Imagine if the bloke running your creative writing circle was spying on you for the secret police...
The Stasi Poetry Circle Philip Oltermann Faber €18 ★★★★★
One of my favourite cartoons shows two people shipwrecked on a desert island, with only a solitary palm tree for company. ‘First things first,’ one of them says. ‘Let’s start a literary festival.’ He might just as easily have suggested starting a book club or a creative writing circle. There are plenty of opportunities nowadays for those who want to talk about books they are reading or writing. These gatherings tend to be cheerful affairs, any disagreements suitably respectful and muted.
Things were very different for readers and writers in communist East Germany back in 1981, when a leading film-maker reminded an audience that writing was a ‘weapon in the ideological class struggle with imperialism’.
At another conference that same year, the veteran head of state security, Erich Mielke, made it clear that every citizen must be watched and examined before being placed in one of four categories.
Category one: enemies of the state, who display a negative attitude to the ruling party.
Category two: those who might easily become enemies of the state, if influenced by those in category one.
Category three: those with ‘wavering positions’ towards the ruling party, who might also be prone to bad influences.
Category four: those the state can rely on.
Category four, he said, was by far the smallest. Even members of the secret police, or Stasi, were more likely to fall into one of the first three categories. So virtually everyone was a potential enemy of the state and had to be spied on. Mielke had long harboured a suspicion of writers. For him, the only point in writing was to promote the state and/or to destroy its enemies. ‘Let’s have a closer look at all those who can write so brilliantly and give such wonderful speeches, and let’s check: how many enemies have they destroyed?’
The East German government revered and mistrusted writers in roughly equal measure. It rewarded writers such as Bertolt Brecht with comfortable lifestyles: reduced income tax, healthy pensions and access to special shops reserved for the intelligentsia. But in return, it demanded obedience.
The year 1959 saw the foundation of a network of Circles of Writing Workers, offering regular writing workshops for aspirant poets and novelists. ‘Pick up the quill, comrade!’ was the motto. All well and good, but the state enforced its utopian ideals with an icy efficiency. Creative writing existed to promote ‘love of the homeland’ and ‘to intensify the hatred of the enemies of peace’. Anyone found betraying these ideals could expect to hear a knock on their door.
The most notable writing circle was run for the officers and soldiers of the elite Guards Regiment.
Their Working Circle of Writing Chekists was supervised by successful author Uwe Berger who, by 1982, had published 20 books – poetry, essays, novels, travelogues – and had received medals and prizes galore.
Berger was a spindly, humourless figure who, like many a lecturer, favoured heavy black spectacles and dark turtleneck sweaters. His own work was robustly onside. It is ‘more important to be a Communist than an artist’, he declared in a newspaper interview.
Unusually for an artist, he opposed the inner world of the imagination, believing it led to no good. In his own work he eschewed metaphors and similes, dismissing them as bourgeois fripperies. This resulted in work of tedious, cardcarrying banality. ‘Berger’s poems were more often than not just a mirror that deprived reality of all enchantment, making the ordinary look only ordinary,’ writes Philip Oltermann in this fascinating, if occasionally tangled, book.
Unbeknown to those who eagerly attended his creative writing classes, Berger was not just a celebrity author: for years he had also been a highly valued police informer.
Researching this book, Oltermann discovered that Berger’s file of secret reports to the Stasi was a full six volumes long, each volume containing 350 pages. In Oltermann’s words: ‘He
‘He could punish enemies and sideline rivals… all with the stroke of a pen’
could punish enemies, sideline rivals and build up allies, all with the stroke of a pen.’ Berger sneaked on fellow authors who drank too much, or had secret lovers, or expressed the wrong political views, or simply wound him up the wrong way.
Reading manuscripts submitted to publishers, he would report back to the Stasi when he chanced upon anything remotely subversive. Reporting on one short story, he said that it was not just an artistic failure but an assault on socialism. Another showed ‘counter-revolutionary tendencies’ and talked down life in East Germany.
Like some academics today, he was only too ready to denounce anyone he disliked as a fascist.
Berger found plenty of ways to undermine those he took against. Once, when he thought a singersongwriter was becoming too popular, he advised the Stasi to instruct the West German critics on their payroll to savage her in their reviews. He praised members of his poetry circle to their faces, while filing reports against them behind their backs. When one of them read out a powerful poem about a nuclear armageddon, Berger congratulated him, but after the class he filed a report complaining that the poem was a criticism of the effectiveness of the state’s peace strategy, and describing him as an ‘uptight, pigheaded personality’.
One of the youngest men in his poetry circle was the 19-yearold Alexander Ruika. From the off, Ruika had demonstrated real ability. ‘Look at this young man, comrades’ was the way Berger greeted his very first contribution. ‘What a talent.’
But while he was praising young Ruika, Berger was also filing reports about him to the Stasi. Was he perhaps motivated by envy, hoping to corrupt his talent? Either way, he suggested that Ruika would make a first-rate informer, and encouraged the Stasi to turn him into one.
Accordingly, the wide-eyed Ruika was arrested, thrown into a cell and denounced as an enemy of the state. Threatened with a lengthy prison sentence, and encouraged by his father to make amends, he eventually succumbed, and agreed to do whatever they
‘While praising the poet he was also filing reports against him to the Stasi ’
wanted. Appropriately enough, the year was 1984.
A couple of weeks ago I reviewed a book about the betrayal of Anne Frank. There are many echoes between Amsterdam in the 1940s and East Berlin in the 1980s: no one knew who to trust; anyone might be an informer. Another student in Berger’s poetry circle was Gert Neumann, denounced by Berger as ‘a semi-educated psychopath’. Accordingly, the Stasi placed bugs in Neumann’s flat, intercepted his post, tried to gaslight him into thinking his wife was unfaithful and even recruited his own mother to inform against him. Eerily, one of those sent to spy on Neumann was Ruika, the one-time golden boy of the poetry class. Forty years on, Oltermann manages to track the two men down and arranges for them to meet. It’s fair to say that their meeting is inconsequential and ends with a shrug: these were dark times, they seem to agree, and best left unrevisited. In a police state, few remain untarnished. By the end, East Germany had 189,000 informers on its payroll, or one in every 89 citizens.
In 2006, Uwe Berger, the man who had turned him from poet to snitch, was uncovered as an informer.
‘I cannot explain my behaviour, nor make excuses for it,’ he told a reporter from Der Spiegel. ‘I ask those affected for forgiveness.’ He died in 2014, his books no longer available, and all but forgotten.