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sheenaghpugh
Lance-Corporals of Love
Who knew? That the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, when not prying into people’s private affairs, destabilising marriages and generally messing up lives, met to study the sonnet and produce anthologies of poetry? But then, as Oltermann points out “the history of the GDR is a book usually read back to front”. We all know, indeed some of us saw, the latter days of the paranoid gerontocracy, trying to make fear do the work of the enthusiasm they could no longer engender. But it is easy to forget that some of those who first set it up were imbued with genuine idealism and a desire not only to reclaim Germany’s impressive cultural heritage but to make it more available to the masses than it had ever been.
Johannes Becher, returning from Russian exile to postwar devastation, gave up his own writing to become a political fixer and give art - “the very definition of everything good and beautiful, of a more meaningful, humane way of living” - an honoured place in the new republic. Though he died in 1958, his dream of bringing artists together with workers survived him. “Theatres and opera houses handed out a proportion of their tickets to factories and educational institutions. A 1973 decree prescribed that larger factories must have an on-site library.” And the “Bitterfeld Path” programme sent writers out to run workshops among workers. “Within a few years every branch of industry had its own writers’ circle, by the end of the GDR in 1989 there were still 300 of them.” Christa Wolf, Brigitte Reimann and Erik Neutsch all wrote famous novels while on such placements.
However things finally turned out, these initiatives were clearly laudable. So what went wrong? Becher’s own view of the sonnet may give a clue. He saw it as the artistic expression of dialectical materialism, with the octave as the thesis, the first four lines of the sestet as the antithesis and the final couplet as the synthesis. But things just aren’t as tidy as that, nor do artists of any calibre generally feel at ease as part of a political establishment and singing its tune. It didn’t help that the government censors were hugely distrustful of the poets, feeling that the artful fellows were taking advantage of their ignorance of poetry to sneak sedition past them, as indeed they were – Uwe Kolbe’s subversive poem “Core of my Novel” got past in 1981 because the censors didn’t know enough to look for acrostics.
Their solution, typically, was not to give up trying to censor writing, but to employ spies better versed in these techniques, and the leader of the Stasi writing group, the really rather obnoxious Uwe Berger, was regularly writing intelligence reports on his students. Also, of course, their work was being directed into what he saw as useful channels. In the group’s early days, the younger students especially were keen to write love poetry and at first this was tolerated, until it became clear that this tended to political incorrectness:
“One young member of the secret police fantasised in free verse about being kissed by a young maiden unaware of his lowly rank, thus elevating him to a ‘lance-corporal of love’. ‘Patiently I wait’, the lusty teenager wrote, ‘for my next promotion/at least/to general’. Another young soldier imagined in a sestina writing the words ‘I love you’ into the dark night sky with his searchlight.” The energy, humour and inventiveness of these poems was promising. Alas, when the young poets began expressing the wish to have the beloved all to themselves, “never to be nationalised”, they were hastily guided into duller channels.
When they did manage to express genuine talent without interference, it was sometimes because they themselves were also working undercover for the state. This was the case with the group’s most talented poet, Alexander Ruika, though it also sounds as if he was not only coerced into it but produced reports his masters must have found singularly unhelpful. The three-way conversation between Ruika, Oltermann and the novelist Gert Neumann, on whom Ruika had gathered intelligence, is fascinating, as is the way Neumann baffled the government, not only because they couldn’t for the life of them understand his prose but because, though a constant thorn in the establishment’s side, he showed no desire to leave for the west and indeed worried that if he did a western tour, as some writers did, he might not be allowed back in. It never seems to have dawned on them that criticism did not necessarily mean rejection.
I’d have loved to see some of the poems from which Oltermann quotes reproduced in the original German in an appendix, which could have been a real asset. But this is otherwise a most informative, balanced and thought-provoking book.
