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. 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. 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.
But the Stasi men did not gather to gameplan nuclear war scenarios, work up disinformation campaigns or fine-tune infiltration techniques. They set out to learn about iambic pentameter, cross-rhyming schemes and Petrarchan sonnets. 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. I got hold of a copy of one shortly before I moved to Berlin in 2016. 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. 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 first Writing Chekist to reply was Jürgen Polinske, a former border guard who now worked as an archivist at Berlin’s Humboldt University. He was happy to meet up, he wrote in an email, but “how much time we will need will depend on your questions”. 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.
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.
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 had instilled the group with a dogma: poetry had to rouse emotion and boost the hunger for victory in class warfare.
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.”
***
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”. 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. 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.
A 1973 decree prescribed that larger East German factories must have an on-site library with 500 to 1,000 books, staffed by a librarian. Bigger factories needed more books, 18,000-30,000, in any enterprise employing between 5,000 and 10,000 employees. In terms of books printed, the stated aim was a yearly increase in productivity of 4-5%. Between 1950 and 1989, the number of books printed each year and the proportion of those that were fiction more than tripled. An International Study of Reading Literacy, conceived before the fall of the Wall but carried out just after, found that “the average reading comprehension of East German eighth-graders was significantly higher than that of their West German contemporaries”.
The poetic and political destiny of East Germany were intertwined: that had been the credo of an influential group of poets who had returned from exile after the second world war to take up political posts in the fledgling satellite state of Soviet Russia. One of them, poet-turned-culture-minister Johannes R Becher, argued that creative writing would not merely reflect the social conditions of East Germany, but shape them.
This utopian vision would rattle around policymakers’ heads even after Becher’s death in 1958. A year later, the Socialist Unity party launched a programme designed to bridge the divide between the working classes and the intelligentsia: writers would be made to work in factories or coalmines, where they would teach their craft to their comrades in so-called Circles of Writing Workers. Within a few years, every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle: train carriage construction workers, chemists, teachers.
East Germany’s secret police did not wait long to get in on the act. The first passing references to Writing Chekists in the Ministry for State Security appear in the files as early as 1960. In 1961, the Stasi’s administrative branch in Berlin records a second “lyrical evening”, attended by three of its full-time employees. But the intelligence agency’s dedication to lyrical praxis would remain sporadic for the next two decades.
The Stasi major who ran the informal poetry meet-ups at the Adlershof compound in the late 70s had an inexhaustible appetite for jaunty ditties (“This song is very popular / In our country the GDR” went one), and the poems produced by his students were often similarly lighthearted. Soldiers in their late teens penned love poetry that paid little attention to political debates. One young member of the secret police fantasised in free verse about being kissed by a young maiden who was unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a “lance corporal of love”. “Patiently I wait”, the lusty teenager wrote, “for my next promotion / at least / to general”. One soldier imagined, in a sestina, writing the words “I love you” into the dark night sky with his searchlight. “An egotist / in love I am”, went another verse. “Want you / to be mine / just mine / and hope never / to be nationalised”. Love poetry could be awkwardly at odds with a state that valued collective ownership over private property.
***
For reasons that are not explicitly spelled out in the paperwork that survives in the Stasi records archive, East Germany’s Ministry for State Security decided in spring 1982 that it needed to professionalise its poetry circle. It put out feelers to Uwe Berger, a prize-winning poet with an impressive 20 anthologies and novels under his belt. Berger seemed a strange choice for such a mission. Born in 1928, he had been one of about 200,000 teenagers who were drafted into the Luftwaffe in the dying days of the Third Reich as auxiliary staff, or Flakhelfer: a traumatic experience that seemed to have made him unable to later join the rank and file of party politics. Unusually, and unlike roughly every sixth East German citizen over the age of 18 at around that time, the 54-year-old was not a member of the ruling Socialist Unity party – an organisation that saw itself not as a political party in the conventional sense but an “avant garde of the proletariat” that existed beyond all checks and balances, commanding authority over the judiciary, executive and legislative.
Berger had died in a Berlin hospital in September 2014, but contemporaries I spoke to recalled an almost monkish ascetic, a man whose most extravagant hobby outside writing was a collection of rocks and minerals he had picked up on travels around the Soviet bloc. One poet published by the same imprint said their mutual editor, who used to visit Berger in his apartment every Christmas, had realised one year that the glass of schnapps they drank together always came from the same bottle on his kitchen shelf: in the 12 months between their meetings, Berger would not take so much as a sip. A Berliner Zeitung profile from August 1965 portrayed Berger as a “lone wolf”, who “did not find or seek a connection”. Nonetheless, he accepted the invitation to run the Stasi poetry circle.
Under Berger’s tutelage, a new discipline descended. Young soldiers who were doing their three-year military service in the Guards Regiment had to wear their uniforms; officers could attend in civilian clothing. Lessons had a clearer structure. Members of the programme were required to take turns reading out their poems and Berger would encourage feedback. Only once this discussion had finished did he himself comment, always in a polite voice, rarely overtly critical.
The poems produced in the Stasi’s creative writing class became less frivolous. The utopian underpinning of socialist East Germany faded into the distance. One 32-year-old with a strong stutter, a second lieutenant in the Stasi’s central information service, read out a poem called Dialectics: “Then / at the shooting range / I take aim with calm / and precision”. Poetry, one of the circle’s other members I tracked down told me, was the sound of a little bird, singing. But Berger didn’t want to hear birdsong, “he wanted every poem to sound like The Internationale”.
The group’s new syllabus leaned more heavily on a phrase coined by the poet-turned-GDR-diplomat Friedrich Wolf (father of Markus, one of the most well-known spymasters of the cold war): art is a weapon. “The material of our age lies in front of us, hard as iron”, Wolf had written in a 1928 poem. “Poets are working to forge it into a weapon. The worker has to pick up this weapon.”
***
Working my way through piles of paperwork in the Stasi records archive, I discovered hundreds of poems that were produced by the Working Circle of Writing Chekists, including those that weren’t included in the secret police’s official anthologies. What became increasingly clear was that not all the young men who gathered at Adlershof once a week wanted to write weapons in verse form. They wanted to write poems that did something poetry was good at: asking questions rather than giving answers.
In none of the poems was this tendency more pronounced than in those of 18-year-old soldier Alexander Ruika, one of the few members of the circle with a genuinely interesting way with words. The Guards Regiment was not just an ordinary unit where East German teens could while away their military service. It was an elite training ground from which the Stasi would frequently recruit new talent for special missions, such as the “tunnel unit” that was tasked with preventing underground escapes to the west.
But Ruika’s poems voiced existential fears about life as a full-time spy. “Every human / has a craving / for disguise”, he conceded in Masks. The hunter’s instinct may even be a “habit from pre-human times”. But to him, “pretending to be someone else” looked like “courting behaviour / play acting”. His generation had been offered a chance to do things differently, Ruika wrote, to have the “courage to disrobe”:
Away with the masks
the world of humans no longer a hunting ground
admit you are yourself
accept yourself
and your neighbour too.
The more the Stasi tried to weaponise poetry, the more it seemed to backfire. As tensions between east and west began to rise, the poems produced in the circle became ways of expressing what the East German regime deemed unsayable.
In November 1983, the West German Bundestag voted to allow the US to station Pershing II and Tomahawk cruise missiles in southern Germany. Soviet leaders walked out of nuclear arms talks a day later. All the most dangerous pieces in a giant game of cold war missile chess were pointing at Berlin. East Germany was insistent on not showing any weakness in this cold war game of chicken, with state leader Honecker in denial about the existence of a growing youth peace movement.
But even within the Stasi, fear of nuclear war accentuated a generational divide. In June 1984, a junior officer within the Stasi’s propaganda unit, called Gerd Knauer, presented the circle with a 52-page poem called The Bang. At the top of page three, there’s a noise as loud “as a thunderclap”, followed by a blinding white light, “daggers stabbing into your pupils”. Something is wrong, the narrator realises: the world is “hovering / on a precipice”.
Knauer poured forth feelings he wasn’t usually allowed to express to his comrades. Across two full pages, he described “the fear / that everything might end”, “fear / of the explosions”, “fear that something – by mistake – / will not go to plan”. Locked into an ABAB rhyme scheme, the poem picks up pace, jumping from the personal to the political, the political to the biblical, the biblical to the mythical. By page 10, the poem is narrated by Odysseus, running in terror through “the fog of history”. Hounded by rolling thunder, Odysseus flees into an ivory tower where the philosophers live, seeking spiritual guidance in this hour of need. But Plato, Hegel and Kant all remain silent. Only a man with a bushy beard rises from his seat with an apologetic look on his face:
Karl Marx tries to make a plea
Looks Odysseus in the face
Says gravely: They’re doing it because of me
But they put their faith in the wrong place.
By page 13, the narrator, who at this stage may or may not be Odysseus, is stumbling across a hellscape strewn with dead bodies, “some naked others wearing clothes / Some sliced right open from head to toes”. On the poem’s final pages, the narrator joins a community of nuclear war survivors, disfigured men and women who live off stews made of bugs and flies.
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.
***
What the Stasi officers didn’t know was that Berger had a relationship with the secret police that predated his deployment to the Adlershof compound. One summer morning in 2020, an archivist placed a weighty file on my reading-room desk at the Stasi Records Agency: marked “IM Uwe”, it consisted of six volumes held in faded brick-red cardboard folders, each holding approximately 350 pages. They dated back to November 1969, when the Stasi first approached Berger about working as an informal collaborator.
Over a period of 12 years, the poet without party membership had proved himself to be one of the most productive informants on East Germany’s literary scene. Berger borrowed friends’ unpublished manuscripts to report on their political leanings, or just to comment on them “being a bit senile”. He informed the Stasi which of his literary colleagues was suspected of having an affair with whom, which jokes they told and which western TV programmes they allowed their children to watch (a Tarzan film merited particular disapproval).
Berger’s activity as an informant enabled him to punish enemies, sideline rivals and build up allies, all with the stroke of a pen. In his reports, he eventually made a habit of referring to himself in the third person, as if he were writing small dramas with himself as the protagonist: “Uwe Berger said”; “Uwe Berger rejected this”. He described one writer with surrealist tendencies as having a “fascistoid fondness for intoxication and magic”, while denouncing another for making “the absurd accusation that we have fascists over here [in East Germany]”. In one case he even volunteered to suggest a put-down that the Stasi could place in book reviews of a female singer-songwriter he deemed insufficiently loyal to the state (his humble proposal: “tampon poetry”).
In February 1982, the Stasi rewarded Berger for his enthusiastic service by handing him the silver Brotherhood in Arms medal, a military honour that the Ministry for State Security would only occasionally grant to individuals outside the armed forces. Berger does not mention the medal in a memoir he self-published after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The book makes his collaboration with the secret police sound like a tiresome chore, and rather short-lived. “A couple of years” after starting to write reports, Berger recalls, he asked his handler to release him from his commitment. As an artist, he reasoned, he could not be constantly exposed to the “negative aspects of life”. From reading Berger’s memoirs, you would assume that his appointment as poet-in-chief at Adlershof in 1982 was when his career as a spy came to an end.
But the Stasi wasn’t just gathering information on civilians. It was, especially in the 1980s, also looking in on itself. When the Ministry for State Security was set up in 1950, it had recruited predominantly those from underprivileged, proletarian backgrounds. But in the 1970s a growth spurt made it harder to stick to its founding principles. The Stasi had 20,000 employees in 1961, when the Wall was built; by 1982, its ranks had swelled fourfold, to 81,500. Many were the sons of Stasi officers, and thus only “working class” by a rhetorical sleight of hand. “The candidate comes from a progressive family loyal to the party of the working class” is a phrase that pops up regularly in the Stasi’s recruitment files from that period.
Could this new generation be trusted? In Berlin, staff were housed in self-contained districts, which were managed by an internal administrative unit. Stasi officers were looked after in Stasi hospitals, their children went to Stasi nurseries or Stasi schools: a privilege, but also a sign of the lengths to which the state was going in order to maintain complete control. The officers themselves were made to share offices, so that comrade would always keep an eye on comrade.
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.
As the Stasi men at the Adlershof House of Culture became increasingly accomplished poets, the man brought in to teach them verse turned spy again. Berger resumed his activity as an unofficial collaborator in October 1982 with a series of short profiles. One 20-year-old corporal was “clumsy” with a “low level of education”, but also “open and direct”, and therefore useful: he naively confessed that other comrades had warned him off joining the poetry circle because he would be forced “to wave the red flag” there.
Not all of the poems were sufficiently confessional: some of the aspiring poets had a disconcerting habit of disguising rather than revealing their true feelings. One sergeant-major, though “undoubtedly talented”, was worryingly “cool, sceptical, self-controlled”. “The thing to get to the bottom of,” Berger wrote in his report, “would be to find out what is really behind the mask, at the bottom of his soul.”
Berger’s reports revealed a deeper kind of paranoia at the heart of East Germany’s secret police: an instinctive suspicion not just of themselves but also of the literary creativity that the GDR’s cultural founding fathers had put at the heart of the state. There seemed to be something integral to what poets did that subverted the authority of the Socialist Unity party – a party that was “re-elected” every three to five years in a non-free, non-secret vote, yet claimed that only it was able to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in the correct way. Intellectuals who came up with alternative readings were an instant threat.
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”.
The poems of the talented teen Alexander Ruika, Berger wrote in a report in April 1983, were “ambivalent”: he had a problem with “power” under socialism. On subjects like collectivism, life in the army and revolution, he reported, the young lyricist was hard to pin down: he was “openly in favour”, but “subliminally against”.
But poems didn’t even need to deal with politics to arouse suspicion. In April 1980, the Ministry for State Security’s own thinktank, the Chair for Scientific Communism, had produced a 30-page paper on “solutions to problems in the field of cultural politics”. It claimed that art and culture were especially prone to “covert and subliminal assaults”, because their practitioners employed techniques such as “allegories, metaphors, fables, alienation effects”.
On 25 October 1984, Berger wrote that Knauer had read out a poem about a dream in which he flew a kite that “escapes from narrow confinement and sails into freedom”. Berger explained that the kite was what poets called a metaphor, and that the poem was a covert call for East German army personnel to cross over to the west.
***
As Russia, Poland and Hungary embarked on their courses of political and economic reform over the course of the 1980s, the GDR put its foot on the brake and tried to cover its citizens’ eyes and ears. But the new world order was confusing, dizzying even, for many East Germans, including the Stasi major who had run the poetry circle before Berger. Once sidelined for his relentlessly jolly rhymes, he now presented a poem called Stop Going Around in Circles, which sounded more like a blues ballad:
Sometimes you are strong, and sometimes weak
Sometimes you are tired, sometimes awake
Sometimes you are brave and don’t know no harm
Sometimes a single word has the strength to disarm.
Sometimes the hottest summer day leaves you cold
Sometimes you grasp a spider’s web for hold
Blues songs are often about loss and despair: “The thrill is gone / It’s gone away for good”, laments BB King. But they tend to end on a flick of redemption, a glimmer of hope in the act of voicing their grief: “You know, I’m free, free now baby / I’m free from your spell”. But the major’s melancholy verses are about a terror that dare not speak its name, ending on a positive note that is even more unsettling because we know its optimism is fake: “And yet you carry on and pretend / That you are happy inside and always content”.
I found this poem in a cache that Berger had started to compile for an anthology to commemorate the GDR’s 40th anniversary in 1989, with the working title Man, Soldier, Communist: Poetry and Prose by Writing Chekists. The cache was full of loose pages that looked as if they had been shuffled and reshuffled. The title of the anthology kept on changing, with Berger eventually opting for one that sounded like a gesture of defiance: In My Raised Fist. Pages full of poems were cut, including Stop Going Around in Circles. Instead, Berger picked a poem called Letter of Recruitment:
We are Dzerzhinsky’s men
To us our mission is clear
ready to rise once again
ready to fight with no fear.
A Stasi printing permission slip for the Working Circle of Writing Chekists’ last anthology was issued on 31 December 1989, almost seven weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But the booklet never made it to the printers. In the final manuscript, the dedication to the 40th anniversary of the foundation of the GDR and the Ministry for State Security is crossed out.
Uwe Berger’s publisher informed him three months after the Wall came down that they would allow his contract to expire the following month. His request for a reissue of his 1987 memoirs, showing his “turn to perestroika”, went unanswered. Two years after his death, in February 2014, a new poetry prize in Berger’s name was to be set up at a literature festival in Berlin’s Köpenick district. But, following objections by Berger’s former colleagues and contemporaries from the East German literary scene, the prize was renamed.
• This is an edited extract from The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann, published by Faber & Faber on 17 February, priced £14.99. To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
