The Poets Who Came in from the Cold

The East German secret police flourished from 1950 to the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Officially the organization was known as the Ministry for State Security; in German, the shorthand was “Stasi.” It was responsible for both domestic surveillance and foreign espionage, and it was roundly hated by most of the East German people. 

It became known for kidnapping East German officials who had fled the country or defected and bringing them back for trial and execution. By the time the East German government collapsed in 1989, the Stasi employed 100,000 people and routinely used another 500,000 to two million people to spy on their fellow citizens, work colleagues, friends, and family members. The Stasi maintained files on some six million East Germans, more than a third of the population. 

 

And some members of the Stasi, as journalist Philip Oltermann discovered, not only wrote poetry but participated in a poetry discussion group.

 

The Berlin chief for the British newspaper The Guardian, Olterman painstakingly put together historical records, public information, copies of poems in literary journals, our-of-print poetry collections, and interviews with Stasi members still alive. The result is The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War.

 

Philip Oltermann

It is a strange and fascinating story, part James Bond, part John le Carre, and perhaps even part Get Smart. The Stasi apparently really believed it could help shape the culture (and spy on it) by encouraging its members to write and publish poetry. And the real surprise is that quite a few of the agents were good poets.

 

And the author does a thorough and exhaustive job of tracking down these men (yes, they were entirely men) and the poetry they wrote. They were taught by an East German intellectual named Uwe Berger, who had died in 2014. Berger had published a multitude of books, many of which were admired by West German critics, and had received the German Democratic Republic’s National Prize for Literature in 1972. Interestingly enough, despite his fame and all the awards he received, Berger never joined the East German version of the communist party. But he helped to train Stasi agents as poets, agents who in turn spied on fellow writers.

 

Oltermann is the Berlin bureau chief for The Guardian. He grew up in Germany and studied English and German literature at Oxford and University College London. He’s also published How to Write (2012) and Keeping Up with the Germans: A History of Anglo-German Encounters (2012), and he’s written for newspapers in Britain and Germany, the London Review of Books, Granta Magazine, Prospect, The Nation, and other publications. He and his family live in Berlin.

 

The Stasi Poetry Circle is a story of the Cold War, a story of a communist regime, and a story of poets / government agents who took their poetry very seriously.