The Stasi Poetry Circle by Philip Oltermann

Author:Philip Oltermann [Oltermann, Philip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Annegret Gollin was a non-conformist, and in the eyes of the Stasi a youthful troublemaker they wanted to constrain. Her incarceration was almost inevitable, and she could equally well have been prosecuted for smuggling cigarettes or for possession of a banned book. However, the verses for which the Stasi arrested her appeared to disturb the secret police far more than her wayward lifestyle. In the months following her arrest on 11 February 1980, Gollin was interviewed thirty-six times about her modest poetic output. Again and again the twenty-three-year-old was marched to an interrogation room and asked to interpret and explain her own poems. The police could see what her poems said, but what did they mean? Was this poem a criticism of the National People’s Army? Did this line mock the Socialist Unity Party? Was this title a reference to the police crackdown on the 1977 protests at Berlin’s Alexanderplatz? Every air pocket of ambiguity had to be beaten out of the pieces of paper the spies had retrieved from Gollin’s flat. One of the poems, she eventually explained, was a criticism of how the East German government handled the expulsion of the dissident songwriter Wolf Biermann: ‘In my poem,’ Gollin told her interrogators, ‘I make the claim that there is no freedom in the GDR, and that everyone who takes a political view that runs counter to that of the Party and government is being imprisoned or expelled from the GDR.’ Even after the author had been made to trample over her literary work until it was flattened into a literal message, the Stasi could not quite fathom what they were dealing with. The charges against Gollin bring to mind a terrorist building home-made explosives, not a teenage girl jotting down her insecurities in her bedroom: ‘In 1977, she made the decision to practice subversive agitation in written form. To achieve this aim, she made use of certain expertise she had acquired in a literature club in Neubrandenburg, and manufactured eleven inflammatory pamphlets in verse form. These were transferred from Post-it notes in her A5 format so-called literature book and circulated in early 1979.’

How could a state be so scared of a few lines of verse? These weren’t poems written by a powerful, influential author admired by millions, but an unemployed twenty-one-year-old with no publishing contract to her name. They weren’t photocopied verses going viral behind closed doors, but lines handwritten into a school notebook, shared with no more than five close friends. Her poem titled Betonien, or ‘Concretia’, was laid out in an unusual style, like two tower blocks of text.

I live in the 20th century.

I live the modern way.

I live a super life.

I live progressively.

I am a creature of Concretia.

I find it nice and interesting.

I find it good and comfortable.

I look out of the window.

I see concrete to my left.

I see concrete to my right.

I feel good

I notice

I think concrete.

I become concrete.

(That’s not just the case in New York City.)

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