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. The extraordinary true story of the Stasi’s poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society .

In this article, I will discuss the importance of poetry circles and how they have impacted certain social groups for the better. I will also explain that I host a relaxed writing group free of charge and that everybody is welcome to join. The poetic and political destiny of East Germany were intertwined: that had been the credo of an influential group of poets who had returned from exile after the second world war to take up political posts in the fledgling satellite state of Soviet Russia. One of them, poet-turned-culture-minister Johannes R Becher, argued that creative writing would not merely reflect the social conditions of East Germany, but shape them. poets, including Ted Walter (1933 - 2012), who was for many years an associate member of Shortlands Poetry Circle. I digress. In this case the Stasi convinced itself that one way to win the cold war was to convince the West that the their culture was not as good was by becoming better poets, hence the title of the book. You can find more episodes of Free Thinking exploring German history and culture including: Florian Huber, Sophie Hardach, Tom Smith and Adam Scovell on New angles on post-war Germany and Austria https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006sjxIf 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.

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 NapolasThe poems of the talented teen Alexander Ruika, Berger wrote in a report in April 1983, were “ambivalent”: he had a problem with “power” under socialism. On subjects like collectivism, life in the army and revolution, he reported, the young lyricist was hard to pin down: he was “openly in favour”, but “subliminally against”. Increased sense of community: Poetry circles can help people to feel a sense of belonging and community. This is because they provide a space for people to connect with others who share their interests. 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. 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.

Berger was also a snitch – one of the 620,000 informers on the Stasi’s books. When he wasn’t grassing on friends and neighbours (“an alcoholic”, “a bit senile”, “unstable”), he was sniffing out counter-revolutionary tendencies in the workshop he ran. As the Stasi’s institutionalised paranoia increased in the 1980s, so Berger became more vigilant. Ambiguity worried him. What was the poet hiding? Could he be an insurrectionist in the making? Poetry circles are a powerful force for uniting people through words. They provide a shared space for people to express themselves, connect with others who share their love of writing, and share their stories and experiences. Poetry circles have been used to unite people in a variety of settings, and they have been shown to be an effective way to promote social inclusion.Overseeing this inky mission was the circle’s leader, Uwe Berger, who, after some searching, believed he had found his star student. Alexander Ruika was a recruit who had followed his colonel father into the Guards Regiment, an elite training ground for Stasi recruits. What separated Ruika from his fellow versifiers was his use of figurative language, the “mastery of metaphor” that Aristotle believed was the mark of genius. Oltermann traces his early successes – a string of awards, publication in prestigious literary magazines – but also hears a dissenting voice in his poems that suggests Ruika was not a model Chekist but “the Hamlet of the Stasi poetry circle”, a soul at war with himself. His ambivalence becomes almost a test case in this account – how to reconcile the free fluidities of poetry with the ideological constrictions of communism. Be prepared for a sting in the tale. Berger implied that his work as an informant came to an end once he took over the poetry circle at Adlershof On 25 October 1984, Berger wrote that Knauer had read out a poem about a dream in which he flew a kite that “escapes from narrow confinement and sails into freedom”. Berger explained that the kite was what poets called a metaphor, and that the poem was a covert call for East German army personnel to cross over to the west. 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. In none of the poems was this tendency more pronounced than in those of 18-year-old soldier Alexander Ruika, one of the few members of the circle with a genuinely interesting way with words. The Guards Regiment was not just an ordinary unit where East German teens could while away their military service. It was an elite training ground from which the Stasi would frequently recruit new talent for special missions, such as the “tunnel unit” that was tasked with preventing underground escapes to the west. If you are interested in joining a poetry circle, I encourage you to do so. You may be surprised at how much you enjoy it and how much you can learn from it.

It sounds interesting but I found the book quite dry. I'm not sure if part of this was because of the language of the time being discussed, the language of the state. There's also a lot of poetry dissection and analysis - I appreciate you can't get away from this when the central topic is the use of poetry as a weapon but I didn't find it the easiest read. I often found myself having to re-read sections multiple times to understand what was being said. Also, the narrative jumps around in time quite a lot which made it disjointed for me, sometimes we're with Oltermann's own investigations and his attempts to get interviews with people. Other times, we're in the timelines of those people as they're living the events. Also, I didn't feel the real impact of all this spying on people's lives, apart from maybe the case of Annegret Gollin, where the consequences of not conforming to type were very real and serious indeed. 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. Increased creativity: Poetry circles can help people to tap into their creativity and to express themselves in new and innovative ways. By 1984 morale within the Stasi was suffering. The Wall couldn’t keep out western influence. There were stirrings of a peace movement among the young. Even the military preferred Eric Clapton and Steven Spielberg to homegrown music and films. But the leaders of East Germany were old and the country was slower to accept glasnost than the rest of the Soviet bloc. At least the end was bloodless: whereas Nazi Germany went up in flames, in the GDR “there were no burnt bodies, only pulped files”.

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When Knauer finished reading it to the circle, he told me over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in Marzahn in 2019, there was a moment of silence. An ashen-faced kitchen worker, who had joined the group for the first time that day, rushed to the toilet. All the remaining eyes in the room were on the circle’s artistic leader. Uwe Berger said the poem was very technically advanced, and he was impressed with the skills the Chekists had acquired. Gerd Knauer, who was a junior officer within the Stasi’s propaganda unit when he attended the poetry circle. Photograph: Courtesy of Gerd Knauer I normally present a shortlist of books for my store's book club to choose from and I like to throw in one non-fiction into the mix each time - there's so much great non-fiction out there and it doesn't seem to get much of a look-in. This was the first time the book club had actually gone for it and now I'm rather worried that I might have turned them off non-fiction now :( Nonetheless, it makes for a fascinating read. The fact that members of the Stasi would meet to workshop their poetry seems surreal, but it did happen. Being the GDR, nothing was completely as it seemed. The country was rife with informants and people being surveilled - even in this Stasi group, poets were watching and reporting on poets. Found that he often went off on tangents not directly associated or relevant to the history/story of the Poetry Circle itself.