The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War

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If you've see the movie Other People's Lives, set in the GDR, at the end of the movie the main Stasi character is seen as now being a postie delivering letters. It has been said many times that the falling of the Berlin Wall was neither foreseen or expected. When it did happen, that country, the GDR and its culture (valued or not) just disappeared into dust.

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Patsy Kensit 'rekindles romance with property tycoon fiancé' Patric Cassidy four months after splitting Karen Leeder is Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Oxford. Her books include Rereading East Germany: The Literature and Film of the GDR and a translation of Durs Grünbein's Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of My City 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.

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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. SARAH VINE: Royal biographer Omid Scobie may be a leech... but the treachery of Harry was so much worse Christina Aguilera sparks a fan frenzy as she arrives at her Melbourne afterparty following rained-out performance at Always Live festival

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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. 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”. Years later, in 2006, Der Spiegel confronted Berger about having spied on his students. ‘I cannot explain my behaviour, nor make excuses for it,’ he said. ‘I ask those affected for forgiveness.’

Contradiction also animates the story of Berger, the man at the centre of the web. A mediocre poet who won vast acclaim, he had refused to join the Socialist Unity party and yet had accumulated significant influence within the state. A total of 620,000 informers were listed on the Stasi’s books between 1950 and 1989, their role to report on dodgy tendencies and opinions among the populace. The GDR was, in effect, a nation of curtain-twitchers. Berger had been approached to join them as an “informal collaborator” and apparently took to the work with alacrity, turning out a steady flow of lies, half-truths and obfuscations. In 1982, he was rewarded by the Stasi with a silver “brotherhood in arms” medal for his efforts, though in a memoir he wrote after the Berlin Wall came down he makes no mention of it or of his reports. He implied that his work as an informant came to an end once he took over the poetry circle at Adlershof, whereas we now know this posting marked a sinister new chapter in his snitching career. Silence of the Royal sisters-in-law: Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle 'have not spoken in four years', claims Sussexes 'mouthpiece' Omid Scobie Bobby Brazier's Strictly tribute to Jade Goody moves judges Shirley Ballas, Anton Du Beke and actor's father Jeff to tearsOlivia Culpo shows off her NFL star fiancé Christian McCaffrey's painful bruises and scratches from the 49ers' Thanksgiving win over the Seahawks Are STEM CELLEXOSOMES the secret to a 'snatched' jawline? Discover the products that influencers are claiming gave them taut, flawless skin... The 1920s Philosophy's Golden Age https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q380 Wittgenstein changed his mind, Heidegger revolutionised philosophy (and the German language), and both the Frankfurt School and the Vienna Circle were in full swing. Written by a second lieutenant in the Stasi’s central information service, these experimental lyrics still lie in a cache of poems at the Stasi Records Archive in Berlin, subsumed into the German federal archives last year. The folders full of typewritten verse – some written in jaunty rhyming couplets, others in tense vers libre – bear testimony to one of the most bizarre experiments of the socialist German Democratic Republic, when one of the most fearsome secret police forces in European history tried to weaponise the vaguest of literary disciplines, the “art of substantiating shadows, and of lending existence to nothing”, as Edmund Burke once wrote.