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

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I host a relaxed writing group free of charge. The group is open to everyone, regardless of their level of experience. The group uses WhatsApp to stay connected and uses Google Docs to share work. We encourage members to offer editorial suggestions and praise. Stars, normally it's either 5 stars or nothing, so what's different here? Hard to say actually, a lot of books are set in events long since passed, or todays countries but in olden times or even in countries invented by the author. 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. Helen Roche is Associate Professor in Modern European Cultural History at the University of Durham. Her second book is The Third Reich’s Elite Schools: A History of the Napolas

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.He snitched upon others, too. Oltermann points to the “unremarkable” quality of Berger’s own poems, despite the numerous prizes given to him by the regime. Spite got the better of him. He denounced more successful writers and poets, as well as his own editor when she was lukewarm about his work. Berger died in 2014, defending his actions to the end. 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. 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. Of course art in the East was required to be blended with Marxist-Leninism, and where better to start with the blending than with those art-loving jokers in the East German secret police, the Stasi.

If a sinner sins and knows not what they do, is it still a sin if someone doesn't point out that it is sinful?poets, including Ted Walter (1933 - 2012), who was for many years an associate member of Shortlands Poetry Circle.