The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 13
The good poem as a miniature model for the good society: at the outset of the Stasi poetry circle, that had once been the idealistic vision. A state with steady feet and a perfectly calibrated rhyme structure would learn to wind its way through the corridor of history to the steady beat of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, just as the sonnet unfurls down the page. But by 1984 it wasn’t just thanks to the dissonant chords struck by Gerd Knauer’s poems that the state was starting to lose its rhythm. As the atom bomb grew larger in the minds of ordinary East Germans, cracks also started to show in the Adlershof compound. An internal report, published in March 1984, tried to get to the bottom of a noticeable decline in morale inside the Wachregiment. In the preceding twelve months, there had been a disconcerting rise in disciplinary measures against Feliks Dzerzhinsky guards, in response to fights between personnel inside barracks or members of the regiment getting drunk and lashing out at civilians. An increasing number of new recruits were expressing their displeasure at the number of hours they were required to train and the hardship involved. One likely factor behind this shift in attitude, the report concluded, was the rising consumption of Western means of mass communication. Many East German officers openly admitted to watching West German TV, ‘because the television of the GDR only provides youth-appropriate entertainment shows of insufficient quality and quantity’. ‘Watching films and sport shows is now commonplace,’ the report concluded resignedly. The lack of information about political events was frequently cited as a reason for switching off East Germany’s state broadcasters.
In keeping with the Bitterfeld ethos of opening up literature to the masses, the barracks had its own library for soldiers of all ranks, and in this library there was also a shelf full of vinyl records that was sporadically updated with new releases. New additions to the Feliks Dzerzhinsky record collection in September 1985 included an album by East Berlin band Karat, an anthology of marching songs called ‘The Boys from Moscow and Berlin’, as well as a compilation of ‘Red Songs’ that contained an updated version of Ernst Busch’s popular anti-American ditty ‘Ami Go Home’, sung to the tune of ‘Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!’: ‘Ami collect your Pershings in a haste / Pershings are a bloody waste,’ the lyrics went, ‘Go home, Ami! Ami go home / split your atoms for peace instead.’ Yet whoever had been in charge of ordering new stock that month hadn’t exactly taken the spirit of the song to heart. Apart from albums by Eric Clapton, Joe Cocker and Roxy Music, acquisitions in September also included a Foreigner ‘Best Of’ and Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Twenty years earlier, the then president of the Socialist Unity Party, Walter Ulbricht, had insisted that East Germany should not ‘copy every piece of dirt that comes from the West’ and should take a stand against the ‘monotony of the Yeah Yeah Yeah’ of the Beatles. Now, behind the fortified walls at Adlershof, soldiers were suddenly staring into the distance while listening to ‘I Want to Know What Love Is’ and clicking their fingers in time to ‘Billy Jean’.
Something similar was happening at the cinema where East Germany’s elite military force was allowed to unwind in front of the big screen. Since 1981, senior officials had allowed the projectionists to show not just agitprop classics from Russia, Romania and Cuba, but also the odd movie from a capitalist country. The only proviso: someone needed to keep attendance records and monitor audience numbers for the two ideological categories. The results were worrying indeed: even though almost twice as many soldiers and spies flooded into the auditorium for capitalist films as early as 1981, the numbers began to grow out of all proportion. In the year 1984–85, there were on average 623 viewers for each capitalist production compared to 211 for each film from socialist brother states, even though capitalist movies only made up about a tenth of the programme. The popularity of some of these films wasn’t surprising: the animated feature film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, for example, told the story of a little town surrounded by outposts of an evil Roman empire, striking a chord with the military personnel, even if it premiered in Adlershof almost ten years after its release in the West. In René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo’s film, Caesar challenges Asterix and Obelix to a series of Herculean tasks in order to disprove rumours of their godlike powers – only to watch the two Gauls repeatedly beat the odds and come up trumps. To East Germans, whose Olympic team had finished in the top three of the medal table in every summer Olympics it had participated in, even beating the mighty United States to second place in Montreal 1976, watching this light-hearted adventure story triggered a warm glow of recognition. Senior officials in the Ministry for State Security might have also appreciated how non-judgementally this French box-office hit depicted the use of performance-enhancing magic potions: in 1974, the Ministry had overseen a large state-sponsored doping programme, ‘State Plan Theme 14–25’, which involved around twelve thousand athletes being treated with untested steroids or male hormones, some of them without their knowledge and most of them unaware of the physical and psychological consequences. Those placed lower down the chain of command could find solace in Asterix and Obelix’s eighth task, where the two Gauls have to enter a multi-storey government building, The House that Sends You Mad, to obtain a permit. Driven to the edge of insanity by an illogical and inhumane bureaucratic apparatus, the heroes managed to complete their challenge only after they beat their opponents with their own weapons, inventing a fictional ‘Permit Number A39, stipulated in Circular B65’ that sets the officials off on a wild goose chase culminating in collective madness among the bureaucrats and the handing out of the desired permit.
If the Asterix movie could still be explained away as a glorified depiction of how socialism in one village can go on to beat the world, the inclusion of a genuine Hollywood blockbuster on the programme of the Adlershof regiment’s on-site cinema in February 1985 comes as more of a shock. Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind had originally been released in the West eight years before, but its message had gained a new urgency after Reagan declared the USSR the ‘evil empire’ and announced a new missile defence system that was soon known as ‘Star Wars’. In the movie, Richard Dreyfus plays Roy Neary, a blue-collar electrician who is haunted by visions and daydreams after a close encounter with a UFO; a five-tone leitmotif, written by Jaws composer John Williams, plays in the heads of anyone who has had a glimpse of extraterrestrial life. But if science fiction films before and after portrayed alien life-forms from the other side as many-tentacled, blood-sucking invaders, Spielberg’s 1977 film shows them to be kind-hearted creatures with angelic voices. The film’s narrative runs on the conventional Hollywood fuel of rugged individualism: its dominant conflict is not between ordinary humans and alien visitors, but between human individuals and the officials who try to contain them, such as employers, politicians and military authorities. Its central question, however, implies a strongly pacifist viewpoint: what if, the film asked, the gigantic strange object falling from the sky was not an ending to be feared, but the beginning of something? ‘Stop and be friendly,’ says a sign that one UFO truther holds up when he sees lights descending from the night sky: a thoroughly counter-intuitive message to beam into the heads of military personnel on the borderline of a brewing nuclear conflict in the middle of the new Cold War.
Close Encounters of the Third Kind was an odd film to screen inside Adlershof in 1985. Not just because of its laissez-faire attitude to the enemy from the other side, or because it would once have been considered a weapon in the culture war, but also because it already predicted how that culture war would eventually be won: not with nuclear weapons, but by sending pop-song melodies, lines of poetry and film scenes across the Iron Curtain, which would embed themselves in minds as if by telekinesis. In February 1985, the Stasi agents inside the Adlershof cinema were not just watching Roy Neary’s quest to reach out to another world, they were also becoming little GDR Roys, already transfixed by music from the other side. As US and Soviet leaders ratcheted up their rhetoric and Europe cowered in fear of the big bang, there was a new spirit of détente inside the very place where Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s cool head, hot heart and clean hands were meant to rule supreme.
Lesson 10
PALINODE
An ode or song that retracts or recants what the poet wrote in a previous poem.
The black Volga was waiting under the street lamp in silence, as if its wheels had never moved an inch. Only the pulse of the yellow taxi sign on its roof throbbed through the December smog. Gert Neumann stumbled the few steps across the icy pavement. The chrome handle was cold to the touch, even through woolly gloves. Neumann pulled the back door shut and sank deep into the synthetic leather. Where was he off to, the driver asked from the front seat. Neumann hesitated for a minute. He hadn’t really thought about that until now. Then he made up his mind. Let’s go all the way to Leipzig. From East Berlin to Leipzig, East Germany’s second-largest city, it was easily a three-hour drive. Neumann had never taken a taxi all the way before, but tonight he was too exhausted for the train. Was 100 Deutsche Mark enough, he asked. Earlier in 1987, East Germany’s central bank had printed so much money that the exchange rate had briefly gone through the roof: for the first time ever, one Deutsche Mark got you ten of its GDR equivalents. But there was no need for Neumann to spell out the conversion rate. The taxi was already moving.
Of all the enemies the Stasi had racked up among East Germany’s literary scene, Gert Neumann was the most confusing. Forty-five years old but looking fifty-plus, he had first got into trouble with the state in 1968, with a poetry reading on a boat on Leipzig’s Elsterstausee lake that had included citations from Alexander Dubček’s ‘Action Programme’, the Czechoslovak communist politician’s plan for an independent path to socialism. After being chucked out of university, Neumann and his wife, the poet Heidemarie Härtl, had developed a manifesto for a new type of literature. At the core of their vision was the belief that the Socialist Unity Party had, through monotonous decrees, jargon engineered at Party conferences and lies printed in state-sponsored newspapers, so thoroughly corrupted the common language of the people of East Germany as to render it useless. ‘The dictatorship of black words’, Neumann wrote, had ‘murdered’ poetry. To describe the world truthfully again, poets needed to first go into hiding. Neumann did not take an overtly political stance in his writing, nor did he try to emulate Western literary idols. What made his work provocative to the East German state was that it was so cryptic that even the three literary critics the Culture Ministry hired to analyse his texts couldn’t work out exactly what he was trying to say. Neumann was a locksmith by trade, and he wrote like one. His first two novels, Guilty Words and Eleven O’Clock, were like locked rooms with keys gone missing: little plot, little direct speech, few individuated characters, long labyrinthine sentences, a dense thicket of literary quotations and references. ‘The collective of individualities has a silent interest in dissolving potential intelligence into a dumb and blind form of observation,’ he wrote in Eleven O’Clock. Sentences like these were so elusive, so hard to pin down, that they drove some of his silent observers into a fury. Uwe Berger, the Stasi poetry circle’s poet-spy-in-chief, described Gert Neumann in one of his reports as ‘a semi-educated psychopath’, whose ‘confused thoughts’ and ‘highfalutin gibberish’ rejected life in the socialist republic and ‘propagated a religious irrationalism’.
Neumann’s books weren’t published in East Germany, but they weren’t officially censored either: his manuscripts simply got stuck in the state censor’s office because even the Culture Ministry’s smartest minds couldn’t figure out what they actually said. Eventually, he lost patience and posted the manuscripts of his first two books across the border in chunks, where the two books were picked up by Fischer, the biggest literary publishing house in West Germany. As a result, no one in the East could read Gert Neumann, but West German writers and critics adored him. The influential West German novelist Martin Walser, one of his biggest champions, bumped into the East German Culture Minister at a hotel in Leipzig and told him that Neumann had such force that he would defeat them all: ‘If you are against this human being,’ Walser said, ‘then you’ve already lost!’
To confuse the Stasi even further, Neumann showed no apparent interest in acting like the enemy of state they made him out to be. He had personally considered Walser’s intervention highly unhelpful, because the last thing he wanted was to jump ship to the capitalist West. He believed in solidarity, and William Blake’s dictum that opposition is true friendship. Living in a socialist state had taught him things about humanity he didn’t think he could experience as a refugee to the West. Neumann wrote Eleven O’Clock while working full-time as a locksmith at a large department store in Leipzig. Every day at 11 a.m., Neumann had put down his spanner and picked up his pen to describe short episodes from his working life and muse about poetry. The book would later be regarded by West German critics as a defining work of dissident literature, but in many ways it was literature as the founding fathers of the socialist GDR had envisioned it: art made by working people, for working people, among working people. ‘Pick up the quill, comrade,’ as Walter Ulbricht had once put it. The ‘separation between art and life’, the ‘alienation between artists and the people’ that the Socialist Unity Party had spent the last forty years worrying about – Neumann had found his own strategy to overcome it long ago. He had created a social reality, much more social and a hundred times more real than the socialist realism decreed by the state.
At Mühlenbeck, to the north of the city, the taxi joined the ring road to orbit West Berlin counterclockwise. The car stereo was playing jazz, but the road was thumping its own rhythm over the blue notes. Da-dong. Da-dong. Da-dong. The Volga was usually a smooth ride: a heavy barge of a car with a three-speed gearbox and an outline that mimicked that of a classic American cruiser. East Germans nicknamed the car Bonzenschaukel or ‘fat cats’ swing’. But the Berlin ring road was bumpy, still made up of the same concrete plates the Nazis had laid down during the Third Reich five decades ago. Over the years, the weight of traffic had gradually pushed the segments apart and you could feel each gap through the Volga’s suspension. Da-dong. The even stretch between each bump was just about long enough for the car to start swaying. Da-dong. Neumann’s back was killing him. At work, they called him ‘the hunchback of Notre-Dame’ because his posture was so bad. The doctors said it was a mystery illness: tension in the back and neck, triggered by mental stress. If only the bloody springs in this back seat weren’t so worn through. He squinted to make out the features of the man in the seat in front of him, but the glow of the street lamps was too weak. Da-dong. Perhaps once they made it past Potsdam he would get a few sweet minutes’ shut-eye.
In 1987, more than three thousand people successfully plotted their escape across the border into West Germany. Thousands more dreamt up plans that were dashed by bad timing, the watchful eyes of a border guard or simply their own lack of courage. Neumann, however, had just spent the last six months agonising over whether he would be able to cross the border in the other direction. In June he had accepted a string of invitations in Western Europe: one engagement in Amsterdam, another in Rolandseck, near Bonn. But in the West every interview, every dinner party, every reading had seemed like a trap. There was the room in Laren outside Amsterdam he was accused of having wrecked after staying there for a few nights, the provocative questions from the audience at a reading inside the disused train station, dotted with the jargon of the Stasi cadres: all these incidents, he was convinced, had been engineered to trigger a scandal the Party could use as grounds to refuse him re-entry into the East. Yet he had dodged them all, and made it back across the border. And now he was as tired as a dog.
There was only one more thing he still needed to sort out, and he had to make his way to Leipzig to do so. His wife Heidemarie had travelled back with him across the border, but then suddenly disappeared for a week. When she returned, she couldn’t really explain where she had been. Friends of Neumann’s had implied that there was something suspicious about his wife’s behaviour. Her father was an army major, after all. So after a few weeks Neumann had told her to leave. You are a nuisance to me, please go back, he had said. She said something in response, but he hadn’t understood what she meant. Upon his return to East Berlin, Neumann had stayed for a few days at his son’s flat on Linienstrasse. It was here that he came to the conclusion that he needed to travel to Leipzig to meet his wife and break up with her.
He put his sleepy hot head against the cold window. You’re in luck, said the driver. I know this journey like the back of my hand. I used to drive between Berlin and Leipzig all the time when I was studying literature there.
Suddenly, Neumann was wide awake.
*
I had come across Gert Neumann’s name in the Stasi archive early on in my research: according to files I had seen, he was one of a handful of writers on whom Alexander Ruika was tasked to gather intelligence after his recruitment as an unofficial informant. A report dated 17 December 1987 mentions an encounter between Neumann and ‘Michael Lindner’, in which the informant managed to ascertain that the novelist had fallen out with his wife after hearing that she might have spied on him for the Stasi. Citing Ruika as a source, the report claims that Neumann intended to leave the GDR but wanted to make financial preparations first. ‘When he leaves, he won’t be going quietly,’ the report claims. But when I called Gert Neumann in the summer of 2016 to find out if he remembered the encounter with his spy, he shrugged me off: there must be a misunderstanding, Neumann mumbled, and at any rate he wasn’t feeling well at the moment. The line went dead.
Neumann’s instinctive distrust was understandable. The disciplinary procedure following the nautical poetry reading on Elsterstausee had resulted in a full-scale surveillance operation involving at least seven informants dedicated to tracking his movements. In 1975, the Stasi had broken into Neumann’s apartment when he was out, installed bugging devices, photographed every inch and photocopied every piece of paper it could get its hands on. Postal deliveries were intercepted. The Stasi sat in on every train journey, every reading he gave in friends’ living rooms. It tracked every movement of Neumann’s curtains and counted every beer he drank in the bar around the corner. A friend of the family was signed up to spy on the novelist and his wife on their holidays. Then, when the Stasi felt it still wasn’t watching Neumann closely enough, it simply recruited his own mother to spy on him.
