The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 5
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The East German state kept a detailed file on every citizen in gainful employment. The so-called ‘cadre file’ would chart their professional development from primary school through to their retirement home, by means of school reports, memberships of political parties or state-affiliated bodies, criminal records, payslips and workplace assessments. But in a state that believed it had overcome the bourgeois distinction between private and working life, the cadre files also cast light on life outside the workplace, via health certificates, records of holidays and trips to West Germany, reports of activities that the state security apparatus interpreted to be subversive, and detailed accounts of family members, friends and lovers, and their ideological leanings. All organs of the East German state had access to these files, including the secret police. Since January 1992, the surviving cadre files have been held by the Stasi Records Agency, which has its headquarters in Berlin and twelve further regional offices across eastern Germany. Ordinary citizens can view their own files at one of the Stasi Record Agency’s reading rooms. Historians and journalists can also apply to view the cadre file of members of the Ministry for State Security, like Alexander Ruika, and its unofficial collaborators.
‘We don’t toe the line’, starts one of the poems that Ruika brought along to the poetry seminar in Schwerin.
We watch your step
We judge, we sentence
and we pardon
We are / an INSTITUTION
The title of the poem, ‘My Noble Family’, is another metaphor, because Ruika did not literally come from aristocratic stock. Instead of inheriting an elevated status, he explains in the final stanza, his family had acquired theirs through hard work: ‘We never had privileges / […] / Never lived / off others’ toil – / THAT IS OUR NOBILITY’. Ruika’s Stasi cadre file only partially backs up this boast. His father was originally from Lithuania, with a surname that had been Germanised during the Third Reich. Having witnessed the terror of Nazi rule, Ruika senior had become enthused by the East German vision of building a new state and pursued a career in the military with focus and determination. Ruika’s father rose to the rank of colonel in the East German army before becoming an officer at the Defence Ministry. In 1970, the Ruikas even moved to Leningrad for a year, where their son Alexander, born 30 August 1962, attended the GDR’s general consulate’s school. This is the part of the poem that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The privilege that came with being a member of what the Russians call the nomenklatura, the holders of key positions in the Soviet Union’s bureaucratic system, may not have always felt like one: back at secondary school in suburban Berlin, Ruika’s cadre file notes, he was bullied by classmates because of his father’s political affiliations. But if the state offers you a leg-up not available to others when you find yourself in a tight spot, then privilege is the right word: in 1974, young Alexander was transferred to another school in Berlin-Friedrichshain, ‘upon recommendation of the central public prosecutor’ and with the explicit permission of the Department for Education.
The full name listed in the cadre file is Alexander Os Ruika, his middle name meaning ‘axis’ in Russian: a nominative determinant for a young man whose poems often have an invisible tipping point – a repetition, a play on words, a contradictory image – where the meaning suddenly lurches into its opposite. In ‘My Noble Family’ it’s in the second stanza, where Ruika suddenly writes that ‘We work / to survive / but would rather / live to work.’ The boosterish pride in the family line of work tips over into self-doubt: what if working for leisure is a greater achievement than fighting for survival? Was there necessarily more dignity in serving the nation than working for yourself? In Alexander Ruika’s family, that alternative approach to life in the Soviet sphere was embodied by his mother, or so the cadre file suggested. The daughter of a Ukrainian mother, she had a Slavic heritage to which she drew attention by wearing long sarafan-style dresses with floral patterns and tasselled shawls, as well as writing books for children and young adults that took their readers on adventures into the unknown wilderness of the Soviet Union. Yet hers was not the Russia of Moscow central command but the remotest corners of Siberia, full of folk customs and fairy tales. Her book In Search of the Copper Fairy tells the story of a young boy, named not Alexander but Axel, who goes on a trip to Russia to learn about minerals and precious stones, only to lose himself in a dreamworld full of mythical creatures and enchanted lizards, after drinking a cup of tea made from taiga berries. Like her husband, Ruika’s mother was a member of the Socialist Unity Party. But she believed in the existence of an inner world that had the right to shut itself off from the reach of the Central Committee.
Alexander Os Ruika’s CV depicted a man who oscillated between the life of duty and the sphere of dreams. After completing a two-year apprenticeship as a printer at the publishing house that brought out his mother’s books, he seemingly changed direction in 1981, following in his father’s footsteps by joining the Guards Regiment on a three-year assignment. But life in the military was tough. The Erkner compound where he was last stationed was even further from the centre of Berlin than that at Adlershof. The exercises and duties he had to carry out were mundane and largely irrelevant to the functioning of the state. He was allowed to leave the site twice a week, between eight o’clock in the evening and midnight, which was barely enough time to get home and back. Only once every three months did he get a weekend off. One winter night in his second year, Ruika dislocated his knee during judo practice. His superiors were displeased when they discovered he had dragged himself out of the sports hall anyway and driven all the way to Berlin to see his girlfriend. As punishment, he was under orders to stay on his hospital bed for the next twelve weeks. In the poem ‘Disagreement over Orderliness’, Ruika ponders whether ‘order and happiness / are mutually exclusive’. Was orderliness perhaps ‘a deformation, a disease / that you succumb to in your twenties?’ Ruika was torn, even more so because he also understood that discipline could have a purpose. ‘What is it that troubles me? / Why do I resist?’
The Guards Regiment was not just an ordinary military unit where young men could while away their obligatory service. It was also an elite training ground from which the Stasi would frequently recruit new talent for special missions, such as the ‘tunnel unit’ that was tasked with preventing underground escapes to the West. But the thought of life as a full-time spy filled Ruika with horror, or so his poetry suggested. ‘Every human / has a craving / for disguise,’ he concedes in ‘Masks’. The hunter’s instinct may even be a ‘habit from pre-human times’. But to him, ‘pretending to be someone else’ looked like ‘courting behaviour / play acting’. His generation had been offered a chance to do things differently, Ruika wrote, to have the ‘courage to disrobe’:
Away with the masks
the world of humans no longer a hunting ground
admit you are yourself
accept yourself
and your neighbour too.
At the end of his three years’ service, Ruika had more options than most, a mark of the privileged: graduates of the Guards Regiment stood a higher chance of gaining sought-after university places and could apply for generous stipends. But the Hamlet of the Stasi poetry circle was forever holding two thoughts in his head at the same time, slowly approaching one conclusion before retreating back to the other. In his head and his heart, the writer was determined to wrestle with the fighter. No poem of his articulated the questions going around his head at night better than ‘Workshop or Armoury’: ‘Now tell me / all of you / for whom / do you write poems?’ he asks, above all of himself.
Some people build cars.
Others drive them.
You write poems.
Which of the people
whose work you live off
understand them?
As a teenager, Alexander Ruika once came eighth in the national motocross championship, and his poems frequently not only featured chromed motors but also sounded like a dirt bike whose driver was frantically shifting gears to pull himself out of the mud. The final stanza of ‘Workshop or Armoury’ is not a synthesis but a howling motor: ‘For fuck’s sake, / now I want to ride my motorcycle!’
Did Ruika eventually free himself? His cadre file, frustratingly, was incomplete. Millions of pages of Stasi files were destroyed in the dying days of the GDR – burnt, shredded and torn up by hand, randomly and seemingly without a system. And in Ruika’s case this meant his file was full of gaps where I was looking for answers. The Stasi Archive don’t actually allow you to wander around their stacks. Instead, after you apply to view someone’s file, you are assigned a case worker who compiles a file for you. When there are gaps in the cadre file, the case worker can search elsewhere for duplicates, though this takes time. In the meantime, I went back online. Company filings showed that Ruika’s business had at various points been registered at three different addresses in Berlin, two in the north, one in the east of the city. One November morning in 2015, I left my apartment with three letters carrying the same message: would he talk to me about his poems and his time with the Circle of Writing Chekists? No one came to the door after I rang the bell at the first address, at the end of a footpath in Mahlsdorf. There was no movement behind the curtains when I rang the doorbell at the second, a large detached house in a leafy street in Hermsdorf. At the last address, in the suburb of Hohen Neuendorf, a young woman opened the door. It was Alexander Ruika’s daughter. Her father was out, she said. I thrust my letter into her hands. Could her father call me on the number I’d included in the letter? I’m sure he would, she assured me. On the train back to my apartment, I was brimming with optimism. Days passed, then weeks, then months. Slowly, I began to accept that Alexander Ruika would probably never call me.
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One question was gnawing away at me. Reading Alexander Ruika’s poems, I understood why his talent had commanded so much attention in the Stasi’s poetry circle. But the more poems I read by the circle’s teacher, Uwe Berger, the less I understood why he sat in the room as the group’s tutor, revered as an authority on matters lyrical. The English literary critic and poet William Empson believed there were two ways, broadly speaking, to account for what made a poem good. He described the first of these as the ‘pure sound’ school of thought: the idea that a poem turns words into music. The main argument of the ‘pure sound’ approach, Empson wrote, was that it identifies an extreme oddity about how poetry acts: ‘the way lines seem beautiful without reason’. ‘The Tyger’, the William Blake poem I had read so many times with my pensioners’ poetry circle in Kings Cross, was a good example of a poem whose brilliance could be explained in terms of ‘pure sound’. Blake builds up a thumping rhythm with a series of poetic devices: a galloping AABB rhyme scheme, repetition (the couplet ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright / In the forests of the night’), and assonance, the resemblance of sound of syllables of nearby words (‘Dare its deadly terrors clasp?’). ‘The Tyger’ is a song that builds its own backing band, playing a music that can capture you even if you don’t speak the language. The beat that drives the song does not necessarily have to be as merciless as Blake’s. In the case of Bertolt Brecht, a poet much more popular with Berger and his East German contemporaries, the rhythm is more usually that of a ballad, and rhyme is used sparingly. ‘Memory of Marie A’, a poem that I forced myself to memorise in order to impress the members of my poetry circle at the Kings Cross day centre, walks with the timeless poise of a verse commun, a ten-syllable alexandrine with a caesura after the second foot, elegantly held together by the second and fourth, and sixth and eighth lines of every stanza. Uwe Berger’s poems, by contrast, were rarely overtly musical. Early in his career, he wrote verses that rhymed, such as ‘Death in Winter’, from 1952:
New snow must fall,
The dead must rest,
Every one of us all,
has a past to divest.
Things won, things lost:
his life is now done.
Ground hard with frost,
A new journey begun.
But by the early 1970s, Uwe Berger’s poems rarely rhymed at all. The metre was unremarkable, the repetition, assonance and onomatopoeia lacking in ambition. Berger’s go-to poetic technique became the cheapest of them all: anastrophe, the Yoda method of inverting the syntax of a sentence to convey a sense of depth or drama (‘of blood the earth is wet’, ‘of tanks is the square surrounded’, ‘not those who fail are great’).
According to the second school of thought outlined by Empson, and one to which he very much subscribed himself, this should not necessarily matter. A line, he argued, could be highly poetic even if it lacked rhyme or metre. Instead, the ‘essential fact’ about poetic language was its compactness. By pressing words, ideas or statements into the restricted space of a few lines, Empson wrote, ‘the reader is forced to consider their relation for himself.’ This is why Empson, like Aristotle, believed metaphors to be the indispensable tool of a poet: they were ‘effective from several points of view’. In ‘The Tyger’, Blake’s metaphor is that God is like a blacksmith – ‘What the hammer? what the chain? / In what furnace was thy brain?’ – and a somewhat deranged blacksmith at that, forging terrifying tigers as well as innocent lambs. In ‘Memory of Marie A’, Brecht’s metaphor is that love is like a cloud, transient yet eternally memorable for its transience.
But the Stasi circle’s poet-in-chief Uwe Berger employed metaphors only reluctantly. The subjects of his poetry were poetic in the sense that they dealt with the kind of things a poet was expected to write about: descriptions of landscape, such as waves lapping on the shore of the sea, clouds meandering across the sky, fresh snow falling on frozen ground, cherry trees blossoming, birdsong, or remembrances of romantic encounters, hands touching under tables, a pre-coital embrace, a sleeping lover’s steady breathing. But these were not metaphors. On the contrary, Berger seemed intent on turning the very principle of how a metaphor works on its head. In his 1970 poem ‘Vapour Trail’, Berger spends the first two stanzas painting a picture of an aeroplane’s condensation trail cutting across the sky, ‘swirling fantastically’, seemingly headed for the sun on the horizon. Since the vapour trail is already the subject of the poem’s title, you could be forgiven for thinking it may not just be a literal vapour trail but a metaphor, perhaps for modern technology’s Icarus-like temptation of fate. But Berger quashes any such speculation with the third and fourth stanza:
What the picture
only simulates
is already reality:
Earth, sky and even
the galaxy are inhabited
by man.
‘A story of particular facts’, Shelley wrote in ‘A Defence of Poetry’, ‘is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful; poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted.’ But Berger’s poems were more often than not just a mirror that deprived reality of all enchantment, making the ordinary look only ordinary. A vapour trail that seems headed for the sun, his poem says, is a sign of technology’s progress. The metaphor is not a metaphor but a fact.
‘Does the poem serve the truth or not?’ That was the central question Berger said every poet should pursue. But the truth he was pursuing in his poetry just seemed utterly mundane. The more I read of his work, the more I struggled to understand how it merited the numerous prizes and accolades he had received. Perhaps the gulf in literary taste between East and West, between pre- and post-Wall worlds, was deeper than I had thought? But when I dug in the archives for reviews Berger received at the time, it emerged that he similarly failed to inspire his contemporaries. In April 1979, the Halle-based newspaper, Freiheit, published an article about his collection Quiet Words that borders on a hatchet job, bemoaning the ‘simplification of historical matter’, ‘images that don’t work, even when you make willing allowances for poetic licence’, and a lack of ‘contradictions’. Sometimes writers who regularly get panned by critics inspire a particularly vociferous loyalty among their readers, but this doesn’t seem to have been the case either. In May 1984 Uwe Berger wrote a letter to his editor at Aufbau, complaining that there hadn’t been a new edition of Quiet Words. ‘Specialists in the GDR and abroad’, he claimed, had ‘begged’ him for a copy, and when he told them there weren’t any reprints they were ‘taken aback’. Berger was irritated to hear that the latest work by a female poet writing for a rival publishing house had been printed with a run of twelve thousand copies. He was convinced, he wrote, that a reprint with a similar run was ‘not just justified but would quickly sell’. His publisher reluctantly agreed to print another three thousand copies, but added that the actual demand for the book was realistically ‘more like a couple of hundred copies at most’. ‘It can’t be in your interest that we print a second edition we can only partially sell,’ the editor added, wearily.
