You can find more episodes of Free Thinking exploring German history and culture including: Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Tom Smith and Adam Scovell on New angles on post-war Germany and Austria https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjx

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”. Uwe Berger (in glasses) at a book signing in Berlin, 1975. Photograph: Rainer Mittelstädt/Bundesarchiv 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.”

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The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War is just an amazing title for the book! The title alone made me want to read the book and learn more. Increased creativity: Poetry circles can help people to tap into their creativity and to express themselves in new and innovative ways. Yet the political is also personal, which is where the story gets murkier. Stasi members were not themselves immune from surveillance – far from it – and writing verse can make poets vulnerable. During the Romantic era, as Oltermann reminds us, the notion arose that a poem is an expression of the poet’s inner self. Which meant that when a circle member’s demeanour or lyrics did not appear supportive of the regime, Berger informed on them.

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. A study published in the journal “Poetry Therapy” found that poetry circles can be an effective way to promote social inclusion for people with mental health problems. The study found that participants in the poetry circles reported feeling less isolated and more connected to others. They also reported feeling more confident in their ability to express themselves.

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Oltermann introduces us to some fascinating characters in service to the state who very often wrote crap but sometimes produced thoughtful, high quality work which Ewe Berger, the leader of this sewing circle, promptly reported to his superiors in the Stasi. 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.

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”:What I find both beguiling and strange about books like this is that it is set in a country that no longer exists and in a culture that has disappeared. That any of the poetry is any good seems like a miracle but some of it quite good. On the whole they are not as interesting as the spy craft and the crazy morality of the system, but these well-chosen examples of what was coming out of the Stasi are entertaining, though as I said before, not as entertaining as the continual totalitarian reportage. It sounds interesting but I found the book quite dry. I'm not sure if part of this was because of the language of the time being discussed, the language of the state. There's also a lot of poetry dissection and analysis - I appreciate you can't get away from this when the central topic is the use of poetry as a weapon but I didn't find it the easiest read. I often found myself having to re-read sections multiple times to understand what was being said. Also, the narrative jumps around in time quite a lot which made it disjointed for me, sometimes we're with Oltermann's own investigations and his attempts to get interviews with people. Other times, we're in the timelines of those people as they're living the events. Also, I didn't feel the real impact of all this spying on people's lives, apart from maybe the case of Annegret Gollin, where the consequences of not conforming to type were very real and serious indeed.