Sonnets and savagery
HESTER VAIZEY recommends an erudite investigation into the East German secret police’s fascination with poetry
When Guardian journalist Philip Oltermann offered to run a poetry club in an old folks’ home in King’s Cross, he found it a lot more challenging than expected. Some members just wanted a platform to read their own work; others preferred analysing great poetic works from the literary canon. One individual mostly just nodded off.
This experience brought to mind an article Oltermann had read in news magazine Der Spiegel a few years earlier, about a circle of Stasi poets. Were those verse writers of the East German secret police an equally motley crew? And how did their leader manage such a group in a regime not known for encouraging freedom of thought or expression? The Stasi Poetry Circle is the result of Oltermann’s search for answers to these questions, uncovering a little-explored area of Germany’s second dictatorship of the 20th century.
The Stasi – the eyes and ears of the dictatorship in communist East Germany – was infamous for watching and trailing its political opponents before hauling them in for lengthy interrogations. The revelation that members of the Stasi’s elite Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment were whimsical wordsmiths is, therefore, rather surprising. However, it reflects the fact that the East German regime recognised the power of culture to bolster or, alternatively, undermine support for their communist outlook. If the pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword, then the regime would have been foolish not to weaponise it as a mouthpiece for its message.
The writings of several of Oltermann’s East German bards, it turns out, revealed ambiguous sentiments about the regime. Oltermann’s erudite unpacking of their literary offerings inevitably makes this book less accessible than his last work, Keeping Up With the Germans. However, he sets his poets in the wider context beautifully, adding an unexpected piece to the puzzle of what made the East German dictatorship and its citizens tick. And his careful analysis of their poems will undoubtedly find fans among those who enjoy literary criticism of the poetic form.