The Stasi Poetry Circle: The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War

(Paperback, Main)

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'Engrossing.' -Observer

'Remarkable.' - The Times
'Magnificent.'- Phillipe Sands

'Gripping.'- Literary Review


'A history so outlandish and unlikely that you feel it must be true . . .[A] grippingly well-written book.'- Anthony Quinn, Observer Book of the Week


In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Once a month, a group of soldiers and border guards gathered in a heavily guarded military compound in East Berlin for meetings to learn how to write lyrical verse.


Journalist Philip Oltermann spent five years rifling through Stasi files, dig-ging out lost volumes of poetry and tracking down surviving members of this Red poet's society, to illustrate the little known story in which spies turned poets and poets spies.

Reviews

'A magnificent book. I could not put it down. It is at once touching, exquis-ite, devastating and extraordinary - it's a wonderful narrative, with impeccable detective work, and beautifully written. It manages to be under-stated and thrilling, a kind of literary page turner. I loved it. It deserves to be very widely read and then turned into a movie.' - Philippe Sands, author of EAST WEST STREET and THE RATLINE

Author Bio

Philip Oltermann grew up in Schleswig-Holstein and stud-ied English and German literature at Oxford University and University College London. As a journalist he has written for Granta, the London Review of Books and the Guardian, for whom he is the Berlin Bureau Chief. He is the author of Keeping Up with the Germans (2012) and tweets at@philipoltermann.