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

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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. 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. 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. 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. Uwe Berger (in glasses) at a book signing in Berlin, 1975. Photograph: Rainer Mittelstädt/Bundesarchiv

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.

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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. 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”: 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. 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? 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)

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. Increased creativity: Poetry circles can help people to tap into their creativity and to express themselves in new and innovative ways. 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. 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. 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.

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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. If you are interested in joining a poetry circle, I encourage you to do so. You may be surprised at how much you enjoy it and how much you can learn from it. 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. 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.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. 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.

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.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). The extraordinary true story of the Stasi’s poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society . 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