The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 11
On 19 March, Annegret Gollin was sentenced to twenty months at a prison in Karl-Marx-Stadt: one year reactivated from her previously suspended conviction and eight months for ‘public vilification of an organ of the state’. Her son was sent to a children’s home. In December, she found out that her son’s father had died, supposedly of an accidental gas leak at his home, though the circumstances were suspicious: her late husband had trained as a gas-fitter and lived in a flat with a persistent draught. One of the poems for which Gollin was sentenced to prison was called ‘I Laugh at You’, containing the following lines of blank verse:
Shut your gob, you shouted
And threw a punch
Now I am missing my front teeth
And I call out twice as loud
for freedom.
*
One of the books Annegret Gollin had discovered during her apprenticeship as a bookseller conjured a vivid picture of the East German state’s relationship with language. Notionally a children’s book with language games, poet Franz Fühmann’s The Steaming Necks of the Horses in the Tower of Babel centres on a group of friends whom a Turkish ghost called Küslübürtün teaches about palindromes, anagrams and rhyme schemes, as well as introducing them to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer and Karl Marx. The central metaphor of the book, and Fühmann’s central metaphor for the state of the GDR in the late 1970s, was the biblical Tower of Babel: a structure, as his child students are quick to point out, that could not have been built without a common language. How else could its architect have conveyed to the builders what he had in mind? But having a common language made the workers too powerful: they would have kept on building the tower until it reached into Heaven. In the Book of Genesis, God decides to confuse the people’s common language, and scatters different tongues all over the globe. Fühmann, an idiosyncratic Marxist, read the Old Testament myth against the grain: the confusion of language, as he saw it, was not a punishment from on high, but a feature of the division of labour, something he regarded as an inevitability rather than a bourgeois aberration: ‘It started with the division into hunting and farming, which literally divided the tribes – farmers were stuck in one place, but the hunters roamed the land.’ Farmers needed to find new words to distinguish types of plant, while the hunters were content to stick with ‘grass’. ‘Work has created language, but work has also confused language,’ says the little green ghost in baggy salvar trousers. Fühmann’s book is a celebration of the anarchic mess of language, its inconsistency and absurd beauty. The most ridiculous character in The Steaming Necks of the Horses in the Tower of Babel is the officious librarian Herr Leipzig, who speaks in the jargon of the Socialist Unity Party and warns children off ‘nonsense’ poems that ‘don’t convey progressive knowledge or useful feelings’. ‘Sometimes I like poems because they are beautiful and nothing else,’ the children reply. ‘Is that so bad?’
Fühmann’s book passed the censors, but the message between its lines was slyly subversive. One way to read it was as a kind of DIY manual for encrypting and decoding the confused language of a confused regime, a manifesto for poetic terrorists like Annegret Gollin or the poet Uwe Kolbe. In 1981, Kolbe’s sixty-two-line poem, ‘Core of my Novel’, ended up on the desks of the Culture Ministry’s censors. The state-sponsored assessors were used to scrutinising texts for diversion tactics, obviously provocative so-called ‘white elephants’ or ‘porcelain dogs’, designed to distract them from the more subtle criticism the writer really wanted to get across. But Kolbe’s poem raised no suspicions and got the all-clear. Only after publication did state officials realise they had failed to read the poem the right way around: if you strung together the first letter of each word in the epic poem, you got the following message:
Your measures are miserable
Your demands enough for bootlickers
Your formerly blood-red flag blows
Into a sluggish belly
To the victims of your heroism I dedicate
An orgasm
May you mighty old men be torn apart
By the daily revolution
Since some writers had been able to evade their censors in such a humiliating fashion, the Stasi concluded it needed to get even better at understanding the machinations of poetry. In April 1980, the Ministry for State Security’s own think tank, the Chair for Scientific Communism, produced a thirty-page position paper on ‘solutions to problems in the field of cultural politics and its current political and political-operative consequences’. Quoting Lenin, it reminded the Chekists that ‘a war can be won in a few months, but in the field of culture it is impossible to achieve victory in such a short time’. The cultural Cold War required greater tenacity, more patience, and more systematic planning. Especially at a point in time in which ‘real existing socialism’ seemed to be winning on the economic, political, and military front, it argued, the threat on the culture front was greater than ever before. A good Chekist had not just to train himself physically, but to sharpen his eye when it came to detecting forms of literary subversion. Art and culture, the Stasi think tank concluded, were especially prone to ‘covert and subliminal assaults’, because their practitioners employed unusual ways of reflecting on the ‘objective reality’ of the real world, among others ‘allegories, metaphors, fables, alienation effects’. To disarm these new enemies, the secret police needed a young Chekist who had access to their arsenal and understood how it worked.
Lesson 8
HEROIC POETRY
Narrative verse that is elevated in mood and uses a dignified, dramatic and formal style to describe the deeds of aristocratic warriors and rulers.
The Stasi had developed an interest in Alexander Ruika’s connections to the literary world before he joined Uwe Berger’s circle. As early as February 1982, the Main Division XX/7 sent out the first of a series of letters to the Guards Regiment, enquiring about the teenager: ‘hostile persons’ and ‘oppositionally suspect writers’, such as the great novelist Stefan Heym, had apparently met Ruika at readings and literary parties and taken a shine to the talented youngster. The Stasi’s central information service was tasked with scrutinising his background and connections. The initial verdict was positive: because of his mother’s literary activities, Ruika was familiar with the Biermann saga and had ‘learnt to differentiate’. Uwe Berger’s first reports on his poetry had raised some questions about the purity of his ideological convictions, but by September 1983, there were signs of improvement. Ruika, Berger wrote in one dispatch, ‘seems to be making good progress’: ‘He is prepared to change and gets involved.’ Earlier in the year he had married his girlfriend and become a father for the first time. ‘He seems relaxed,’ Berger felt. On 13 September, Ruika was officially designated a potential future recruit, a ‘probationary’ unofficial informant, complete with the provisional cover name ‘Grosse’. Over the coming months, he was invited eight times for meetings at an apartment in Marzahn, where a man from the Stasi asked him questions about people he knew and told him to make more enquiries about various people he didn’t. The reports on these meetings in his file are vaguely phrased, but suggest that in some cases Ruika complied. In others he didn’t. Ruika was ‘not an easy character’, Berger commented. ‘I’m on the right path / and try to be nice / and share all day and night,’ goes a verse in one of the young Chekist’s poems. ‘But still / I fight.’
One tactic the Stasi deployed when it couldn’t land a catch that was thrashing about wildly under the surface was to stun it with a swift blow. In late summer 1984, Alexander Ruika was ordered to make a delivery from his command post at Erkner to the main compound in Adlershof. His holiday was due to start the day after, and he had again been invited to attend the Poetry Seminar in Schwerin. But after he dropped off the parcel at the post room, the guard at the front gate would not let him leave. After Ruika tried to start a fight, he was thrown in a cell, where he embarked on a hunger strike in protest. Three days in, when hunger and thirst started to bite, his cell door opened and a woman in her forties entered. ‘I think there are some problems here we need to talk about,’ she said, and Ruika opened up, telling her about his marriage problems, the burden of becoming a father, his conflicts with his parents and his ambivalence about working for the Ministry for State Security. The woman listened patiently, but after an hour her demeanour suddenly changed: she told Ruika that he was a bad person set on boycotting life in the GDR, an enemy of socialism who deserved to be locked up in Bautzen, the notoriously rough political prison in Saxony. When Ruika barked back at her, the woman left. After a few days without further questioning, he received a message that another visitor wanted to see him. In the visitor’s room at Adlershof, his father was waiting for him, a large peach resting on the table between the two men. Unless he wanted to end up in prison for the long haul, his father said, he needed to apologise. ‘Think about it,’ the old colonel said. ‘Don’t be stupid.’
On 19 July 1984, Alexander Ruika’s probationary status was upgraded to that of an IMS, an unofficial informant tasked with infiltrating a specific area of public life. His file states that the informant was available for service around the clock – ‘in his free time, during the day, at night’ – and that he was sent on a mission to create a ‘who is who’ profile of aspiring young authors in Berlin and Leipzig, as well as making close observations of public readings by authors suspected of dissident tendencies. Sometimes cadre files will hint that an informant was blackmailed into service – the phrase ‘making amends’ is a giveaway. Ruika’s file at least claims that the young man took on his new task of his own free will, because ‘he recognises the necessity of our secret struggle’.
When his military service came to an end in September that year and he left his barracks for the last time, Alexander Ruika was unofficial collaborator ‘IM Michael Lindner’, his name possibly a fatalistic nod to Michael Lindener, a sixteenth-century author of bawdy broadsides who appointed himself ‘poeta laureatus’ of Leipzig and was executed for stabbing an innkeeper to death.
I looked back over Ruika’s poems. There was one called ‘Transformation in Autumn, or The Call-Up’, which describes the crossing of a symbolic threshold. ‘Close the door / and walk. / Far. How far?’ The first time I read this poem I had detected a bitter aftertaste, a sarcastic undertone: I imagined Ruika was subverting the language of conscription to describe what was actually his departure from the Guards Regiment, stepping out into the real world. But now I wasn’t so sure: maybe the poet was walking in rather than out. ‘Step through the gate,’ the poem concludes. ‘Be weak / and / become strong.’ Another Ruika wrote for the poetry circle was called ‘In Anger, or: After a Discussion about Literature’.
Go ahead!
You keep on searching for your true selves!
Dig up your own navel,
immortalise the sighs of your bedfellows
Go ahead.
Meanwhile I go out into the world
TO THE GIANT OF MUROM
I want to wake him.
Who was this giant, so awesome he required capitalisation? I emailed a folk-tale specialist I knew, who referred me to a Russian historian, who said he hadn’t heard of the Giant of Murom but would put my query to an email group of Slavicists. A Swiss academic pointed me towards a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘The Tsars’, that referred to the waking of ‘Ilya, the Giant of Murom’. Another email, this time from a scholar in the US: the Giant of Murom was Ilya Muromets, a mythical knight errant of medieval Russian epic poetry, who defended the medieval kingdom of Rus against foreign invaders. She pointed me to a recently published book. Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1999, the Russian Orthodox Church went on to make Ilya Muromets the patron saint of Russian border guards. His most famous epic adventure was the battle with Solovei the Brigand. ‘Solovei’ is the Russian word for nightingale, the bird that poets through the ages have identified as avian kin to their own profession: ‘A Poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds,’ wrote Shelley. But Solovei the Brigand was not a sweet-sounding bird but a monster, half-human, half-animal, who had a human family and a human face, but could also fly and lived in a tree. His special skill was not a sweet night song but a high-pitched shriek that made flowers lose their petals and devastated entire cities. If someone were really to wake the Giant of Murom, then the old Russian folk tale warned that he would take his revenge on the poets:
Then the old Cossack Ilya Muromets
Quickly mounted his good steed,
He took Nightingale to the open field
And he cut off his reckless head.
Lesson 9
DISSONANCE
A disruption of harmonic sounds or rhythms; a harsh collection of sounds.
Inside the impregnable fortress at Adlershof, a vague feeling was growing that something outside its gates wasn’t right. Stray signals were finding their way through the Stasi’s impenetrable walls and showing up on their radars. Some inside picked up incomprehensible static noise, interspersed with clearly audible messages spelling doom and destruction. Björn Vogel reflected on world affairs in a stream-of-consciousness poem.
His poetic self is disorientated and deprived of sleep: night is day and day is night. An alarm clock wakes him in the dark. He puts on a fresh shirt and reads the news in a trance. All is a blur: news stories, readers’ letters and TV listings run into one another. The flavour of imminent apocalypse is discernible: ‘Match reports state visits plague of locusts’. A headline catches Vogel’s attention, and a chill runs down his spine: a lightning strike has triggered the firing of three American rockets from their missile silos.
A line break indicates a sigh of relief: they are only ‘meteorological rockets’, not designed to sow death and destruction but to harvest information about wind and the weather.
The Stasi poetry circle no longer produced love poems about Marx, Lenin or their girlfriends. Current affairs had gripped the minds of the Chekist bards. A sergeant-major wrote an ode to Christel Guillaume, the ‘weak / strong wife’ of the heroic Stasi spy who recently returned to the GDR after spending eleven years in a West German prison, for the crime of infiltrating the ruling Social Democratic Party. Alexander Ruika wrote a poem in free verse called ‘Belafonte 83’, about the Jamaican-born crooner who had criticised the US invasion of Grenada at a concert in East Berlin’s Palace of the Republic earlier in the year: ‘His pain / turned strength / and infected / us all.’ The year 1984 would prove pivotal, and not only for Ruika. Gerd Knauer, the young propaganda officer, sensed atmospheric turbulence, a brewing storm: the political weather was changing. ‘You can feel it, more and more / history’s summer season’s at the door’, he wrote in ‘Summer’.
Apocalypse was not just a vague fear haunting the lyrical outpourings of the Stasi poets but a game being planned by military commanders on either side of the Iron Curtain. Forty years after the Allied liberation of continental Europe from Nazi rule, another full-scale war was looming, and the damage and loss of civilian life would be far greater than the last time around. That much had been clear since NATO forces had acted out a highly realistic war game across Western Europe in November 1983. Involving the deployment of sixteen thousand additional troops to the continent, technicians rolling out realistic-looking dummy warheads, actual ministers communicating via ciphered messages, and even cooperation between state leaders like Margaret Thatcher and Helmut Kohl, the ‘Able Archer’ exercise had simulated what would happen if a hypothetical opponent, known as ‘Orange’, employed chemical weapons against NATO member states. According to a debriefing document composed after the exercise was over, two days of ‘low spectrum conventional play’ would have been followed by three days of ‘high spectrum nuclear warfare’.
‘Able Archer’ had only been a hypothetical drill, but it made the possibility of a nuclear war on European soil seem all too real. In West Germany, fear of nuclear Armageddon had done nothing less than reset the Federal Republic’s political compass. A centre-left West German Chancellor, of all people, had played a part in bringing East–West relations back down to the frosty settings of the 1960s. At a security conference in London in 1977, Social Democrat Helmut Schmidt had drawn attention to two hundred SS-20 missiles positioned on Soviet territory as part of a Russian weapons upgrade programme. Known in the Soviet Union as RSD-10 Pioneer, the SS-20 was a mobile missile with three warheads and a range of more than 2,500 kilometres – making the entire Western half of the continent a potential target. Within two years, Schmidt’s warning led to the NATO ‘double-track’ decision, the first track being an offer of negotiating a ban of middle-range nuclear missiles, and the second track being the threat of matching the build-up in the East with more missiles in West Germany if negotiations failed, which they did. Although the Soviet Union moved quickly to withdraw twenty thousand soldiers and a thousand tanks from East Germany, the missiles remained – US experts speculated there were warheads positioned near East Berlin. By 1982, the political climate in the West German capital, Bonn, had become tense: Helmut Schmidt lost a no-confidence vote and had to watch his own party turn against NATO’s double-track decision. In March 1983, the Green Party entered the Bundestag for the first time. That October, some 1.3 million West Germans took to the streets to protest against the nuclear arms race, the biggest demonstration of the post-war era at the time. With negotiations with the Soviet Union still at a standstill in November, the West German Bundestag voted by 286 to 226 to allow the US to station Pershing II and Tomahawk cruise missiles in southern Germany. A day later, Soviet leaders walked out of the talks. In the West German press, there were reports of even more modern nuclear missiles, the SS-22, being moved to East Germany and the Bohemian Forest. All the most dangerous pieces in a giant game of Cold War missile chess were pointing to Berlin in the middle of the board, while America and Russia’s kings were safely barricaded in at the top and bottom. West Germany was the obvious target for a pre-emptive nuclear strike by the Soviets, while East Germany was most likely to take the first hit from retaliatory NATO action – and vice versa. If a lightning strike were to trigger a missile launcher, or a passenger plane was to be mistaken for a spy mission, as had happened with the downed Korean Air Lines Flight 007 in September 1983, then it didn’t really matter who cast the first stone: burning German cities would have been the end result. ‘Instead of creating a more secure situation,’ Spiegel magazine wrote in February 1984, criticising the Bonn coalition government, ‘they have led both German states into a dead end of ever greater danger.’
