd that the Stasi report on the Stasi, don't be alarmed. Some 80,000 part-time domestic spooks reported to the professional spooks. It was a spooky world that even after all the attempts to pulp these files remains formidable to this day. Berger’s reports revealed a deeper kind of paranoia at the heart of East Germany’s secret police: an instinctive suspicion not just of themselves but also of the literary creativity that the GDR’s cultural founding fathers had put at the heart of the state. There seemed to be something integral to what poets did that subverted the authority of the Socialist Unity party – a party that was “re-elected” every three to five years in a non-free, non-secret vote, yet claimed that only it was able to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in the correct way. Intellectuals who came up with alternative readings were an instant threat.This utopian vision would rattle around policymakers’ heads even after Becher’s death in 1958. A year later, the Socialist Unity party launched a programme designed to bridge the divide between the working classes and the intelligentsia: writers would be made to work in factories or coalmines, where they would teach their craft to their comrades in so-called Circles of Writing Workers. Within a few years, every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle: train carriage construction workers, chemists, teachers. If a sinner sins and knows not what they do, is it still a sin if someone doesn't point out that it is sinful?

The extraordinary true story of the Stasi’s poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society . This way of doing things impedes the forward progress of TSPC, and if you're the type who prefers time in a constant left/right flow, you will no doubt become frustrated. Over a period of 12 years, the poet without party membership had proved himself to be one of the most productive informants on East Germany’s literary scene. Berger borrowed friends’ unpublished manuscripts to report on their political leanings, or just to comment on them “being a bit senile”. He informed the Stasi which of his literary colleagues was suspected of having an affair with whom, which jokes they told and which western TV programmes they allowed their children to watch (a Tarzan film merited particular disapproval). I can't remember why Plato banned poets from his Republic, but I think he shouldn't have worried so much. Maybe he was jilted by one, or had his own poetry badly criticised by a peer. As we have daily proof, soft power only really goes so far, and the idea of a Literturgesellschaft (literary society) is more utopian than a Marxist one. But even if poetry can't crush an enemy like a Soviet tank, it sure can piss people off. And for that alone, it's worth consideration.Berger was also a snitch – one of the 620,000 informers on the Stasi’s books. When he wasn’t grassing on friends and neighbours (“an alcoholic”, “a bit senile”, “unstable”), he was sniffing out counter-revolutionary tendencies in the workshop he ran. As the Stasi’s institutionalised paranoia increased in the 1980s, so Berger became more vigilant. Ambiguity worried him. What was the poet hiding? Could he be an insurrectionist in the making? But what about the moment they left their desks? The Stasi needed someone to watch the watchers when they let their guards down. It had to find a method to gaze into their hearts to identify any desires that could grow into a temptation, to X-ray their souls for deviant fears and aspirations. It had a job for Uwe Berger. The poetic and political destiny of East Germany were intertwined: that had been the credo of an influential group of poets who had returned from exile after the second world war to take up political posts in the fledgling satellite state of Soviet Russia. One of them, poet-turned-culture-minister Johannes R Becher, argued that creative writing would not merely reflect the social conditions of East Germany, but shape them. As far as Berger was concerned, however, the poetry circle was not for writing love poems. He believed verse was nothing if it was not political: “Poetry had to rouse emotion and boost the hunger for victory in class warfare.” Philip Oltermann (Photo: Sarah Bohn) To read and enjoy fiction you have to be able to suspend disbelief. To read and enjoy history you have to be able to suspend judgement.

The 1920s Philosophy's Golden Age https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q380 Wittgenstein changed his mind, Heidegger revolutionised philosophy (and the German language), and both the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle were in full swing. Of course art in the East was required to be blended with Marxist-Leninism, and where better to start with the blending than with those art-loving jokers in the East German secret police, the Stasi.The greatest aspect of this book, was that I learnt about a part of Cold War/East German history which I previously knew nothing about. Oltermann’s topic is very niche, but really brings to light an under-researched topic; that culture and the arts were weaponised by both East and West German ideological systems between 1945 and 1989.