![]() Illustration: Ellie Foreman-Peck/The GuardianĪ 1973 decree prescribed that larger East German factories must have an on-site library with 500 to 1,000 books, staffed by a librarian. A mere 35% of the adult population reading Goethe and Pushkin was deemed insufficient: in East Germany, that number was to rise to 90%, and ideally within five years. In the 1970s, the East German government had warned that the relatively small number of readers of schöne literatur, or high literature, represented a “key problem” for the socialist country. In theory, there is nothing surprising about the East German politburo declaring a matter of statecraft the vaguest of all literary disciplines, what Edmund Burke once called the “art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing”. I know that now, after thinking about it for a long time. 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. He had instilled the group with a dogma: poetry had to rouse emotion and boost the hunger for victory in class warfare. If I really wanted to understand why the Stasi had set up the circle and how they planned to use it, Polinske said, I should try to contact the circle’s former artistic leader, a thin man with thick glasses called Uwe Berger. He, too, had stopped attending after a few months. 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. 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. Was the idea to help East Germany’s working-class warriors better understand the decadent bourgeois mind? Polinske shook his head. What had the Stasi tried to achieve with its poetry programme, I asked Polinske over a currywurst with potato salad. We met at a restaurant under the railway arches in Berlin’s Mitte district, just down the road from Friedrichstrasse station where he used to wave people across the iron curtain. He was happy to meet up, he wrote in an email, but “how much time we will need will depend on your questions”. The first Writing Chekist to reply was Jürgen Polinske, a former border guard who now worked as an archivist at Berlin’s Humboldt University. How had a secret police synonymous with the suppression of free thought ended up writing poetry? Over the coming months I tried to track down former members of the circles, and contacted them to see if they could tell me more. The slim paperback, its title Wir Über Uns (“We about us”) falling down the front page in curling calligraphic letters, felt like something out of a Monty Python sketch, or a spin-off from the film The Lives of Others. I got hold of a copy of one shortly before I moved to Berlin in 2016. The group, which internal memos referred to as the Working Circle of Writing Chekists (a reference to the fearsome Bolshevist secret police, the Cheka), produced two anthologies over this seven-year period. They set out to learn about iambic pentameter, cross-rhyming schemes and Petrarchan sonnets. ![]() They met in a first-floor room adorned with portraits of East German leader Erich Honecker and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that was closed with a security seal overnight.īut the Stasi men did not gather to gameplan nuclear war scenarios, work up disinformation campaigns or fine-tune infiltration techniques. From spring 1982 until winter 1989, they gathered once every four weeks, from 4pm until 6pm, at the House of Culture inside the premises of the Felix Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment (the Stasi’s paramilitary wing), in Berlin’s Adlershof district. At the height of the tense second phase of the cold war, a group of Stasi majors, propaganda officers and border guards convened at a heavily fortified compound in socialist east Berlin. ![]()
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