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Philip Oltermann

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

€13,95

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, digging 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.

Format: Paperback
Published: UK, 2023
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Pages: 224
Language: English
ISBN 13: 9780571331208
ISBN 10: 0571331203

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

€13,95