The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 12
Were nightmares east of the Iron Curtain plagued by buzzing warheads too? US President Ronald Reagan put that question to the American ambassador to the Soviet Union on 28 March 1984: ‘Do you think Soviet leaders really fear us, or is all the huffing and puffing just part of their propaganda?’ he asked. The American leader knew that for the last three years the Soviet Union had started to look closely for early indicators of an impending nuclear strike from the West via Operation RYaN, a joint move by the KGB and the military intelligence directorate, GRU, the ‘Main Directorate of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation’. Frantic activity around Western European military bases was causing sweaty palms in the Kremlin, where Brezhnev’s death in 1982 had left a power vacuum that neither of his short-term successors, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko, had been able to fill. As ‘Able Archer’ commenced, the Kremlin issued instructions for a dozen aircraft in Eastern Germany and Poland to be fitted with nuclear weapons. Around seventy SS-20 missiles were placed on heightened alert. Soviet nuclear submarines had dived under Arctic ice to avoid detection. One CIA asset on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain, a Czechoslovakian intelligence officer, tried to impress upon the men around Ronald Reagan that there was genuine fear behind the huffing and puffing in the East. Senior figures in Soviet intelligence, he noted, were ‘obsessed’ with the historical echoes of 1941, the year Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in a surprise attack that caught Stalin off guard.
But East German leaders were less scared, or at least less willing to admit to their own fears. Markus Wolf, the Stasi’s spymaster and son of the GDR diplomat and ‘art as weapon’ philosopher Friedrich Wolf, noticed the increasingly urgent demand for nuclear-related intelligence from Moscow with concern. East Germany’s Soviet partners, Colonel General Wolf worried, had become ‘obsessed with the danger of a nuclear missile attack’. Watching the A-bomb play havoc with the political landscape in West Germany had made East German leaders cautious. Because while there were no political opposition parties in the East German parliament, there were stirrings of a home-grown peace movement, largely organised by the Protestant church. A manifesto by the preacher Rainer Eppelmann and the communist Robert Havemann called on the Socialist Unity Party to stop the ‘production, sale and import’ of arms, replace military service with ‘social peace service’ for conscientious objectors, and give up its expensive penchant for military parades. The movement even had its own logo and motto, ‘Swords to Ploughshares’, which managed not only to quote the Bible but also to invert the motto of the Ministry for State Security, the ‘shield and sword of the Party’. A delegation of newly elected West German Green Party politicians wore the logo on their shirts as they met with General Secretary Erich Honecker in November 1983.
The Stasi pulled badges with the logo off young people’s jackets whenever they could – a pointless measure, because many protesters moved to deliberately cutting round holes into the arms of their jackets to show their allegiance. In its insistence not to show any weakness in the Cold War game of chicken, East Germany was starting to look less agile and even more stubborn than the Soviet Union. Honecker did not want to know about an East German peace movement because the Little Political Dictionary had made very clear that the global peace movement was directed against the ‘military–industrial complex of the USA and other imperialist states’. To support peace meant to support the Socialist Unity Party. The use of modern weapons of mass destruction, the dictionary had ascertained, was something advocated solely by the Western powers: ‘The USSR and all other peace-loving powers are fighting for a ban on the production, dissemination and use of weapons of mass destruction, and their destruction over the course of gradual disarmament.’ No footnote to the entry mentioned that the Soviet Union’s stockpile of nuclear warheads had been outgrowing that of the US since 1978.
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In the Stasi, fear of nuclear war accentuated a generational divide. The NATO two-track decision, the SS-20s and the new Pershings on the other side of the Wall had been debated among officers at the biannual skill enhancement camp in the spring. As at every camp, there had been rifle drills and target practice, and in the evening junior and senior Stasi officers sat by the campfire and shot the breeze. An older officer in his mid-sixties spoke up and told the younger cadres not to wet their pants. The war might blow everything to smithereens, he said, but in the end there were always a couple of people who managed to crawl out of their holes afterwards and build up a new world from scratch. Knauer, the young propaganda officer, was quietly seething with rage: East Germany was a touch of a button away from all-out nuclear war, and his colleagues thought they could just ‘crawl out of their holes’ afterwards. He wanted to tell the older officer to his face what consequences a nuclear war on German soil would have, but when surrounded by Stasi officers you had to be careful what you said. In the coming weeks, Knauer channelled his anger and frustration into his typewriter.
At first, the thirty-one-year-old embarked on a draft of a science fiction manuscript about two warring planets in the same solar system who both develop a super-weapon. But the novel ended up in the bin. Instead, Knauer started a poem with the title ‘The Bang’: poetry allowed you to say more by saying less. Page one starts with an idyllic scene, like in one of Brecht’s love poems. The narrator is basking in the sunshine on a meadow full of daisies, dreaming of ‘a pair of women’s breasts’: ‘Summer is a giant / I am a dwarf / snugly shielded in its palm’. At the top of page three, there’s suddenly a noise as loud ‘as a thunderclap’, followed by a blinding white light, ‘daggers stabbing into your pupils’. Something is wrong, the narrator realises: the world is ‘hovering / on a precipice’. Doomsday is coming. Knauer poured forth feelings he wasn’t usually allowed to express to his comrades. Across two full pages, he described ‘the fear / that everything might end’, ‘fear / of the explosions’, ‘fear of those / that think themselves god’s warriors’, ‘fear of those that stand to profit / from this madness in our world’, ‘fear that something – by mistake – / will not go to plan’, ‘fear that more people will burn / than have ever burned before’. The young poet wrote himself into a rage. Locked into an ABAB rhyme scheme, the poem picks up pace, jumping from the personal to the political, tumbling from the political to the biblical, falling from the biblical to the mythical. By page ten, the poem is narrated by Odysseus, running in terror through ‘the fog of history’. Odysseus meets Prometheus, who bursts into tears in the face of the nuclear apocalypse, and cries: ‘That’s not what I wanted / The fire was meant to save you.’ Hounded by rolling thunder, Odysseus flees further, into the ivory tower where the philosophers live, seeking spiritual guidance in this hour of need. But Plato, Hegel and Kant all remain silent. Only a man with a bushy beard rises from his seat with an apologetic look on his face:
Karl Marx tries to make a plea
Looks Odysseus in the face
Says gravely:
They’re doing it because of me
But they put their faith in the wrong place.
By page thirteen, the narrator, who at this stage may or may not be Odysseus, is stumbling across a hellscape strewn with dead bodies:
Some naked others wearing clothes,
Some sliced right open from head to toes,
Others without a blemish on their skin
Grabbed by the reaper in a flash,
Some with a horribly distorted grin
Some burnt to charcoal
Others one big bleeding gash.
He sees dead men, women and children, and is harassed by hungry rats.
I drag myself
for weeks on end
and stumble all alone
no longer through hills of rotting flesh
but mountains made of bone.
On page sixteen, he meets a group of anti-communist cannibals, who chant ‘We’ve rid the entire periphery / of crimson-red barbarity’ before raping women and then dismembering them limb by limb: ‘Serve up an arm, a leg, a foot, a toe, / Then smash the head in with one blow.’ On page twenty-one, the narrator meets a group of deformed men and women who live off stews made of bugs and flies. A woman with two heads ponders how the green planet she once knew came to be so devastated:
Who took a stand
against this ghastly fate?
Was there too little fear at hand?
Did fear show up too late?
In June 1984, Gerd Knauer read the entire poem to the poetry circle. When he finished reading, there was a moment of silence. An ashen-faced kitchen worker, who had joined the group for the first time that day, rushed to the toilet. All the remaining eyes in the room were on the circle’s artistic leader. Uwe Berger said the poem was very technically advanced, and he was impressed with the skills the Chekists had acquired. The report he filed to his handler on 14 June 1984 was less restrained. ‘Gerd Knauer delivers a fifty-two-page poem on the nuclear destruction of mankind. Spreading fear is the main aim, vividly conveyed through the poem’s formal smoothness.’ The stanza about Prometheus and Karl Marx in particular troubled him. The syntax was ambiguous: when Marx said ‘they are doing it because of me’, was the ‘it’ referring to the other philosophers’ silence, or to nuclear war? And if the latter, were ‘they’ Marx’s followers or his enemies? ‘The question of guilt is not answered unambiguously,’ Berger noted in his report. Knauer implied that ‘Marx has invented social revolution and is therefore to blame for the imminent annihilation of mankind,’ a thesis that amounted to nothing but ‘idealism and acceptance of surrender’. At the end of the circle’s meeting, Berger had a word with the young propaganda officer. Did Knauer realise that this ‘fear poem’ was at odds with his ideological mission in the Ministry for State Security? The younger man told him about the encounter with the old officer at the training camp. Berger tried to remind him of the Socialist Unity Party’s ‘peace strategy’, which was to ‘establish peace before war is started and before the imperialist system that causes it has been abolished’. But Berger wasn’t entirely convinced that the young man was listening: ‘Comrade Knauer and his uptight, pig-headed personality,’ he signs off his dispatch.
Around the time Alexander Ruika was signed up as an informant on a special mission, Berger’s reports began increasingly to focus on Gerd Knauer. On 6 September 1984, he reported that Knauer had told the circle that ‘he is not a worker and won’t write a poem about being a worker or about workers being in charge’, even if that meant ‘the workers will chuck him out’. On 25 October, Berger wrote that Knauer had read out a poem about a dream in which he flew a kite that ‘escapes from narrow confinement and sails into freedom’. Berger explained that the kite was what poets called a metaphor, and that the poem was a covert call for East German army personnel to cross over to the West. The young propaganda officer was producing new poems at a prodigious rate, and Berger struggled to keep up. On 13 December, Berger wrote to inform his handler of a poem called ‘The Yes Sayers’, in which Knauer railed against those who were ‘never in doubt about their doubts’. Such people made the young poet want to ‘throw up’. Knauer interspersed these depth charges in verse form with partisan poetry: his epic, ‘The Bang’, had ended on the narrator waking from his nightmare on the realisation that ‘the fight for peace in our world / needs me / like I need peace.’ But Berger was convinced these were diversion tactics, ‘an alibi’. He was dealing with a professional sabotage attempt. Knauer, he concluded, was ‘systematically obstructing the Circle of Writing Chekists.’
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Gerd Knauer agreed to meet me in Marzahn, a district around ten kilometres from the Brandenburg Gate. For Berliners who live in central districts like Mitte, Kreuzberg or Prenzlauer Berg, Marzahn is a cliché, a part of the city full of Ossis on low incomes who never wanted or accepted the fall of the Wall. Home to what was once Europe’s largest high-rise estate, where 103,000 model apartments were built in the 1970s, many of its streets are ravines flanked by crags of prefab concrete. The Wall, which has vanished from the city as a whole, is literally still at home here, stored by the city senate in neat rows in a backyard of the local botanical gardens, which occasionally hands over segments as gifts on grand state visits. On the way to my meeting, I passed artist Walter Womacka’s recently restored socialist realist ‘Peace’ mural, and the voices of a choir singing Russian folk songs floated in and out of earshot. But to picture this corner of Berlin as a ‘Goodbye Lenin’ style bubble in which the sun has never set on the Soviet Union would be misleading. As in many parts of Germany that used to lie east of the Wall, the weeds of late capitalism have sprouted more aggressively in Marzahn than in the protected biotopes of West Berlin. Gerd Knauer had proposed we meet in front of Eastgate, a US-style shopping mall seemingly modelled on a tape dispenser, more vulgar and gregarious than anything you would find in genteel Schöneberg or Friedenau.
The propaganda officer’s cadre file had painted a picture of a man with an ability to breeze through situations in which his senior comrades were weighed down by dogma. Born 2 August 1952 in Chemnitz, Knauer was a stand-out student at school, quick on the uptake and gifted with broad general knowledge. His only flaw, teachers bemoaned, was that he struggled to hide his boredom when he had to wait for fellow pupils to catch up. The file noted that he did not ‘cultivate contact with adolescents who embody Western decadence’, though there were glimpses of a kind of home-grown exuberance that didn’t sound too dissimilar.
After joining the Guards Regiment at nineteen, Knauer was repeatedly ticked off for little incidents that hinted at a lax attitude: he dropped an important key to a safe in the woods before going for a spontaneous dip in a lake, and he accidentally left behind a service card revealing his membership of the secret police in a hotel room. Less mentally agile members of the Stasi would have lost their jobs over such infractions, but Knauer seemed to have floated on. First from the Guards Regiment to a university course in journalism, where he was reprimanded for skipping lessons but nonetheless passed the final exam with flying colours, and then back to the Stasi, into the propaganda unit.
The passport photo in Gerd Knauer’s cadre file had led me to expect a person as buttoned-up and tight-lipped as some of his former circle colleagues. But the trainer-wearing, bestubbled man I met outside the Eastgate shopping mall was different: relaxed, friendly and open to telling stories from his past. Over a Vietnamese duck curry, Knauer told me how much he had enjoyed the aftermath of the GDR’s collapse, how he had spent years on the dole writing crime novels, before coming across a job ad for an agency that helped East Germans file tax returns. Working in the Stasi meant he had more experience with bureaucracy than ordinary citizens of a state that filled its coffers directly from nationalised industry rather than taxing personal income. Many ordinary East Germans had fallen into a deep hole as the world around them was transformed, unable to cope with the daily demands of the market economy, terrified of ending up on the streets. Some senior officers at the Stasi’s propaganda unit had wound up selling newspapers on street corners, others were unemployed. A former speech-writer of the Stasi chief, Mielke, was working in a warehouse. Yet Knauer had simply cruised from the old ideological system into the new. Working at the agitation and propaganda unit had cushioned the culture shock, he explained. The department’s archives in Johannisthal held not only Western spy thrillers, but also action movies and porn films. Writers and artists dropped by regularly, and employees thought of themselves as bohemians rather than bureaucrats. Compared to the radio station where Knauer had done an internship after his university course, working for the Stasi was a boon for his work-life balance, with few urgent deadlines and casual working hours. Business trips were quickly approved and rarely checked. He was able to acquire and find time to read books that weren’t available in bookshops, and developed a growing admiration for the poetry of Wolf Biermann, the singer-songwriter whom his employer had worked so hard to hound out of the country. Biermann, he said, was a master of his craft. Of course he didn’t completely approve of his politics at the time, but there was much to be admired in his poetry: subtle humour, the ability to criticise things that deserved criticising in a way that was as intelligent as it was insidious. What did he think of the poems of Uwe Berger, the poetry circle leader, I asked. Knauer ordered a second beer. Hard to digest, he said. Almost illegible. Too much content, too little poetry. Poetry, said Knauer, was the sound of a little bird, singing. But Berger didn’t want to hear birdsong, he wanted every poem to sound like the Internationale.
