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Lädt ... The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War (2023. Auflage)von Philip Oltermann (Autor)
Werk-InformationenThe Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War von Philip Oltermann
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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. --- The result is The Stasi Poetry Circle – The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War (published by Faber & Faber), a surprising, entertaining and enlightening account of the role of poetry in state control, and of the determination of Germany’s Socialist Unity Party dictatorship, complete with Five Year Plan, to surpass the West in the volume of its literary achievements. But there’s more than a little of Monty Python in Oltermann’s description of secret policemen having po-faced discussions of the poetic.
'Liebe Mitstreiter', he says. Dear comrades in arms. Today we are going to learn about the sonnet. Berlin, 1962. Morale is at rock bottom in East Germany, thrown into chaos by the new Berlin Wall. The Ministry for State Security is hunting for a new weapon in the war against capitalism - and their solution is stranger than fiction. Rather than guns, tanks, or bombs, the Stasi resolve to fight the enemy through rhyme and verse, winning the Culture Wars through poetry - and the result is the most bizarre book club in history. Consisting of 15 secret agents - from WW2 veterans to schoolboy recruits - the 'Working Group of Writing Chekists' met monthly from 1962 until the Wall fell. In a classroom adorned with portraits of Lenin, the spies wrote their own poetry and were taught verse, metre, and rhetoric by East German poet Uwe Berger. The regime hoped that poetry would sharpen the Stasi's 'party sword' by affirming the spies' belief in the words of Marx and Lenin, as well as strengthening the socialist faith of their comrades. But as the agents became steeped in poetry, revelling in its imaginative ambiguity, the result was the opposite. Rather than entrenching state ideology, they began to radically question it - and following a radical role reversal, the GDR's secret weapon dramatically backfired. Weaving unseen archival material with exclusive interviews from surviving members, Philip Oltermann reveals the incredible hidden story of a unique experiment: weaponising poetry for politics. Both a gripping true story and a parable about creativity in a surveillance state, this is The Lives of Others meets Dead Poets Society - and history writing at its finest. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)363.2830943109046Social sciences Social problems and services; associations Other social problems and services Police Services Services of special kinds of security and law enforcement agencies Secret History, geographic treatment, biography Europe Germany and Central Europe Northeastern Germany; German Democratic Republic History, geographic treatment, biography 1900-1999 1960-1969Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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This is a carefully researched history, and the author managed to follow up the stories and subsequent careers of quite a few creative writers, from conscripted soldiers to birder guards to professional poets. Such an interesting idea, but the book itself was not easy reading. But I'm glad I made the effort to find out a little more about this bit-part in GDR history. ( )