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. 

“The Day of the Lie” by William Brodrick

This is one of the best books I’ve read this year.

Father Anselm of the Gilbertine Order Larkwood Monastery near Cambridge receives a call from John Fielding, who’s been a friend since they were 11 years old and sent to the same school. Anselm had gone into law before becoming a monk, while John went into journalism. John had traveled globally and had been a reporter for BBC when he was forced to leave Warsaw in 1982 for “espionage.” Which translates as talking to dissidents.

Since then, John had been involved in an automobile accident and had lost sight in both eyes. And he needs help. The woman he was meeting with in 1982, who was to connect him to a shadowy dissident known as the Shoemaker and had herself been arrested, had shown up at his door in London. She was asking for help in bringing to trial the man in the secret police who had arrested them. 

But this wasn’t her first arrest by the secret police officer. That had happened in 1951. She and the officer had been in the anti-Nazi resistance together as teens. In 1951, he had arrested her but executed her husband. He had also persuaded her to give up the child she was carrying and gave birth to in prison.

And now, the officer had survived the fall of the communist regime in 1989 and was quietly retired, spending his days with his stamp collection. Many people want him brought to justice.

In other hands, The Day of the Liewould have been an interesting story of the aftermath of the Cold War. In the hands of author William Brodrick, the story is less a mystery novel and far more serious literary fiction, with a slight suspense element to it. This novel is as good as any of the John LeCarrenovels, and LeCarre ranks as one of the best spy story writers.

William Brodrick

Reading this story is like opening kachina dolls. You think you’ve found the answer – for example, who the informant was that betrayed John and the woman – and it turns out not to be an answer but only a path deeper into the story. And along the way Brodrick explores human motivation and psychology, the damage wreaked by years of first Nazi and then Soviet domination, and how all that history continues to shape, guide, and distort the present.

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

The Day of the Lieis a masterpiece, and I don’t use that term lightly.

Related:

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Deadby William Brodrick.

My review of A Whispered Nameby William Brodrick.

Top photograph: Mokowtow Prison in Warsaw, by Jolanta Dyr via Wikimedia. The prison plays a significant role in The Day of the Lie.