This was, in Becher’s mind, a reaction to Nazi philistinism. (Think of that line often misattributed to Goering: “Whenever I hear the word culture, I unlock the safety catch on my Browning.”) Becher believed poetry was “the very definition of everything good and beautiful, of a more meaningful, humane form of living”. As a poetry critic, it’s a sentiment I’ve expressed myself, but this bleakly funny history made me doubt it. Stalin and Mao wrote poetry: did it really turn them into better, more humane people?
Berger – and the Stasi – took a less wholesome view: “Art is a weapon.” A good poem, for Berger, was propaganda without ambiguity. The purpose of creative writing was to “intensify the hatred of the enemies of peace and socialism”. This fiery vision was let down by what his students actually produced. After all, few men in love are communists. “Want you/ to be mine/ just mine/ and hope never/ to be nationalised,” wrote one smitten soldier to his beau.
Aside from its propaganda role, the workshop served a second function, as a way for the Stasi to spy on itself; poetry might be a window to a writer’s innermost thoughts. Oltermann shows how similar snooping took place in writing groups around the country. He tells the distressing story of a free-spirited hitchhiker and bookseller called Annegret Gollin. Dobbed in as a subversive by a seemingly sympathetic teacher, she was arrested and questioned 36 times just for a few “lines handwritten into a school notebook, shared with no more than five close friends”.
Above all, it seems, the Party feared ambiguity. They lived in terror of the impenetrable Gert Neumann, a literary celebrity whose gnomic novels were acclaimed west of the Wall but unpublished in his home country. “They weren’t officially censored,” Oltermann points out. “His manuscripts simply got stuck in the state censor’s office because even the Culture Ministry’s smartest minds couldn’t figure out what they actually said.” There were at least seven informants dedicated to tracking Neumann’s movements; his own mother spied on him; three literary critics were hired by the ministry to decode his prose. He left them all stumped.
By contrast, Oltermann’s own prose is fast-moving and lucid, with a enjoyably pulpy, hardboiled quality that only occasionally slips into clumsy journalese. “It wasn’t only the thoughts racing around Rolf-Dieter Melis’s head that were accelerating: the number of people leaving East Germany.” (I think he forgot to add “was, too.”)
If the story he tells seems outlandish, it’s worth remembering that this “arts race” wasn’t one-sided. Eric Bennett (in Workshops of Empire) has written about how the CIA funded creative writing at the University of Iowa as a Cold War gambit. It was the polar opposite of Berger’s workshop: creativity at Iowa became all about the cult of the individual, with any kind of philosophical or political writing quashed by the thought-deadening maxim “show don’t tell”.
Amid many colourful details in Oltermann’s history (the contents of the Guards Regiment’s record collection, what they watched on movie nights, etc) I was strangely moved by his account of a subversive children’s book called The Steaming Necks of the Horses in the Tower of Babel, which somehow slipped past the GDR’s censors when it came out in 1978. “Sometimes I like poems because they are beautiful and nothing else,” the children in the book say. “Is that so bad?”
The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann is published by Faber at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
