Descriere
The extraordinary true story of the Stasi's poetry club: Stasiland and The Lives of Others crossed with Dead Poets Society.
'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, 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.
A magnificent book. I could not put it down. It is at once touching, exquisite, devastating and extraordinary - it's a wonderful narrative, with impeccable detective work, and beautifully written. It manages to be understated 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
[An] absorbing portrait of the era through a bizarre lens . . . Engrossing. ― Financial Times
Less The Lives of Others and more The Death of Stalin . . . A brilliantly told tale. ― Sunday Times
Fast-moving and lucid, with an enjoyably pulpy, hardboiled quality. ― Daily Telegraph
A genre-defying work, an engrossing read and my book of the year so far. ― Scotsman
Oltermann's chipper, nightmarish The Stasi Poetry Circle outlines he workings of totalitarianism with a plot worthy of Monty Python. The clarity secret policemen crave does battle with their own evasiveness - a.k.a. the lauded poetic virtue of ambiguity. Evil has seldom been more banal. A vivid, funny, and imperturbable portrait of Soviet Russia's most loyal satellite. -- Nell Zink
Oltermann's erudite unpacking of their literary offerings . . . sets his poets in the wider context beautifully, adding an unexpected piece to the puzzle of what made the East German dictatorship and its citizens tick. ― BBC History Magazine
Gripping and highly readable . . . What makes this book so fascinating is the lives of its characters. ― Literary Review
