The Stasi Poetry Circle, page 7
But in other reports Berger endorsed the Stasi using his information to crack down with full force. ‘The IM is of the opinion’, Pönig wrote after a meeting on 28 January 1972, ‘that the GDR should no longer put up with effrontery and provocations’: the best solution would be to deport offensive writers to West Germany, not least because it would have an intimidating effect on others. By the end of the 1970s, Berger’s reports to the Stasi were full of calls to arms, packed with military jargon and the metaphors his poetry lacked: critical authors were ‘oppositional gangs’ who ‘strive for hegemony’ in order to carry out ‘frontal assaults’. Before innocents got caught in the ‘crossfire’, he advised the Stasi to further ‘scout out territory’ before eventually ‘pushing [them] against the wall’. A 1979 collection of poems and lyrics by the singer-songwriter Bettina Wegner had drawn his ire for ‘creating and gradually increasing a general feeling of unease, of disappointment, disgruntlement’ that could potentially turn into ‘emotional tinder’ for appeals from the ‘other side’. The eager informant suggested ‘primarily psychological means’ of unsettling the target, such as getting left-leaning journalists in West Germany to criticise her songs. If Wegner’s popularity in East Germany were nonetheless to increase, Berger recommended the coinage and circulation of a catchy put-down. His humble proposal: ‘tampon poetry’.
*
In February 1982, the Stasi rewarded Uwe Berger for his enthusiastic and reliable contributions by handing him the silver ‘Brotherhood in Arms’ medal, a military honour that the Ministry for State Security would only occasionally grant to individuals outside the armed forces. After two officers had put the white cloth ribbon with two orange stripes around the eager informant’s neck, Berger expressed his gratitude and reiterated his willingness to work for the secret police again in the future, or so a report of the meeting claims. ‘He described himself as a patriot without a Party affiliation, who was on the side of the working class and its Party.’
Uwe Berger does not mention the medal, or the contents of any of his reports, in the post-Wall volume of his memoirs. The book makes his collaboration with the secret police sound like a tiresome chore, without any real consequences, and at any rate rather short-lived. ‘A couple of years’ after starting to write reports, Berger recalls, he asked his handler to release him from his commitment. As an artist, he reasoned, he could not be constantly exposed to the ‘negative aspects of life’. At a secret location, over dry bread rolls, two senior officers granted him his wish. There was only one condition. In return, Uwe Berger was asked to take over the artistic direction of the Circle of Writing Chekists at the Guards Regiment. Seven years earlier, he had snitched on two writers who had suggested that circles for writing workers mainly produced ‘verses about boozing, vomiting and shitting’. Now he had the chance to prove them wrong, so he agreed. From reading Berger’s memoirs, you would assume that his appointment as poet-in-chief at Adlershof in 1982 was when his career as a spy came to an end.
Lesson 6
BATHOS
An effect of anticlimax created by an unintentional lapse of mood from the sublime to the trivial or ridiculous.
For Stasi staff, life inside the institution was one of exotic adventures outweighing small personal sacrifices. East Germany’s ‘scouts for peace’ travelled from Siberia to Bonn under forged papers to infiltrate the West German government. They swooped into South America to expose former Wehrmacht officers plotting a resurgence of fascism. They dashed arms deals in Portugal, retrieved chemical weapons from shipwrecks at the bottom of Norwegian fjords, muffled war drums in Turkey, prevented CIA coups in Greece and spoiled plans to inject the entire West German army with a drug known as ‘King Kong Flu’ that would induce aggressive behaviour. The lack of family life could be tough, but it all became more bearable when you had to bed busty blonde neo-Nazis to avoid blowing your cover along the way.
That, at least, is how the life of the Stasi’s elite force was portrayed in a series called Das unsichtbare Visier, which first aired on East German television the day before Christmas Eve, 1973. It was not only the opening sequence of this series that was modelled on the adventures of a certain British super-spy who regularly featured on West German TV: at the start of each episode, a suited figure appeared in the middle of a blue-tinted circle to the sound of a stalking bass line, pausing before turning to the camera at the cue of a wailing horn section. East Germany’s James Bond was called Werner Bredebusch. Played by the dashing young Armin Müller-Stahl, he was intended by his creators to embody ‘a socialist scout excelling in partisanship, steadfastness, bravery in battle, self-discipline, readiness to make sacrifices, cleverness, [and] creativity’, and he did so with great swagger.
But the reality of serving the Ministry for State Security did not always match up to Bredebusch’s adventures on the East German small screen. The number of Stasi employees dedicated to foreign, as opposed to domestic affairs, dwarfed those working for James Bond’s employers: by 1989, there were nine to ten thousand full-timers at the Ministry’s reconnaissance branch, compared to 2,300 officially recorded as employed by MI6. But foreign affairs for the Stasi mostly meant West Germany rather than derring-do in exotic locations, and in the vast majority of cases their work consisted of paper-pushing. The growing number of informal collaborators came with a growing number of handwritten reports or minutes of secret meetings, and the volume of paperwork produced in the process needed to be kept in order. Björn Vogel, the second-oldest member of the Stasi poetry circle, had entered the Ministry in 1970 and joined the archive department, which collated and organised information gathered by its wide network of full-time and informal spies. His poem ‘Night Shift’ tries, and struggles, to imbue a daily routine of data processing with the glamour of a life of ejector seats and exploding pens:
Between night and morning
A radio call
Quickly!
Frenzy.
Phones ringing, teletypewriters chattering.
Tired yawns, but excited concentration.
Precise research through
Accurately filed matter.
Information
To the comrades.
Quiet pride –
Mission completed
In the struggle for peace.
*
The Stasi had always thought of itself as more than just an ordinary secret police force. When the GDR’s first President, Wilhelm Pieck, had appealed to Josef Stalin in 1948 for his fledgling republic to have its own spying agency, his pitch rested on the proposal that the Stasi would be modelled as closely as possible on the Soviet Union’s legendary ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission’, the Cheka. Even in the 1980s, employees of East Germany’s Ministry for State Security still referred to themselves as ‘Chekists’, and the internal room-booking sheet at Adlershof described the monthly meet-up not, say, as the ‘Stasi poetry club’ but as the Kreisarbeitsgemeinschaft Schreibende Tschekisten, the ‘Working Circle of Writing Chekists’. In Russia, the Cheka had presented itself as a state security organ of a new type: as the historian Julie Fedor writes in her book on the mythologies of Soviet state security, the Cheka’s foundation ‘marked the dawning of an entirely new era in the state policing of society’. It was distinct from the Tsarist guards, the Okhrana, with its own moral code and a spiritual aura. Chekists, the Russian writer Isaac Babel wrote, were ‘sacred people’, whose mission was to bring to the enemies of the Revolution ‘a spiritual bath in death’, in poet Velimir Khlebnikov’s phrase; Lenin hailed them as ‘proletarian Jacobins’. These were supermen of subterfuge, who were required to achieve nothing less than a seemingly impossible equilibrium of intellect and passion: a burning dedication to their moral cause, an emotional detachment from the human sacrifices required to achieve it, and an utter immunity to temptations of the flesh and lucre. A brass plate, fixed to the wall at the bottom of the staircase one floor down from where the Stasi poetry circle met, regularly reminded its members of these high ideals. Engraved underneath a stark portrait of ‘Iron Feliks’ Dzerzhinsky, whose hollow cheeks lent him more than a passing resemblance to depictions of Jesus, were three criteria for what made a good spy: ‘Only someone with a cool head, a hot heart and clean hands can become a Chekist.’
The Chekist mission statement contained some contradictions not apparent at first sight. These elite operatives had to prioritise their professional lives over their family commitments at all times: their work must never be discussed with parents, partners or children. But at the same time they had to be utterly truthful to their employers. They had to be hard and unyielding, but also completely transparent in their actions – which is to say they must never be able to turn their hardness against the Party that controlled them. The second line on the commemorative plaque at Adlershof found the right metaphor to gloss over this seeming paradox: ‘A Chekist has to be more clean and honest than anybody else,’ it read. ‘He has to be as clear as a crystal.’ The image of the crystal was central to the original Cheka’s mythology: in a 1957 poem that dramatises the moment Lenin selects Feliks Dzerzhinsky as the man to take charge of suppressing counter-revolutionary activity, Soviet writer Semen Sorin imagined the anointing to have been accompanied by ‘glass tinkling from a nearby explosion / As though the ice of the Neva was breaking’. One of Russia’s biggest manufacturers of technical glass is still named after the Bolshevik spymaster, as is Dzerzhinsk in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, east of Moscow, a town famous for the production of crystal and glass. One defining characteristic of crystal, as East German students of crystallography knew, is that it is inherently symmetrical, made up of identical repeating patterns.
The older members of the Stasi poetry circle in particular had uniformly committed themselves to this hierarchy of values. Björn Vogel, born in Saxony in 1949, had joined the Stasi as a twenty-one-year-old under difficult circumstances, with his recruiters forcing him to break off an engagement before they allowed him to join the ranks: his former fiancée’s stepfather was a ‘returner’, an escapee from East to West who had later changed his mind and thus remained a potential risk factor. Once Vogel had signed up, his professional progress was slow, impeded by a physical disability and family matters. His stutter came to the fore every time he had to operate under stress, and speaking in front of large groups or to strangers was difficult for him. In March 1982, his name was crossed off the personnel reserve list of young officers who had the potential to move up to a higher official role. Earlier in the year the Stasi had thrown out his younger brother, who had been employed for three years in the same department, once it was discovered that he was gay. Homosexuality had been decriminalised in the East five years earlier than in the West, but the Stasi had its own moral code, which meant gay members of its force were potential targets for blackmail and therefore an unwanted liability.
All these personal slights and sacrifices, in addition to the evidently mind-numbing mundanity of his everyday work routine, had made me think Björn Vogel might be open to a conversation about his past. He was easily found on social media, and his profiles were public. From LinkedIn I could glean that he used to work as a caretaker, but the pictures on his Facebook profile gave the impression that he was deep into retirement: photos of the beach in his home town of Kühlungsborn, glasses of craft beer in restaurants, Vogel bobbing in the Baltic Sea in Świnoujście, grinning. In the digital sphere, he was a willing sharer of likes and dislikes: I discovered that he kept fit in old age, using a walking app that automatically posted updates onto his timeline. I learnt that he was still sceptical of American politics, posting articles about US-led wars from the Russian state-sponsored network Russia Today, but also a lover of American music who liked Roy Orbison, Bruce Springsteen and Frank Zappa. I learnt that he had flipped from left to right: there were clips from September 2017 that described Germany’s nascent Alternative für Deutschland party as ‘totally gaga’, but he changed his tack after the right-wing populist party entered the national government for the first time two weeks later, now commenting with ‘He’s got a point …’ on a video of an AfD politician condemning the US intervention in the Syrian civil war. In June 2018, he shared a video that claimed mass immigration from Africa was ‘organised by powerful people like George Soros’, the Jewish-born Hungarian-American financier, and that international Jewish finance networks were deliberately bankrupting African countries ‘in order to subsume them into the New World Order’.
But as transparent as Björn Vogel was about his political views now, he remained secretive about his past. When I sent him a message on Facebook, asking if he would talk to me about the Working Circle of Writing Chekists, his answer was prompt and curt: ‘What’s that meant to be good for??’ I sent several follow-ups. He never responded again. ‘Strong and impenetrable / are the walls that surround us’, Vogel had once written in a poem called ‘Vow’. ‘It is impregnable / our fortress / because on us, comrades / you can rely’.
Keeping the Chekist flame alive was a daily struggle. No one knew this more than the man in uniform who had led the group before Uwe Berger had been drafted in. Ever since Rolf-Dieter Melis had joined the Guards Regiment as a twenty-year-old in 1964, there had been questions about his commitment to the Stasi cause. During political debates, one report noted, Melis was often cautious and reserved: ‘He only takes an active role when he is asked to make a statement.’ Rather than being as ‘hot’ as required, Melis’s heart, his superiors worried, was only beating at room temperature. His hands were clean, but mainly in the sense that they hadn’t seen much action: ten years into his service at Adlershof, when Melis asked his superiors for a promotion, they realised he had only acquired ‘a minimum in military capabilities’, skipping officer school, the section leader course and training for chief guards. Instead, Melis had thrown himself into every cultural activity available to him: he had joined a choir, a cabaret group and a folk dance class, and had taken over the organisation of the Stasi’s radio studio and set up the poetry group.
But Rolf-Dieter Melis got away with these deficiencies because his ability to meet the third of the Cheka’s requirements, keeping a cool head, had never seemed in doubt. Melis’s cadre file records how he and his family attended the sixtieth birthday party of his father-in-law in the spring of 1975. When the couple arrived, a small group of visitors was already present. After a few minutes, Melis noticed that two people spoke in a ‘foreign dialect’: they were relatives of his mother-in-law, visiting from Bavaria in West Germany. Melis immediately left the building, on the pretext of taking his daughter to a walk. The next day, according to a report he volunteered for his Stasi superiors, he had informed his parents-in-law in ‘unmistakable terms’ that contact with citizens from an ‘NSW’ or Nichtsozialistisches Wirtschaftsgebiet, a non-socialist economic zone, could not be reconciled with his service in the armed units of the Ministry. When he realised that his in-laws did not respect his position with the ‘necessary level of understanding’, he broke off all relations with them. The almost-encounter at the birthday party, during which no words were exchanged, merited a four-page report from Melis.
When I asked Jürgen Polinske whether he had stayed in touch with any of the members of the group after the fall of the Wall, he shook his head. Everyone had their own issues to deal with, he said, but artists were always a bit more sensitive, and in times of change artistic sensitivity could be a negative. Was he talking about anyone in the group in particular, I asked. Rolf-Dieter Melis, he said, had been one of the sensitive ones. After that meeting I found the name of Hilde Melis, Rolf-Dieter’s wife, in the phonebook, and when I called she picked up almost immediately. But when I mentioned that I was interested in her husband and his work at the Stasi poetry circle, she said she would hang up the phone. Yet she continued talking: she and her husband had never talked about what he did at the Stasi, she said. Work always came first, then family. What about that poem her husband had written about her, ‘Gratitude to the Soviet Soldier’, recalling that she was the little girl in the giant sculpture at Treptower Park? Surely that must have meant something to her? There was a silence at the other end of the line. Still, Hilde Melis did not hang up. Instead, she offered a prime example of Berliner Schnauze, the capital’s famously coarse-but-hearty way with words: Die hatten doch was an der Bommel, ‘Those guys needed to have their head checked.’ The girl in the Soviet War Memorial, she said, had never been her. Still, Hilde Melis continued talking. After the fall of the Wall, a friend had talked Rolf-Dieter into building himself a house: getting a building permit and the necessary materials was meant to be easier in the new reunited Germany than in the old encrusted Soviet system. Melis had taken out a small loan for 60,000 Deutsche Mark to buy a plot of land in Königs Wusterhausen, south-west of Berlin, and in 1993 the building work had begun. But then the building contractors he employed went bankrupt. The family breadwinner couldn’t get any more work, and Hilde was bringing in most of the cash. He couldn’t get a foothold, she said, and that’s why he did what he did in 1994. Before the house was finished, Melis had taken his own life. If her late husband walked through the door now, his widow said, she would slap his face. Without the organisation that had once structured his life, Rolf-Dieter had told his wife before his suicide, she was the stronger out of the two of them, and he could no longer go on. Rolf-Dieter Melis had been a good crystal until his very last day, which is to say he was transparent to the Stasi but opaque to everyone else.
