London: Faber, 2022.
210 pp. $15.63 (paperback)
Sometime in the early 1960s, the East German secret police—commonly known as the Stasi—convened some of its staff to compose and share their own poetry. The group called themselves the Writing Circle of Chekists, borrowing the word “cheka” from their fellow spies in Russia, and they met once a month for almost three decades. But what exactly was their goal? That was a question that Philip Oltermann, a German-born writer for The Guardian, set out to answer after his curiosity was piqued by learning of an anthology the Circle published in 1984. He searched what remains of the Stasi’s archives and interviewed several alumni of the Circle still living in Germany, and the result is this short, entertaining book. More a collection of vignettes than an in-depth study, The Stasi Poetry Circle offers an unusual glimpse of the relationship between communist totalitarianism and the poetic impulses of both its victims and their victimizers.
The Stasi established a creative writing workshop for several reasons, and they begin with a professional propagandist named Johannes Becher, who served as culture minister for East Germany and was awarded the Stalin Peace Prize in 1953. Becher thought that there was a natural affinity between poetry and the fundamental claims of communist theory. According to Hegelian/Marxist dialectics, history and culture unfold through a process typically referred to as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis,” in which a social or cultural institution generates its own opposite force, and then the two merge into a new cultural institution. Becher thought this paralleled the structure of a sonnet: a short poem (typically fourteen lines) in which the writer begins with one idea, then juxtaposes a second, and then reconciles them in a concluding rhyme. From this seeming parallel grew Becher’s scheme to use literature to revive Germany in the wake of World War II and usher in a culture of socialism.
Becher persuaded East Germany’s leaders to organize a program that, as Oltermann puts it, would “bridge the divide between the working classes and the intelligentsia” by forcing writers to work in factories and recruiting factory workers to write (31). Becher thought this would help generate adequately socialist literature that would raise the consciousness of the working class. The scheme eventually grew beyond the factories, to such proportions that by the time the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 (an event the Germans call Mauerfall), there were some three hundred “writing circles” operated by members of various trades across the country. Every industry from teachers to railroad car builders had its own resident authors.
Partly as an outgrowth of that program, the Stasi put together a group of its own employees to produce propaganda verse. Records of its early years are spotty, but it appears that the Writing Circle of Chekists met on sporadic occasions to compose lines about, for example, the twentieth anniversary of the communist German state. Then, in the 1970s, the Stasi decided to formalize the Circle. Becher having died in 1958, it was placed under the leadership of poet Uwe Berger.
Berger was a bit of a paradox; he had an independent streak and refused to join the Socialist Unity Party—the country’s only legal political party, membership in which would have been a great advantage to his career. Yet he was no dissident. As early as 1981, he spoke at a meeting of the East German Writers’ Union, calling for suppression of the Polish trade union known as Solidarity, warning—accurately, as it turned out—that Solidarity would contribute to the downfall of Soviet communism.
His socialist faith affected his writing; he eschewed traditional tools of metaphor or beautiful language, preferring an unornamented verse that he thought truer to socialist dogma. One of his poems, for example, is about the contrail of an airplane; it concludes—in Oltermann’s translation—“What the picture / only stimulates / is already reality / Earth, sky and even / the galaxy are inhabited / by man” (57). Such dry lines can hardly have inspired many readers. On another occasion, he wrote a poem celebrating the erection of the Berlin Wall, which he called a “class barrier” that “protects our work and the people who liberate themselves” (58).
But in addition to producing propaganda, Berger had another motive for running the group. The Stasi was not only one of the largest secret police forces in the communist world, but also among the most paranoid, and it devoted much energy to spying on its own members. The Writing Circle gave the Stasi’s leadership an opportunity to uncover the potential for subversion concealed in the minds of its own employees.
There’s a cruelty to that, although no more than is ordinary for communism. Poetry inherently emphasizes privacy, perhaps more than any other art—privacy both for its creator and its audience. Poems may be about other people, and may be shared with other people, but to create a poem, the writer must seclude himself from distractions and focus solely on his own thoughts. Poetry doesn’t even require tools; where painters need pigment and canvas, and musicians typically need instruments, poets can compose solely in their own minds—as many poets imprisoned in totalitarian states have done. The Soviet dissident Anna Akhmatova, for example, preserved many of her works exclusively in her memory, instead of writing them down. Likewise, a reader can experience a poem in the pure solitude of his own mind and memory—experiencing the art, so to speak, without any intercessor. Thus, although some degree of independence is necessary for all art, solitude is one of poetry’s peculiar strengths. This gives it an intimate quality, which is why people so often resort to poetry to express feelings of love or sexual attraction.
In fact, that got some Stasi poets into trouble in the early days. When Becher ran the group, it included some young military men who, Oltermann writes, “had an irresistible urge to pen love poetry that paid little attention to political debates” (34). One soldier, for example, confessed in verse to being an “egotist / in love,” who hoped that his beloved would “be mine / just mine / and hope never / to be nationalized”—obviously an unacceptable sentiment in a collectivist state (34). Not surprisingly, Berger halted such gaiety when he took charge. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell said that in a totalitarian state, sex is a “political act”—because it is an assertion of individuality and of the individual’s right to his own happiness. Here, in miniature, is proof of his thesis.
Even more reminiscent of Orwell’s dystopia is the case of twenty-four-year-old Annegret Gollin, who was arrested in 1980 for a single poem written in a diary. She was not a Stasi member, just a free-spirited woman—something of a hippie who enjoyed hitchhiking and had a child out of wedlock, which was severely disapproved of in East Germany. In 1979, she made the mistake of attending a poetry workshop she saw advertised on a flyer. It was a trap. “Once the budding writers let their guard down,” writes Oltermann, “they were encouraged to open up about their literary tastes—information then passed straight to the Stasi” (101). Gollin told another member of the meeting that she was interested in the work of a writer named Reiner Kunze, who had been declared politically unacceptable after he supported the anti-Soviet Prague Spring of 1968. Around the same time, the father of one of Gollin’s friends reported to the Stasi that he had found a subversive poem in his teenage daughter’s diary, which, she told him, Gollin had written. The poem was called “Concrete,” and it was fifteen lines long; it briefly described the concrete buildings of Germany before ending with:
I think concrete.
I become concrete.
(That’s not just the case in New York City.) (104)
As Oltermann observes, these lines sound an ambiguous note: Gollin was not attacking communism outright; in fact, she appeared to be toeing the communist ideological line with her crack about Manhattan. But she obviously was saying something to the effect that East Germany was soul destroying. Frustrated Stasi interrogators questioned Gollin thirty-six times about this and other poems, until she finally confessed that she was “mak[ing] the claim that there is no freedom in [East Germany]” (103). She was ultimately sentenced to more than a year and a half in prison for “vilification of an organ of the state” (113).
The Stasi poetry police didn’t stop there. Alongside their propaganda and surveillance missions, they had another goal: to understand poetry. Genuine collectivists, who view privacy as anathema, can never really understand poetry—at least, not lyric poetry—because it is such a direct expression of the evanescent and ineffable creative spark within the human mind, something collectivism can never truly reach. One of the best anti-communist poets, E. E. Cummings, expressed that point in his own quirky way in his classic “Jehovah buried,Satan dead,” which bitterly satirized communist states where “Souls are outlawed” and “dreamless knaves on Shadows [feed].”1 The result of communist regimentation, he wrote, is that
Boobs are holy,poets mad,
illustrious punks of Progress shriek;
when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,
Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:
That last phrase—“Minds nothing can”—was not only Cummings’s way of saying that a country that outlaws individual aspiration will also obliterate creativity, but also his way of expressing the essential crudity of communism, which views man as a mechanism to be manipulated, categorized, and put to labor, rather than as a unique creature of infinite potential. East Germany’s rulers, who never lifted their eyes from the dingy concrete of the police state, could hardly comprehend such potential. And that made it impossible for them to grasp, let alone counteract, the attractions of the free world’s culture.
The aesthetic “competition,” if it can even be called that, between communism and freedom was especially worrisome to the communists in Germany, where East and West Berlin brought the two worlds into such close contact. Music, movies, and literature crossed the boundary easily before the Wall was erected in 1961. So did the people—who flooded to the free West, and who, after the Wall went up, kept risking their lives to escape. The Stasi hoped that by better understanding poetry, they might find a way to counteract the influences of capitalistic individualism.
They found that impossible. For one thing, smart poets can exploit linguistic ambiguities to disguise their messages. In 1981, the writer Uwe Kolbe got government approval to publish a long poem called Kern meines Romans. Only after it appeared did the censors realize that it was an acrostic: the first letters of each line spelled out a denunciation of the “bootlickers” who ran the state (115). Even more challenging were writers whose work never made explicit political statements but still seemed vaguely deviant. The Stasi reserved a kind of torture for these people—not only bugging and searching their homes, but harassing them in hopes of eliciting incriminating responses.
Gert Neumann was an author whose work they found especially frustrating. His style was odd, lengthy, and awkward while still being sensible—yet they could not figure him out. For example, Oltermann translates one line of his book Eleven O’Clock as “The collective of individualities had a silent interest in dissolving potential intelligence into a dumb and blind form of observation,” which was certainly “subversive” but not clearly enough to get him arrested (145). Even more exasperating to the Stasi was the fact that, unlike such writers as Becher or Berger, Neumann actually was a “worker” in the communist sense: He was a locksmith who wrote in his spare time, precisely as the government had encouraged with its “writing circles.” The Stasi, therefore, didn’t officially ban Neumann from publishing, but they pressured publishers not to release his work. So, he sent his manuscripts to the West, where they proved a sensation. Neumann became a celebrity—but refused to leave the East. The Stasi surrounded him with spies and informants, and even paid thugs to beat him up in back alleys, in hopes of catching him saying something unacceptable. In the end, he was saved by the bell: Mauerfall and the end of German communism left him free to pursue his studies, as he does today.
Plato infamously decreed in The Republic that writers would be banned from his collectivist utopia, because “poetry feeds and waters the passions instead of drying them up.”2 The totalitarians of East Germany did their best to dry up people’s passions, fearful that they would erode the walls communism erected around their souls as well as their bodies. But as Oltermann shows in this illuminating, chilling, and ultimately uplifting book, they could not keep those souls from blossoming once again.
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1. E. E. Cummings, “Jehovah buried,Satan dead,” in Complete Poems 1904–1962, ed. George J. Firmage (New York: Liveright, rev. ed., 1991), 438.
2. Plato, The Republic in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, vol. 3, trans. Benjamin Jowett (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 322.
