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

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Temporarily out of stock

ISBN: 9780571331208
Title: Stasi Poetry Circle – The Creative Writing Class that Tried to Win the Cold War
Author: OLTERMANN PHILIP

‘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.

Format: Paperback
Publication date: 08/05/2023
Pages: 224
Temporarily out of stock