Love in a cold climate: poems by the Stasi
In a bid to prove its cultural credentials, the Stasi taught East Germans not just to spy on each other but to write sonnets, too
HISTORY
THE STASI POETRY CIRCLE by Philip Oltermann (Faber £14.99, 224 pp)
YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM
YOU might have thought that the habit of writing poetry — ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’, as William Wordsworth defined it — would be the last thing to be encouraged by the Stasi.
Surely that network of cold-blooded snoopers and informers was intent on suppressing the spontaneity and powerful feelings of the whole of east germany? And surely they had nastier things to do than train their recruits in the art of writing poems?
Yet here we are, in the opening chapter of Philip Oltermann’s intriguing and creepy short book, sitting in the seminar room at Stasi HQ in 1982, where poet Uwe Berger is saying to a class of young recruits, ‘Dear comrades in arms. Today we are going to learn about the sonnet.’
What on earth was going on? Well, ever since its conception in 1949, the gDr had a vision of itself as a cultured literary society, as opposed to the philistine West which gorged on fly-by-night bestsellers. The government stipulated that each factory must have a well-stocked library, and that bourgeois writers should go and work among manual workers, training them to write poetry. ‘Pick up your quill, comrades!’ was the motto.
To set an example, the Stasi Poetry Circle was founded in the 1960s and met once a month. Many of its trainee poets were teenage boys doing military service. Their leader Berger was not an official member of the Stasi, though he strongly espoused the Stasi’s agenda; he stipulated that their poems must ‘rouse emotion and boost the hunger for victory in class warfare’.
The quaking boys chewed their pencils until they came up with what now read as hilariously mundane lines of poetry. One tried his hand at a love poem: ‘I want you to be mine, just mine/and hope never to be nationalised.’
That line was dodgy, politically speaking: as Oltermann points out, ‘Love poetry could be awkwardly at odds with a state that valued collective ownership over private property.’
Berger nipped that sort of thing in the bud, reading out his own deadly dull and prosaic poems. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was ‘the place towards which the earth is turning’ and where ‘wisdom prevails’.
Occasionally, a poetic genius would turn up. One was a 19year-old trainee soldier called Alexander ruika, who had the rare gift of being able to hold more than one idea in his head at a time. ‘What a talent!’ exclaimed Berger, after ruika had read out his well-crafted poem about a Soviet monument.
But no one could trust anyone else in that terrifying society. Oltermann discovers that for two decades before becoming leader of the poetry circle, Berger had been an enthusiastic Stasi informer.
It was partly through those means that he’d attained his own success — by grassing on his writer colleagues, denouncing them as ‘unstable’, ‘a bit senile’, and ‘alcoholic’.
He reported one he caught watching West german TV (strictly forbidden), who allowed his children to watch a Tarzan film. With wily cleverness, Berger got himself a job as a publisher’s reader. He would file one report to the publisher, saying whether he thought the book was worthy of publication, and another report straight to the Stasi, saying things like ‘This book is an assault against Socialism’.
Talk about duplicitous! Berger was duplicity itself. Lives were ruined thanks to his efforts. He trained his recruits not only to write their own poems, but to read between the lines of the poetry of others and inform on them.
Alexander ruika would soon be informing on another poet, gert Neumann. Berger reported him as a ‘semi-deluded psychopath whose thoughts rejected life in the Socialist republic’.
Neumann was then subjected to the Stasi’s sinister psychological workings. His apartment was bugged. The Stasi signed up his mother to spy on him, and probably also his son. He took a taxi to Leipzig in order to break up with the wife who had betrayed him — and his taxi driver for that journey was none other than Alexander ruika, who’d been tasked to chat with him and inform on him. His report was duly submitted to the Stasi: Neumann had ‘fallen out with his wife’ and ‘intended to leave the gDr after he’d made financial arrangements’.
While researching this book, Oltermann met Neumann, who told him that he’d known exactly what that taxi driver was up to. It was all bluff and double-bluff. He lived to tell the tale and now lives happily in West germany.
The moral of this story is, ‘Beware writing poetry under a Communist regime.’
Oltermann tells the chilling story of one teenager called Annegret gollin, who was arrested for writing a poem about the soul-destroying effects of living in a concrete tower block. She was interrogated 36 times about the meaning of the poem, sentenced to 20 months in prison, and her child was sent to a state home.
Years later, in 2006, Der Spiegel confronted Berger about having spied on his students. ‘I cannot explain my behaviour, nor make excuses for it,’ he said. ‘I ask those affected for forgiveness.’
The Stasi set about destroying its archives, shredding them into ‘intelligence confetti’ while the headquarters were being stormed in January 1990. Thankfully for the truth, 69 miles of its files remain intact.
We need the sleuthing of people like Oltermann to uncover the malign doings of that surveillance state, that took place in such innocent-sounding surroundings as a poetry circle at tea-time.
I want you to be mine, just mine And hope never to be nationalised