A meeting room at the Adlershof military compound in East Berlin. Fifteen men take their seats around a conference table, watched from above by the portraits of Erich Honecker (the German Democratic Republic’s head of state) and Lenin. The room falls silent as the figure at the top of the table opens a file. ‘Dear comrades in arms,’ he begins. ‘Today we are going to learn about the sonnet.’

Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle tells the bizarre and little-known story of the ‘Working Circle of Writing Chekists’, the East German secret police’s very own creative writing workshop. Chaired by the poet Uwe Berger, the group’s members included paramilitaries from the Stasi’s Guards Regiment, officers from the central information service and the propaganda unit, national service conscripts, and, on occasion, even a kitchen worker. The group met monthly to read and discuss each other’s work, and three anthologies were published: POEMS by the Circle of ‘Writing Chekists’ and other Comrades of the Guards Regiment Feliks Dzerzhinsky in 1969, I Met Dzerzhinsky…Chekists Write for Chekists in 1975, and We About Us in 1984.

But as well as workshopping their own creative writing, the Stasi agents were also learning how to read and interpret literature in search of subversive messages. Oltermann combines close readings of the group’s published and unpublished poems with first-hand interviews and archival research using ‘cadre’ files held at the Stasi Records Agency to tell the story of the poetry circle, its members, and its targets.

The Working Circle of Writing Chekists had been established as part of a range of cultural policies instituted in the GDR’s early years. Johannes R. Becher, a Bavarian poet who in 1945 had returned to Germany from exile in the Soviet Union, believed that the ‘barbarism of National Socialism…had been expressed most profoundly in its disdainful treatment of culture: the mocking of artists, the hounding of writers, the burning of books’. Becher was immensely proud of Germany’s cultural heritage, particularly its philosophers and writers, and the German language itself was, after all, the native tongue of Hegel, Engels, and Marx. Becher conceived of a new social order in the fledgling GDR, where ‘there would not be workers in one corner of society and intellectuals in the other, but only workers who wrote and writers who worked.’ He called this society ‘the Literaturgesellschaft, or “literature society”.’

Over the next four decades, the policies brought in to realise the Literaturgesellschaft ranged from tax breaks for artists, actors, and scientists to free opera and theatre tickets for factory workers. Culture was also brought into the workplace: in 1973 the government required that ‘larger factories must have an on-site library with five hundred to a thousand books, staffed by a part-time librarian. If the factory had over five hundred workers, the librarian needed to work full-time.’ In 1981, Honecker championed the GDR ‘as a “country of readers”—as opposed to what he called the “bestseller country” on the other side of the Berlin Wall.’ The government sought to make the GDR a country of writers, too: in 1959 the ‘Bitterfield Path’ was established, where ‘in order to bridge the divide between the working classes and the intelligentsia, writers would be plucked from their bourgeois writing dens and placed amongst manual workers in factories or coal mines.’ As well as working in the factories, the writers would also run ‘Circles of Writing Workers’ with the motto ‘Pick up the quill, comrade!’ The scheme was hugely successful: ‘Within a few years, every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle: train carriage construction workers, chemists, teachers. By the end of the GDR in 1989, there were still three hundred of them.’

The Writing Chekists began in 1960 as part of the Bitterfield scheme, and Berger began leading the group in 1982. But by this time the Stasi had become gripped by an ‘institutionalised paranoia’: every citizen was watched and a cadre file, listing everything from school reports and medical certificates to payslips and records of holidays, was assembled. At the top of the list of potential subversives were writers and artists, the very people who in the GDR’s early days had benefitted from Becher’s Literaturgesellschaft. In 1979, Stasi agents ‘came to the conclusion that cultural actors were particularly vulnerable to Western influence and could easily be turned into capitalism’s “ideological multipliers”’. As Frances Stonor Saunders describes in Who Paid the Piper? (1999), the CIA had indeed funded a number of projects as part of the so-called ‘cultural Cold War’, including film adaptations of Animal Farm (1954) and 1984 (1956) as well as the literary journal Encounter, founded in 1953. Berger and other members of the Writing Chekists were therefore recruited to begin scrutinising the work of East German writers to find and rout out subversive content.

The target of one such operation, code-named ‘Anthologie’, was Gert Neumann, a locksmith who had published two experimental novels, Guilty Words and Eleven O’Clock. Berger described Neumann in a report ‘as a “semi-educated psychopath”, whose “confused thoughts” and “highfalutin gibberish” rejected life in the socialist republic and “propagated a religious irrationalism”.’ A ‘full-scale surveillance operation’ began, with agents breaking into Neumann’s apartment, bugging every room and photocopying every piece of paper, and there were ‘at least seven informants dedicated to tracking his movements.’ Seven informants tailing a novelist. You do begin to ask, what is the point of that? The Stasi, however, didn’t think they’d gone far enough, so they went one further and recruited Neumann’s own mother as a spy.

The irony of this institutionalised paranoia is that when Gerd Knauer, a Writing Chekist and junior officer in the propaganda unit, finally visited West Berlin for the first time in 1989, he was completely underwhelmed. ‘The lure of the West’ had been ‘of the East’s own making.’ The paranoia about capitalism’s ‘ideological multipliers’ had been quite unnecessary: ‘Capitalism wasn’t beautiful enough to be banned.’ Reading The Stasi Poetry Circle, it’s difficult not to feel a touch of regret for the failure of Becher’s Literaturgesellschaft and the admirable cultural policies it had entailed. But the story of the Writing Chekists is ultimately the story of the Stasi’s cult of paranoia and its consequences.