Why East Germany’s much-feared Stasi secret police studied poetry
- Officers of the ‘Circle of Writing Chekists’ within the Stasi discussed poetry to better detect literary subversion, at a time when art was seen as a weapon
- ‘The Stasi Poetry Circle’ by Philip Oltermann provides a surprising, entertaining and enlightening account of the role of poetry in state control
In pre-reunification Berlin, a handful of officers from East Germany’s much-feared secret police, the Staatssicherheitsdienst or Stasi, and workers in their private compound, would regularly sit down in a specially reserved conference room to discuss not police work, nor politics, but poetry.
This “Circle of Writing Chekists” sometimes studied the 14-line sonnet and how its form of thesis, antithesis and synthesis supposedly reflected Marxist dialectical materialism and the style of “debate” common to communist states.
Sometimes they discussed the verse structure of the 19-line villanelle, and sometimes the threat posed by metaphor. They read out their own poems, and intermittently published collections of verse.
“Cheka” was the Lenin-era name for what would go on to become the USSR’s KGB, and then modern Russia’s FSB. The East German version, the Stasi, more commonly discussed feet in terms of using them to kick down doors, not as units of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry.
But in a country where the written word was seen as a cultural unifying force of considerable power, and where circles of writing workers were being set up in factories and organisations of all kinds, the Stasi must be able to understand the literary tools available to the forces of dissent: allegories, metaphors, fables and alienation effects.