The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 10
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Annegret Gollin was a non-conformist, and in the eyes of the Stasi a youthful troublemaker they wanted to constrain. Her incarceration was almost inevitable, and she could equally well have been prosecuted for smuggling cigarettes or for possession of a banned book. However, the verses for which the Stasi arrested her appeared to disturb the secret police far more than her wayward lifestyle. In the months following her arrest on 11 February 1980, Gollin was interviewed thirty-six times about her modest poetic output. Again and again the twenty-three-year-old was marched to an interrogation room and asked to interpret and explain her own poems. The police could see what her poems said, but what did they mean? Was this poem a criticism of the National People’s Army? Did this line mock the Socialist Unity Party? Was this title a reference to the police crackdown on the 1977 protests at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz? Every air pocket of ambiguity had to be beaten out of the pieces of paper the spies had retrieved from Gollin’s flat. One of the poems, she eventually explained, was a criticism of how the East German government handled the expulsion of the dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann: ‘In my poem,’ Gollin told her interrogators, ‘I make the claim that there is no freedom in the GDR, and that everyone who takes a political view that runs counter to that of the Party and government is being imprisoned or expelled from the GDR.’ Even after the author had been made to trample over her literary work until it was flattened into a literal message, the Stasi could not quite fathom what they were dealing with. The charges against Gollin bring to mind a terrorist building home-made explosives, not a teenage girl jotting down her insecurities in her bedroom: ‘In 1977, she made the decision to practice subversive agitation in written form. To achieve this aim, she made use of certain expertise she had acquired in a literature club in Neubrandenburg, and manufactured eleven inflammatory pamphlets in verse form. These were transferred from Post-it notes in her A5 format so-called literature book and circulated in early 1979.’
How could a state be so scared of a few lines of verse? These weren’t poems written by a powerful, influential author admired by millions, but an unemployed twenty-one-year-old with no publishing contract to her name. They weren’t photocopied verses going viral behind closed doors, but lines handwritten into a school notebook, shared with no more than five close friends. Her poem titled Betonien, or ‘Concretia’, was laid out in an unusual style, like two tower blocks of text.
I live in the 20th century.
I live the modern way.
I live a super life.
I live progressively.
I am a creature of Concretia.
I find it nice and interesting.
I find it good and comfortable.
I look out of the window.
I see concrete to my left.
I see concrete to my right.
I feel good
I notice
I think concrete.
I become concrete.
(That’s not just the case in New York City.)
At its 1971 party conference, the Socialist Unity Party had passed a proposal for a vastly ambitious construction programme with the aim of completely eradicating housing shortages by the year 1990. Eighty-seven thousand new residential units were built within the first year alone – by 1978, a year after Annegret Gollin wrote ‘Concretia’, the millionth new apartment was ceremonially handed over to the Grosskopf family in Berlin’s Marzahn district. Most were Plattenbauen, constructed with slabs of pre-cast concrete, many of them dropped incongruously onto the outskirts of small rural towns. A teenage Annegret had seen prefab tower blocks sprout like autumn mushrooms covering the hillside where she had gone sledging as a child, and had taken an instinctive dislike to them. She called them Sachsenschliessfächer, ‘Saxon deposit boxes’ – a reference to the compulsory resettlement programmes of the 1950s and 1960s, when the East German state had removed thousands of citizens from near the border with West Germany. The population of the GDR was made up of two tribes that had feuded for centuries, and in the minds of Mecklenburgers like Annegret Gollin, Saxons tended to be slavishly loyal to the regime (Saxons, of course, believed the same to be true of those who lived in the north). To her, the concrete high-rises of ‘Concretia’ were nothing but devices to instil discipline among the population and water down the concentration of dissidents: those who live in concrete end up thinking like concrete, the poem suggests in its penultimate line. But were the Stasi really able to unpack a poem like that?
Perhaps what made Annegret Gollin’s fifteen lines of verse so threatening was not what they said, but the fact that it is unclear whether they said anything at all. In his testimony to his Stasi handlers, informant ‘Klaus Richter’ claimed he remembered the poem so well because he had disagreed with the last line and asked her to change it. When grilled by the Stasi later, Gollin herself remembered their discussion differently: in her recollection, it was her tutor who had encouraged her to add that last line to narrow down the ambiguity. The final line, ‘That’s not just the case in New York City’, creates another layer of meaning: uniform, heavily set architecture is a metaphor for uniform, heavily set thinking not just in the class enemy’s capital of capitalism, but also elsewhere, though the poet doesn’t say where. But it is a line that also removes ambiguity: without it, most people would have read it as a poem about East Germany, while being able to pretend that it’s a poem about America. ‘The process of getting to understand a poet’, wrote William Empson, ‘is precisely that of constructing his poems in one’s mind.’
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‘Just because you’re paranoid’, Joseph Heller wrote in Catch 22, ‘doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.’ And there was some evidence that authorities in the East were particularly aware of the subversive power of poetry because their counterparts in the West were too. The first post-war German Writers’ Congress in early October 1947 – the gathering where Johannes R. Becher had announced that literature in the East would have the standing of a Grossmacht or ‘sovereign great power’ – had been rudely interrupted by an American visitor with a neatly trimmed beard who protested that no writer could ever enjoy freedom in a Soviet empire where aesthetic taste was decreed by the politburo. The speech drew a variety of impassioned responses from the assembled literati. Some responded with frantic applause, others with heckles of ‘A foreign guest should not be allowed to speak like that!’ One attendant merely shouted the name of composer Hanns Eisler: the Austrian who composed the piece of music that would become the GDR national anthem had been one of the first to be blacklisted in Hollywood during the McCarthy-era witch hunts, and had only a few months previously been interrogated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, a group that included a young Richard Nixon.
For the interruptor, US author Melvin J. Lasky, it was the start of a stellar career in the divided ex-capital of Germany, earning him a reputation as the man who would drag America into the cultural Cold War. Bronx-born Lasky believed that in order to win the dormant conflict between the two great powers, America could not just rely on its popular culture, ‘cheese-cake and leg-art’, to win the hearts of the masses, but also needed to appeal to the minds of the intellectual class. Within the next three years, he was given not just one but two vehicles with which to achieve this goal. In 1948, Lasky was made editor of the West Berlin-based literary magazine Der Monat (‘The Month’), which specialised in publishing a high-profile roster of writers and thinkers who had once been or were still associated with the political left: George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, even the Frankfurt School Marxist Theodor Adorno. And in January 1950, Lasky managed to convince the West Berlin mayor Ernst Reuter to back a broader cultural initiative aimed at gathering liberal but anti-communist writers from across the ‘free world’: the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which would help set up literary magazines with a liberal-left slant everywhere from France to Japan, Nigeria to Lebanon. West Berlin’s efforts in the culture war would later get its own architectural monument just a few hundred metres from the Reichstag and the border between East and West: a congress centre with an audaciously curved roof, later known as the House of World Cultures. Nicknamed the ‘pregnant oyster’, the building was intended by its backers as a deliberate counter-statement to the showcase of new socialist architecture on Stalinallee boulevard on the other side of town – in the words of the new congress centre’s champion, Eleanor Dulles, sister of the CIA director Allen Dulles, it would be ‘a bright beacon shining light into the east’. By the time the world came to be gripped by the arms race, the arts race was already in full swing.
If the East had openly declared art a weapon, America had been more covert. In 1966, the New York Times revealed in a series of articles that the CIA had been secretly transferring funds to false-front organisations – a year later, it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom had been one of them, and that American intelligence agencies had more or less directly funded the careers of leading intellectuals, artists, musicians and writers across the Western world, including Jackson Pollock, Stephen Spender and even one of the towering moral authorities of the West German literary world, Heinrich Böll. In East Germany, this was barely news. It merely confirmed what authorities and the press had said from the beginning. As early as June 1950, Johannes R. Becher had declined to appear on a panel organised by Lasky with the words ‘I don’t debate with snitches’, and East German newspaper Neues Deutschland had published an open letter that exposed what it called ‘the biggest culture scandal of the century’: ‘It is a fact that this Congress [for Cultural Freedom] takes place under the protectorate of the American secret service.’
By the start of the 1980s, however, the idea that American spies were still actively trying to worm their way into East German writers’ minds through literature seemed increasingly far-fetched. The Congress for Cultural Freedom had closed down in the wake of the New York Times scandal, and though East German newspapers still occasionally asked correspondents to dig up dirt on its successor organisation, the International Association for Cultural Freedom, they usually returned empty-handed. Der Monat shut up shop in 1971 and Lasky headed to London to edit its British counterpart, Encounter; an attempt to revive Der Monat in 1978 proved short-lived and lacked the influence of its original incarnation.
And yet the Stasi kept on searching for camouflaged infiltrators. The fact that they weren’t able to unmask more spooks did not convince them that the Americans were less active. On the contrary: surely it had to mean the class enemy was using ever more sophisticated means of disguise. In 1979, graduates of the Ministry for State Security’s own academic institutions in Potsdam took a closer look at the ‘counter-revolutionary events’ of Budapest 1956 and Prague 1968, and came to the conclusion that cultural actors were particularly vulnerable to Western influence and could easily be turned into capitalism’s ‘ideological multipliers’: ‘If external enemy powers manage to mislead persons from this field, to bring them under their influence and eventually build them up into a fulcrum of enemy support, then this offers them a variety of opportunities to realise their subversive plans to create an inner opposition inside the GDR and other countries.’ The screws on the once so privileged literary class had already been tightened in the wake of protests against the state’s treatment of expatriated singer-songwriter Wolf Biermann in 1976. Any author who wanted to be published had to first submit their book to the Culture Ministry, where it was thoroughly frisked for subversive content. The Ministry did not use the word ‘censorship’, but described this process as ‘appraisal’. Outright bans were indeed rare: because the state had sole control over the supply of paper, it could easily pressure publishers to withdraw works, seemingly of their own accord. Surveillance work was scaled up: operation ‘Transit’ against Annegret Gollin was one of roughly a hundred and fifty formal proceedings against writers that the Stasi set up between 1970 and 1989. In July 1979, Culture Minister Hans-Joachim Hoffmann visited the Stasi headquarters on Normannenstrasse to focus the snoops’ minds on the threat posed by poets, ‘these people with whom we have for the last three years been living in an open feud.’ ‘Linie XX/7’, the state security department dealing with cultural activity, was boosted at the start of the 1980s, growing to around 170 full-time employees.
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Deep down, perhaps the Stasi didn’t really believe Western spy agencies were using poems and novels to covertly undermine East German morale. Instead, there seemed to be something integral to what poets did that they perceived to be subverting the state. The authority of the Socialist Unity Party, a party that was ‘re-elected’ every three to five years in a non-free, non-secret vote, rested not in the mandate of the electorate but in the claim, inscribed in the country’s constitution, that only the Party was able to read Marx, Engels and Lenin in the correct way. Intellectuals who came up with alternative readings were an instant threat. The case of singer-songwriter Biermann is well known, while that of Rudolf Bahro less so: three years before Annegret Gollin’s arrest, the philosopher was arrested on trumped-up charges following the publication of The Alternative, a treatise arguing that the East German government had failed to overcome the capitalist division of labour diagnosed by Marx and therefore remained only a proto-socialist state. The Bahro saga, which ended with the socialist intellectual migrating to West Germany in 1979, was symptomatic of a philosophical battle between the state and its internal critics over words and what they were allowed to mean.
One mechanism through which the Socialist Unity Party sought to control the use of language was the publication of a lexicon, first printed in 1967 and then updated every three to five years: the Little Political Dictionary. The dictionary defined the Berlin Wall not as a barrier for people who wanted to leave the country but as an ‘anti-fascist protection wall’: the Wall, it explained, had ‘secured peace’ by spoiling Western plans for a military conflict, and put a stop to the ‘plundering’ of the GDR by the West German republic. The dictionary’s definition for the word ‘opposition’ was that such a concept could not exist in a socialist state: in bourgeois political systems, parliaments were divided between parties in and out of government. In East Germany, however, there was ‘no objective social or political basis for an opposition’ because the working class was both the ruling class and the main source of economic productivity. The entry for the word ‘freedom’ involved a similar degree of contortion. ‘Freedom’, it claimed, citing Engels, was not the ‘imagined independence from natural laws … but the recognition of these laws’. Because all ‘material and spiritual un-freedoms’ had already been overcome under socialism and communism, the Little Political Dictionary concluded, workers in the GDR already lived in the ‘realm of freedom’.
No paycheck from a Western spy agency was required for poets to brush up against these linguistic constraints: in Annegret Gollin’s case, she ran into conflict with the official definition of ‘freedom’ upon her arrest. In spite of its twenty-four-hour surveillance operation, the Stasi had missed something about the twenty-three-year-old until the arrest on 11 February 1980: she was three months pregnant. In September the previous year, Gollin had married Harald Schlieder, a tall and lean hitch-hiker with long hair. On 28 March, the court case against the negative-decadent poet was put on hold for fourteen months to allow her to give birth and begin to raise her child. When the court verdict came through in 1981, it was more lenient than expected: Gollin was ordered to hand over her poetic oeuvre and take up regular employment, and given only a suspended sentence of two years. She could enjoy her freedom within the limits set by the state. But Annegret Gollin decided to put her freedom to the test: on 7 March 1982, she asked a friend to babysit her son and met a group of friends at a dance hall in Ebersbrunn, for her first outing since becoming a mother. Alcohol was cheap, and her friends were generous. By 6 p.m., she had had nine shots of Mocca Edel schnapps. As she walked from the dance hall into the bar area, a friend pointed out a young man with curly hair, whom she recognised from her hitch-hiking days. Her group had regarded the young man as a suspicious character: he had told some people that he had studied philosophy, others that he had studied medicine, and generally seemed a bit too eager to make friends. Gollin went up to the man and laughed in his face: ‘Don’t think you can make friends just because you’re wearing a disguise,’ she said. ‘We still don’t want to have anything to do with you.’ In the ensuing scenes, the man pulled Gollin’s jumper. ‘I know what you think,’ he said, according to Gollin’s later testimony in front of the police. ‘Yes, I am with the Stasi! It’s my job to get you into prison and your child into state care, so that it is brought up properly.’ Gollin called the man a pig and spat in his face. He spoke up, so that everyone could hear him: ‘Have a look at this woman: she smokes, she boozes, and she has a child at home. And she claims to be a mother!’
