This book sounds like a quirky piece of fiction, to set beside The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society or A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. And it begins like a novel, as a young border guard called Jürgen Polinske stands outside the Adlershof military compound in East Berlin dreaming of ice-cream. But Polinske is a real person on his way to attend a poetry workshop. And this is the true story of how the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, established a creative writing programme to teach its spies the art of verse.
Its origins weren’t sinister but idealistic. The culture minister of the newly created GDR, Johannes Becher, dreamed of a model society in which poetry, “the very definition of everything good and beautiful, of a more meaningful, humane form of living”, would have a central place. In Nazi Germany books had been burned and authors persecuted. In the GDR, authors received generous help from the state – care packages, food vouchers, posts in government and a reduced income tax rate. Reading was heavily promoted: between 1950 and 1989, the number of books published each year tripled even as the population declined. And manual workers were encouraged to write as well as read (“Pick up the quill, comrade!”). To Becher, one verse form in particular was crucial to the establishment of the new utopia: the sonnet. In its dialectical structure – thesis, antithesis and synthesis – it mirrored the Marxist view of historical progress.
