While American spies secretly spread Cold War propaganda through art, music, and movies like Animal Farm, East Germany’s secret police weaponized a more unconventional cultural tool: poetry.
Once a month, East German border guards and soldiers would gather as 'writing Chekists' to ponder the nuances of verse and learn how to analyze poetry for potentially subversive messaging. Meetings were held at the secretive Adlershof House of Culture, inside the Stasi’s paramilitary wing, under the watchful portraits of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and East German leader Erich Honecker. It was here that the rough-and-tumble soldiers and guards - who, by day, suppressed free thought - embraced Petrarchan sonnets and free verse.
Some soldiers in their late teens leaned more toward love poetry than politics, Philip Oltermann writes in his wonderfully outlandish book The Stasi Poetry Circle.
One member of the secret police fantasized about being kissed by a young maiden who was unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a ‘lance corporal of love’. Patiently Ɪ wait / for my next promotion / at least / to general.
Other poems were less doting. One 32-year-old, a second lieutenant in the Stasi’s Central Information Service, read aloud a poem called Dialectics: Then / at the shooting range / I take aim with calm / and precision.
The Stasi House of Culture
One of the literary luminaries at the Adlershof House of Culture was Uwe Berger, a writer known for his book Die Neigung (1985). Berger urged budding writers to craft poetry that stirred emotions and fueled the desire for triumph in the struggle of class warfare.
Berger moved in esteemed circles although some dismissed his verse as mediocre. Author Rchard A. Zipser describes Berger as manipulative and cunning, a man skilled at achieving his ends by deceit or guilt.
Berger soon found his star poetry pupil in Alexander Ruika, a member of the elite Guards Regiment who was a master of metaphor. All was not as it seemed, however. Ruika’s tortured poetic soul grappled with contradictory loyalties, embodying East Germany’s broader challenge of harmonizing artistic liberty with communist ideology.
The Dark Side of Poetry
Poetry offered the Stasi an opportunity to sniff out non-conformists and rebels. Writer Annegret Gollin, 23, for example, was interrogated over the meaning of Concretia, a poem about the sharp increase in concrete high-rises. She was imprisoned for 20 months and separated from her young son on the basis of a single poem never published; Oltermann likened her treatment to a person convicted of building homemade explosives.
Poetry was also seen as a useful tool at a time when East Germany was keen to improve literacy rates. The GDR envisioned its future as a cultured literary society, far superior to the paperback-snorting Western philistines. Only 35 percent of East German adults read Goethe and Pushkin in the 1960s and ‘70s and the communist government wanted an increase to 90 percent within a short time frame. Poetry was seen as the way forward.
It may be difficult to understand the focus on poetry in light of more urgent Cold War concerns - nuclear proliferation among them - and yet the fates of poetry and politics in East Germany were deeply intertwined.
