The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War
By Philip Oltermann
Faber & Faber £14.99

PHILIP OLTERMANN is the Guardian’s German correspondent and is clearly keen to jump aboard the gravy train of Stasi horror stories. In discussing this latest “Stasi revelation” book, it is difficult to know where to start in terms of trying to discover factual nuggets buried beneath the huge slagheap of fabulation.

In researching his book, Oltermann takes the easy seam, already well mined by his forerunners. He plunders the “Stasi Archives” to investigate the story behind a poetry circle set up by members of the GDR’s Ministry of State Security (MfS) or, in Western jargon, “the Stasi.”  

Imagine a writer using only MI5 or FBI files as a basis for painting a picture of life in the UK or US, taking the documents, phone tap protocols and photo-copied letters at face value, as accurate and truthful records. But this is what Oltermann has done.

The Ministry for State Security established a poetry circle for employees interested in writing and discussing poetry. From 1982-1989, the group gathered once every four weeks, at the headquarters of the elite Guards Regiment in Berlin-Adlershof.

Oltermann explains that the group “set out to learn about iambic pentameter, cross-rhyming schemes and Petrarchan sonnets” and incorporates numerous quotations from the poems but is transparently patronising about the would-be poets’ often clumsy versifying.

From the names he gleans from the files, he tracks down former members of the poetry circle but meets with short shrift as his intentions are mistrusted.

In an attempt to engineer a revelatory confrontation, he introduces one dissident writer to a Stasi officer who spied on him, but the two men simply end up having a cosy chat, reminiscing about old times.

In the GDR, as in the other socialist countries, cultural development, in its broadest sense, was seen as an essential aspect of a healthy citizenship. Writers and artists’ circles, amateur dramatic societies, sports clubs, choirs and photographic workshops proliferated. In the workplace, everyone was encouraged to become involved in creative activities and the state provided generous subsidies.

The fact that the GDR’s Ministry of State Security also had a poetry circle is, in this context, hardly surprising, but it is this fact alone which Oltermann has fictionalised into a full-blown and sinister plot to counter the intrinsic “untrustworthiness” of intellectuals and develop a counter culture of its own.

Despite his research, Oltermann gets a number of important facts wrong. He makes the ludicrous assertion that Stasi staff “in Berlin were housed in self-contained districts, which were managed by an internal administrative unit” and that employees “were looked after in Stasi hospitals, their children went to Stasi nurseries or Stasi schools” … and that “officers were made to share offices, so that comrade would always keep an eye on comrade.”

I’m sure those office workers in Britain who work in open plan offices will laugh at that last statement.

The MfS did not have its own separate hospitals, nor its own schools. Most MfS employees lived in ordinary housing alongside their fellow citizens, and their children went to ordinary state schools.

He gets it wrong on cinema in the GDR: “since 1981, senior officials allowed not just agitprop classics from Russia, Romania and Cuba, but also the odd movie from a capitalist country” — in fact Western films were shown regularly in GDR cinemas from the first days of its existence. Many Hollywood blockbusters, unsurprisingly, were not shown, less for ideological reasons than simply because they were too expensive to rent.

In 1959, the the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED)  launched a programme designed to bridge the divide between the working classes and the intelligentsia: writers, in Oltermann’s words, “would be made to work” in factories or coal mines. There, he rightly adds, “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.”

This policy was intended to encourage writers to get to know what working people actually did and persuade them to write about real people’s daily lives. There was nothing compulsory about it.

The author also describes efforts made by the GDR government to encourage reading: “A 1973 decree prescribed [his description] that larger East German factories must have an on-site library with 500 to 1,000 books. Bigger factories needed more books, 18,000-30,000.

“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.”

It is true that print runs were often short (the GDR always suffered a shortage of paper, most of which had to be imported) and popular books sold out very quickly, but bookshops stocked world literature and numerous fiction and non-fiction works by German writers.

Oltermann quotes a former dissident young woman who says she was forbidden from reading Marx’s Capital at school! He says she was arrested by the Stasi for writing poetry. The GDR had dozens of writers, poets and song writers who were often highly critical in their texts, so how come they were not arrested?

In actual fact the “feared Stasi,” as he loves calling it and “one of the most brutal spy agencies in history,” was for most GDR citizens more ridiculed than feared, if they discussed it at all. For the overwhelming majority of citizens the activities of the Ministry of State Security, much like MI5 or the FBI in Britain and the US, hardly impacted on their lives directly at all.

Oltermann only hit on this unusual story by chance after buying online a small booklet of poems published by the MfS writing group, but it had lain on his bookshelf, unread, until an article in the German magazine Der Spiegel caused him to look at it properly and then investigate what lay behind it.

His book will no doubt be read and relished by those who can’t wait for another socialist nightmare story and will see it as another exposé of life under a “totalitarian dictatorship.”

But in the end, it remains a convoluted “shaggy dog story” which in its mixing of fact and fiction provides no new insights.