The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 4
There was a question of whether the lack of formal and ideological discipline had not been just tolerated but encouraged by the circle’s previous leader. Rolf-Dieter Melis, a thirty-eight-year-old Stasi officer who had been stationed with the Guards Regiment for almost two decades, had been not only the group’s coordinator but its most prolific contributor, inviting the suspicion he had kept the group alive mainly as a forum for himself. Melis loved droll stories told in a rollicking iambic pentameter, and could not resist a rhyme where he saw one. At official functions, Melis wore his charcoal-black hair slicked into a neat side parting and handsomely filled his Guards Regiment’s uniform. But poetry for Melis was a place where you could let it all hang out. He would rhyme Sache with Sprache even though the first word is pronounced with a short ‘a’ and the second long. ‘This song is very popular / In our country the GDR,’ went another one of his ditties. He enjoyed verses that put a smile on people’s faces, even if the jokes were obvious. ‘When new recruits line up in a row’, Melis advised his fellow officers in his poem ‘Premiere’, ‘Don’t be too earnest and proud by half, / Don’t be afraid to let them know: / This is serious business, but who doesn’t like a laugh!’
Berger had tried to push the debate into a less frivolous direction. He brought along sonnets by Johannes R. Becher, Bertolt Brecht’s awe-filled poem ‘The Moscow Workers Take Possession of the Great Metro on 27 April 1935’, and Maxim Gorky’s paean to Lenin. The preponderance of Russian history in these works was no accident. East Germany’s foundational myth was a negative one: its foundation was anti-fascism. The GDR was not West Germany, which had banned the Communist Party and thus had no one to prevent it from falling back into fascism. The heroes of the GDR’s early history were street fighters of the anti-fascist resistance like Ernst Thälmann, but many of them had died before victory was in sight, executed in Nazi prisons. East Germany borrowed its political vocabulary from the Soviet Union: it had a politburo, a centralni komitet or Central Committee, and the Stasi had a unit for Agitation and Propaganda, or agitprop. The Soviet capital of Berger’s poetry was ‘eternal Moscow’, ‘a house that is a city […] a multilingual home’. If the Stasi poetry circle wanted to write about positive origin stories, to tell narratives that involved the drama of a revolution rather than just a formal fusion of two parties, it was encouraged to turn to Russia.
But Berger’s efforts had only yielded moderate results. Melis, who remained in the group as a participant, had done his best by penning a very earnest, non-rhyming poem about the Russian War Memorial at Treptower Park, called ‘Gratitude to the Soviet Soldier’. Located a dozen kilometres down the road from the Guards Regiment, the monument to the five thousand Russian soldiers who died during the battle for Berlin in 1945 would have been a familiar sight to all its members. They would all have known the giant, thirteen-metre-high Red Army soldier, who stood atop a pile of broken swastikas, and the small, frightened German girl on his arm. Melis’s poem tried to tell this girl’s story, but it did so in emotional hues that verged on melodrama. ‘Her father’s joy / her mother’s pride’, the child had suffered the hardship of Berlin’s post-war famine, ‘hungry and ill / cursing the war / so recently won, / on the verge of despair’. The ‘Soviet soldier from the Urals’ became her saviour not just because he liberated her from Hitler’s fascists, but because he ‘shared his rations / for days / and more … / until the danger was averted’. In the penultimate stanza, the poem made a revelation to melt his readers’ hearts:
That child of nineteen forty five
is now
my wife,
a happy mother.
But ‘Gratitude to the Soviet Soldier’ was really less a poem about the Russian army than about Melis and his claim to fame.
Among the more artistically ambitious in the circle, there was at least a willingness to engage with the ideologically overburdened formal framework that Uwe Berger handed down to them. Though more often than not, it would come crashing down on the author. Björn Vogel, a thirty-two-year-old trained cattle breeder from Naunburg whose career in the Ministry for State Security’s archive department had been spurred on by his talent as an athlete but held back by a persistent stutter, read out a poem called ‘Dialectics’. While not strictly a sonnet in the way East Germany’s cultural founding father had envisioned it, the fifteen-liner tried to press the official philosophy of the Soviet Union into verse form. ‘On a hard wooden bench / of the W50’, Vogel set the scene. ‘The barrel of my MP in my hand, / my steel helmet / rubbing painfully against my thigh’. That was the thesis: a soldier must watchfully defend the peace. ‘Then I think / about the apartments / we could build / instead of barracks.’ Antithesis: why have an army if you want peace? But Vogel’s synthesis is nothing like the analytical process that Hegel, Marx or Becher imagined it to be. Instead, it’s the original thesis again, an order the Chekist executes without further question: ‘Then / at the shooting range / I take aim with calm / and precision.’
*
Another way to tell the story of the beginning of East Germany’s socialist experiment would be to start with the return from exile of another writer who fled the Nazis: Friedrich Wolf. Born in 1888 in the Rhineland, Wolf embodied everything the Nazis despised: a Jew whose experience as a military surgeon on the battlefields of the First World War had turned him first into an ardent pacifist and later a card-carrying Bolshevik, his first plays made a passionate case for the legalisation of contraception and the abolition of paragraph 218 of the German criminal code, which outlawed abortions. Wolf’s Second World War was more geographically fractured than Johannes R. Becher’s: he had stumbled from Germany to France, France to Moscow, from Moscow back to France even though he wanted to join the International Brigades in Spain, into a French internment camp and finally back to Moscow thanks to a forged passport – all with a wife, three children and a string of lovers in tow. Like Becher, he was handed the responsibility of building up the culture sector of the new East German republic as soon as he set foot on Berlin soil in 1945, helping to establish the film studio DEFA, setting up the East German branch of PEN international, publishing an art magazine called Kunst und Volk, and chairing the association of East German theatres. In 1949, the GDR’s President appointed Wolf ambassador to its fellow socialist state, Poland.
But if Johannes Becher was the idealistic angel sitting on East Germany’s shoulder, humming sweet songs of a utopian republic built on the laws of poetry, Friedrich Wolf was the GDR’s little devil, whispering a much blunter message. In a short fairy tale he wrote in 1922, a common house goose called Begbeg expresses her exasperation with her colleague, the nightingale: while Begbeg works day-in day-out to feed herself, so that she will eventually feed her master, the nightingale doesn’t lift a finger and yet is adored by the farmer. ‘You lazy creature, what do you do all day?’ says Begbeg. Reading between the lines, it’s not hard to recognise the nightingale as a symbol of the kind of poet Becher admired, and the hard-working goose as a cipher for Wolf’s poetic ideal. A poet fit for the modern age, Wolf believed, needed to write ‘without frills and plush’, ‘without sentiment, psychology … and ambiguity’. His tastes were so austere, he wrote in one essay, that he longed for a state in which leather became an unaffordable luxury good, so that men and women started to roam the streets of Berlin barefoot again, in touch with the soil as God intended (it is no surprise that Friedrich Wolf was one of the Weimar Republic’s leading advocates of nudism). If Becher had lobbied politicians to give a special status to literature, Wolf turned around and pointed his finger at the writers. Those who really wanted to enjoy privileges in the coming socialist state had better make sure their writing played its part in furthering the socialist cause. Mere entertainment, ‘luxury, caviar and opium’, designed only to distract workers from the ugliness of ‘the grey everyday’, was not good enough. Art as a mere ‘crutch’ for workers’ education was worse. If Prometheus wanted his rebellion against the gods to last, he needed to give the people fire. Art, Wolf believed, was a weapon – a slogan he first coined in a 1928 poem and sharpened in a speech the same year: ‘The material of our age lies in front of us, hard as iron. Poets are working to forge it into a weapon. The worker has to pick up this weapon.’
Wolf’s slogan was older than the idea of a socialist German republic, but it had sticking power. The East German Free Democratic Youth movement adopted the phrase as the central motto of its cultural mission and continued to organise events with the same title well into the 1980s. In September 1981, Konrad Wolf, one of Friedrich’s four sons and an influential film-maker, gave a speech called ‘Art is a Weapon’ in front of senior officers of the National People’s Army. Especially inside the Stasi’s offices, Wolf’s phrase was as familiar as the first verse of the GDR’s national anthem – and not just because another of his sons, Markus, was the head of the foreign intelligence division, effectively the secret police’s number two. In 1980, on the occasion of the 103rd anniversary of Feliks Dzerzhinsky’s birth, every member of the Wachregiment at Adlershof was handed a pamphlet containing a panegyric Friedrich Wolf had written about the founder of the Soviet Union’s secret police, the Cheka. Dzerzhinsky, he reminded the soldiers, always made sure that ‘the content of literary works by Writing Chekists’ could become effective as a ‘weapon in the ideological class struggle with imperialism’. Becher’s airy ideal of a ‘literature society’ was inspiring, but it was hard to tell what it really meant when you were trying to put pen to paper. The idea that poetry could be a secret weapon was more practical in comparison, especially if your entire existence was dedicated to a struggle to fend off the enemies of socialism.
*
At the end of one poetry meet-up in Adlershof in the summer of 1982, circle leader Berger asked the trainee soldier Alexander Ruika to read the poem he had brought along. Aged nineteen, Ruika was not only younger than most of the other Chekists in the room, he also wasn’t really a proper Chekist yet: the young men who were accepted to complete three years of military service as ‘Dzerzhinsky soldiers’ at the Guards Regiment were not fully fledged members of the Stasi. Graduation into the GDR’s secret police was not automatic for trainee Chekists, but easier than for those who only served the legally required eighteen months of military conscription. Similar to Melis, the poem Ruika had brought along was also about a monument, one he had seen when his father and grandmother had taken him on a trip to the Lviv Oblast in Ukraine when he was fourteen. For hours they had driven through the Pontic steppe with nothing but an uninterrupted line on the horizon, until their car suddenly stopped in front of Valentyn Borysenko’s enormous iron sculpture. It depicted commander Semyon Budyonny’s ‘Red Cavalry’, which had played a vital part in the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War of 1918–20. Ruika’s poem started with a description of bucolic harmony: the monument looked as if the ground had begun to billow ‘in soft waves’ towards the ‘round sky’, and then hardened into a ‘green bow’. In the first five lines he uses a technique called enjambment – stretching the syntax of a sentence across line breaks – with the effect of slowing down the poem’s flow, building an arc analogous to the one he describes. From then on, almost every second line is endstopped, and the poem begins to move faster. Inside the green arc are the men on horseback – in the German, Ruika uses the phrase die erznen Reiter rasen, ‘the bronze riders rearing’, using a technique called consonance, stringing together words with the same consonants but different vowel sounds. The bodies of horses and riders are pressed together – he makes words jostle for space to convey a sense of movement in confinement: ‘limb to limb, and pluck to pluck’. The ‘soft waves’ are now a ‘rowdy cloud / guided by thunder’. By the second stanza, the sculpture is no longer a sculpture but a chaotic movement of real bodies, animal and human, and Ruika imagines himself to be one of Budyonny’s red riders, feeling the weight of the Nagant revolver in his belt, screaming the cavalry’s battle cry as they fly across the landscape. The poem is written in free verse, but there is a covert AABBCC rhyme scheme that links lines 3 and 7, lines 9 and 11, and lines 28 and 31. The effect on the listener is one of belatedly catching on to a rhythmic pattern underneath what appears at first to be chaotic movement, matching the sentiment of the poem’s final lines.
As if
the land
were to flow
in soft waves
toward the round sky
and frozen
into a green bow
in the hoofbeat
in the trumpets blaring
toward the horizon
the bronze riders rearing
limb to limb,
and pluck to pluck
pressed together
as a rowdy cloud
guided by thunder.
I pull myself up
and mount.
On my belt
I can feel the Nagant
Vpered! Onwards!
In many languages
I hear this cry
that my own voice
joins in with.
My field-grey coat –
A swirl in the spume
of grey ore,
I hear the hoofbeat
As if their beat
were my heart.
When Uwe Berger finally broke the silence in the room on the first floor of the Guards Regiment in Adlershof, he said something he had never said before in their circle. All the other Stasi men would remember it for years. ‘Look at this young man, comrades,’ he said. ‘What a talent.’
Lesson 4
METAPHOR
An expression that describes a person or object by referring to something that is considered to have similar characteristics to that person or object.
One reason Alexander Ruika stood out from the rest of the Stasi poetry circle is because he seemed to understand something elemental about poetry: that writing poetically involved the art of holding more than one idea in your head at the same time. In his Poetics, Aristotle had argued that this was the cardinal virtue of any good poem, and that the ultimate test of a poet’s skill in this respect was their use of metaphor: the device whereby a term with a literal meaning is used to convey another, non-literal meaning by association or comparison. ‘To be a master of metaphor’, Aristotle wrote, was ‘the greatest thing by far’: ‘It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars.’
The poems of Alexander Ruika, published in anthologies, newspapers and literary magazines that I managed to track down from archives and second-hand booksellers over the following months, were full of metaphors – some intriguing, some puzzling, some downright odd. In ‘Spring Birds’, published in an anthology of young people’s poetry in 1986 by Verlag Neues Leben, Ruika describes driving down the autobahn on his motorbike one Saturday in April. As he flies over the asphalt, he sees ‘a red kite rising high above me’, ‘a stork crossing my path’, and ‘a gaudy-feathered drake, passing through my field of vision’. As the headwind punches the smell of pine forests into his lungs, the poet feels ‘a kinship’ with these birds. Ruika doesn’t mean that he is literally related to these animals, of course, but in a metaphorical sense, there is something about the avian roaming instinct that he recognises in himself. A metaphor, the author Mardy Grothe once wrote, is ‘a kind of magical changing room’, where one thing momentarily becomes another and allows the reader to see that moment in a new way. In ‘Spring Birds’, the motorcycling poet Alexander Ruika temporarily becomes part of the natural world. Then, in an unexpected reversal in the final stanza, the natural world becomes part of Ruika and his motorbike:
We were flying
Until the sun
hung red on the horizon
like a full-face helmet
Critics pricked up their ears when Alexander Ruika read out his poems. ‘Who says our technological age does not allow for original images from the poetic reserve forces?’ wrote a reviewer for Neues Deutschland in August 1981. ‘Spring Birds’, the critic Hannes Würtz wrote, was emblematic of precisely the kind of emotional urgency or Sturm und Drang he had been missing from the new generation of East German writers. In 1981, the year before he was introduced to the Stasi circle, Ruika had presented his poem at the annual ‘Poets’ Seminar’, a kind of training camp for the GDR’s up-and-coming artistic elite, held at a romantic old castle in the north-eastern town of Schwerin. ‘If the Poets’ Seminar wants to survive, it needs to remember its youthfulness,’ wrote Würtz. Many of those who attended the gathering in Schwerin would go on to forge impressive careers after reunification. On one of the symposium’s printed programmes I found in the British Library, there were names of speakers who later won prestigious literary prizes, garnered critical praise and gained powerful roles in the arts. One had been lauded for her work by the Berlin city senate. Another was now in charge of a well-respected theatre in southern Germany. A third had gone on to win the biggest literary prize in the reunified country, the German Book Prize.
But what had become of Alexander Ruika? There were references to strings of awards that reaffirmed his early potential. His first poem was published when he was barely in his teens. Those that followed appeared in all the leading literary journals, in national newspapers and on state radio. Twice he was a runner-up in the Berlin Literature Prize and received the Free German Youth’s annual incentive award. And yet, all the archives and catalogues I searched indicated that Ruika had for some reason failed to live up to his promise. There were no prize-winning anthologies of poetry to his name, no bestselling novel, not even a critically-acclaimed-but-commercially-unsuccessful collection of short stories. Instead, typing the name Alexander Ruika into Google took you to Germany’s open register for limited companies, where Ruika was listed as the director of a business called B. I. S. According to its own website, B. I. S. specialised in installing security systems for private or commercial properties, but also offered ‘detective services’, such as ‘finding missing persons’, ‘surveillance of employees during sickness’, ‘planting undercover detectives in your business’, as well as digging up evidence of ‘misdemeanours in relationships’. What had happened to the young man who had silenced the room with his poem about the Red Riders of Lviv?
