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

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poets, including Ted Walter (1933 - 2012), who was for many years an associate member of Shortlands Poetry Circle. 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. When Knauer finished reading it to the circle, he told me over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Marzahn in 2019, there was a moment of silence. An ashen-faced kitchen worker, who had joined the group for the first time that day, rushed to the toilet. All the remaining eyes in the room were on the circle’s artistic leader. Uwe Berger said the poem was very technically advanced, and he was impressed with the skills the Chekists had acquired. If you've see the movie Other People's Lives, set in the GDR, at the end of the movie the main Stasi character is seen as now being a postie delivering letters. It has been said many times that the falling of the Berlin Wall was neither foreseen or expected. When it did happen, that country, the GDR and its culture (valued or not) just disappeared into dust. He snitched upon others, too. Oltermann points to the “unremarkable” quality of Berger’s own poems, despite the numerous prizes given to him by the regime. Spite got the better of him. He denounced more successful writers and poets, as well as his own editor when she was lukewarm about his work. Berger died in 2014, defending his actions to the end.

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. The poems of the talented teen Alexander Ruika, Berger wrote in a report in April 1983, were “ambivalent”: he had a problem with “power” under socialism. On subjects like collectivism, life in the army and revolution, he reported, the young lyricist was hard to pin down: he was “openly in favour”, but “subliminally against”. What I find both beguiling and strange about books like this is that it is set in a country that no longer exists and in a culture that has disappeared.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. 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.

Stars, normally it's either 5 stars or nothing, so what's different here? Hard to say actually, a lot of books are set in events long since passed, or todays countries but in olden times or even in countries invented by the author. Poetry circles are a powerful force for uniting people through words. They provide a shared space for people to express themselves, connect with others who share their love of writing, and share their stories and experiences. Poetry circles have been used to unite people in a variety of settings, and they have been shown to be an effective way to promote social inclusion.

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Uwe Berger (in glasses) at a book signing in Berlin, 1975. Photograph: Rainer Mittelstädt/Bundesarchiv I digress. In this case the Stasi convinced itself that one way to win the cold war was to convince the West that the their culture was not as good was by becoming better poets, hence the title of the book.

Overseeing this inky mission was the circle’s leader, Uwe Berger, who, after some searching, believed he had found his star student. Alexander Ruika was a recruit who had followed his colonel father into the Guards Regiment, an elite training ground for Stasi recruits. What separated Ruika from his fellow versifiers was his use of figurative language, the “mastery of metaphor” that Aristotle believed was the mark of genius. Oltermann traces his early successes – a string of awards, publication in prestigious literary magazines – but also hears a dissenting voice in his poems that suggests Ruika was not a model Chekist but “the Hamlet of the Stasi poetry circle”, a soul at war with himself. His ambivalence becomes almost a test case in this account – how to reconcile the free fluidities of poetry with the ideological constrictions of communism. Be prepared for a sting in the tale. Berger implied that his work as an informant came to an end once he took over the poetry circle at Adlershof In none of the poems was this tendency more pronounced than in those of 18-year-old soldier Alexander Ruika, one of the few members of the circle with a genuinely interesting way with words. The Guards Regiment was not just an ordinary unit where East German teens could while away their military service. It was an elite training ground from which the Stasi would frequently recruit new talent for special missions, such as the “tunnel unit” that was tasked with preventing underground escapes to the west. Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR and a translation of Durs Grünbein's Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City What had the Stasi tried to achieve with its poetry programme, I asked Polinske over a currywurst with potato salad. Was the idea to help East Germany’s working-class warriors better understand the decadent bourgeois mind? Polinske shook his head. The reason he had joined the Stasi poetry circle was simple: “I had artistic ambitions, and I thought I could learn something from the real poets who ran the workshop.” His own poems were technically accomplished, but could verge on the whimsical, and didn’t always earn praise. Many of the young soldiers who turned up to the Working Circle of Writing Chekists had left with tears in their eyes after being informed of the poor quality of their work. He, too, had stopped attending after a few months.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.