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

Product Information

As the Stasi men at the Adlershof House of Culture became increasingly accomplished poets, the man brought in to teach them verse turned spy again. Berger resumed his activity as an unofficial collaborator in October 1982 with a series of short profiles. One 20-year-old corporal was “clumsy” with a “low level of education”, but also “open and direct”, and therefore useful: he naively confessed that other comrades had warned him off joining the poetry circle because he would be forced “to wave the red flag” there. 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.

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. I suppose in the neurotic times of the early '80's and mutually assured destruction, when Ronald Reagan's 300-kiloton thermonuclear warheads were called "Peacekeepers", it's at least unsurprising that the GDR's Stasi could create a Wunderwaffe of their own out of sonnets, bathos and broken rhyme. It may have had its roots in the utopian days of building a "real existing socialism" with literature as a central pillar, extolling the virtues of the common man. Yet it ended with the writing circles' poetry and literature being co-opted by the out of touch dictatorship for its own ends. It certainly didn't bring out the best in people, or stop "das Volk" from turning against the state and looking westwards. 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 host a relaxed writing group free of charge. The group is open to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. The group uses WhatsApp to stay connected and uses Google Docs to share work. We encourage members to offer editorial suggestions and praise.

Visit the library

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. Yet the political is also personal, which is where the story gets murkier. Stasi members were not themselves immune from surveillance – far from it – and writing verse can make poets vulnerable. 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”. 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.

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. 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?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. 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. Contradiction also animates the story of Berger, the man at the centre of the web. A mediocre poet who won vast acclaim, he had refused to join the Socialist Unity party and yet had accumulated significant influence within the state. A total of 620,000 informers were listed on the Stasi’s books between 1950 and 1989, their role to report on dodgy tendencies and opinions among the populace. The GDR was, in effect, a nation of curtain-twitchers. Berger had been approached to join them as an “informal collaborator” and apparently took to the work with alacrity, turning out a steady flow of lies, half-truths and obfuscations. In 1982, he was rewarded by the Stasi with a silver “brotherhood in arms” medal for his efforts, though in a memoir he wrote after the Berlin Wall came down he makes no mention of it or of his reports. He implied that his work as an informant came to an end once he took over the poetry circle at Adlershof, whereas we now know this posting marked a sinister new chapter in his snitching career. You can find more episodes of Free Thinking exploring German history and culture including: Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Tom Smith and Adam Scovell on New angles on post-war Germany and Austria https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx

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. Working my way through piles of paperwork in the Stasi records archive, I discovered hundreds of poems that were produced by the Working Circle of Writing Chekists, including those that weren’t included in the secret police’s official anthologies. What became increasingly clear was that not all the young men who gathered at Adlershof once a week wanted to write weapons in verse form. They wanted to write poems that did something poetry was good at: asking questions rather than giving answers. 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.

A study published in the journal “Poetry Therapy” found that poetry circles can be an effective way to promote social inclusion for people with mental health problems. The study found that participants in the poetry circles reported feeling less isolated and more connected to others. They also reported feeling more confident in their ability to express themselves. 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. 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.” That any of the poetry is any good seems like a miracle but some of it quite good. On the whole they are not as interesting as the spy craft and the crazy morality of the system, but these well-chosen examples of what was coming out of the Stasi are entertaining, though as I said before, not as entertaining as the continual totalitarian reportage.

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 poets, including Ted Walter (1933 - 2012), who was for many years an associate member of Shortlands Poetry Circle. The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War is just an amazing title for the book! The title alone made me want to read the book and learn more. 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 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.

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. Philip Oltermann is Berlin Bureau Chief for The Guardian and the author of The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War I was hoping that the book would focus more on the Stasi Poetry Circle and for there to be more of the poetry in the book. Rather, it provides a good overview of the GDR, an overview of the political climate during the Cold War and up to the fall of the Berlin Wall, the context to the formation of the Stasi Poetry Circle, it focuses on a few of the more notable poets of the group as well as looking at other poets in the GDR at that time and how they were viewed and treated. 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”: By 1984 morale within the Stasi was suffering. The Wall couldn’t keep out western influence. There were stirrings of a peace movement among the young. Even the military preferred Eric Clapton and Steven Spielberg to homegrown music and films. But the leaders of East Germany were old and the country was slower to accept glasnost than the rest of the Soviet bloc. At least the end was bloodless: whereas Nazi Germany went up in flames, in the GDR “there were no burnt bodies, only pulped files”.