The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War

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I can't remember why Plato banned poets from his Republic, but I think he shouldn't have worried so much. Maybe he was jilted by one, or had his own poetry badly criticised by a peer. As we have daily proof, soft power only really goes so far, and the idea of a Literturgesellschaft (literary society) is more utopian than a Marxist one. But even if poetry can't crush an enemy like a Soviet tank, it sure can piss people off. And for that alone, it's worth consideration. Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR and a translation of Durs Grünbein's Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City

The extraordinary true story of the Stasi’s poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society . If it feels a bit odd that the Stasi report on the Stasi, don't be alarmed. Some 80,000 part-time domestic spooks reported to the professional spooks. It was a spooky world that even after all the attempts to pulp these files remains formidable to this day. Poetry circles (and writing circles) are a powerful force for uniting people through words. They provide a shared space for people to express themselves, connect with others who share their love of writing, and share their stories and experiences. Poetry circles have been used to unite people in a variety of settings, including schools, prisons, and communities affected by conflict. Berger was also a snitch – one of the 620,000 informers on the Stasi’s books. When he wasn’t grassing on friends and neighbours (“an alcoholic”, “a bit senile”, “unstable”), he was sniffing out counter-revolutionary tendencies in the workshop he ran. As the Stasi’s institutionalised paranoia increased in the 1980s, so Berger became more vigilant. Ambiguity worried him. What was the poet hiding? Could he be an insurrectionist in the making?When Knauer finished reading it to the circle, he told me over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Marzahn in 2019, there was a moment of silence. An ashen-faced kitchen worker, who had joined the group for the first time that day, rushed to the toilet. All the remaining eyes in the room were on the circle’s artistic leader. Uwe Berger said the poem was very technically advanced, and he was impressed with the skills the Chekists had acquired. By 1984 morale within the Stasi was suffering. The Wall couldn’t keep out western influence. There were stirrings of a peace movement among the young. Even the military preferred Eric Clapton and Steven Spielberg to homegrown music and films. But the leaders of East Germany were old and the country was slower to accept glasnost than the rest of the Soviet bloc. At least the end was bloodless: whereas Nazi Germany went up in flames, in the GDR “there were no burnt bodies, only pulped files”. Of course art in the East was required to be blended with Marxist-Leninism, and where better to start with the blending than with those art-loving jokers in the East German secret police, the Stasi. But what about the moment they left their desks? The Stasi needed someone to watch the watchers when they let their guards down. It had to find a method to gaze into their hearts to identify any desires that could grow into a temptation, to X-ray their souls for deviant fears and aspirations. It had a job for Uwe Berger.

I paid our bill. Outside the cafe, before we waved our goodbyes, Polinske said something that I couldn’t quite make sense of at the time: “The question mark at the end of a poem is worth a hundred times more than a full stop. I know that now, after thinking about it for a long time. But I didn’t know that then.” What had the Stasi tried to achieve with its poetry programme, I asked Polinske over a currywurst with potato salad. Was the idea to help East Germany’s working-class warriors better understand the decadent bourgeois mind? Polinske shook his head. The reason he had joined the Stasi poetry circle was simple: “I had artistic ambitions, and I thought I could learn something from the real poets who ran the workshop.” His own poems were technically accomplished, but could verge on the whimsical, and didn’t always earn praise. Many of the young soldiers who turned up to the Working Circle of Writing Chekists had left with tears in their eyes after being informed of the poor quality of their work. He, too, had stopped attending after a few months.

Found that he often went off on tangents not directly associated or relevant to the history/story of the Poetry Circle itself.

Berger’s report on Gerd Knauer’s long nuclear-war poem The Bang was particularly troubled by the stanza about Odysseus and Karl Marx. The syntax was ambiguous, he wrote: when Marx said “they are doing it because of me”, was the “it” referring to the other philosophers’ silence, or to nuclear war? And if the latter, were “they” Marx’s followers or his enemies? “The question of guilt is not answered unambiguously,” Berger noted in his report. Knauer implied that “Marx has invented social revolution and is therefore to blame for the imminent annihilation of mankind,” a thesis that amounted to nothing but “idealism and acceptance of surrender”.

If a sinner sins and knows not what they do, is it still a sin if someone doesn't point out that it is sinful? Ways in which the Stasi spied on its citizens, and kept a close eye on East and West German literature.