Philip Oltermann

4 Stars, normally it's either 5 stars or nothing, so what's different here? Hard to say actually, a lot of books are set in events long since passed, or todays countries but in olden times or even in countries invented by the author.

What I find both beguiling and strange about books like this is that it is set in a country that no longer exists and in a culture that has disappeared.

I digress. In this case the Stasi convinced itself that one way to win the cold war was to convince the West show more that the their culture was not as good was by becoming better poets, hence the title of the book.

This was all happening in the GDR so everyone was spying on everyone else.

Interestingly, he tracks down some of the central characters from the bookto ask th em about this "thing" that they were involved in, some answer openly and others are guarded. As a person who has been in 2 cults I can relate directly to the difficulty of explaining something to a person who had not been involved because the experience, at the time was not just all engrossing, but also culturally outside of many of the norms that most people take for granted and consider "normal"

If you've see the movie Other People's Lives, set in the GDR, at the end of the movie the main Stasi character is seen as now being a postie delivering letters. It has been said many times that the falling of the Berlin Wall was neither foreseen or expected. When it did happen, that country, the GDR and its culture (valued or not) just disappeared into dust.

To read and enjoy fiction you have to be able to suspend disbelief. To read and enjoy history you have to be able to suspend judgement.

And so it is here, this book gives a view deep inside the GDR which was really somewhere else entirely. show less

Oltermann is likeable, well-read, and well attuned to English and German culture. And by culture, yes of course that embraces the museums and libraries, the classical lineage of Goethe, Shakespeare and the rest.
But he's also someone who like us has watched a lot of television. So this serves as a lively and still informative counterpart to the BM tome "Germany: Memories of a Nation" (reviewed here in 2015).
Plenty to enjoy, and his hilarious accounts of "Dinner for One" or of Berti Vogts show more on "Tatort" will send you straight to YouTube. show less

This is from the book's blurb. '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.' This sounds like the plot to some black comedy perhaps, but in fact this book is a closely researched account of the period between 1982 and 1989 when the GDR tried to weaponise poetry. It discusses the fact that there was a genuine desire to show more expose citizens to good writing of every kind. And there was also a fear that those already writing poetry might have an anti-GDR agenda, and their work was exhaustively scrutinised for clues as to the poet's true political leanings. Suspects were often imprisoned while their work was analysed.
This is a carefully researched history, and the author managed to follow up the stories and subsequent careers of quite a few creative writers, from conscripted soldiers to birder guards to professional poets. Such an interesting idea, but the book itself was not easy reading. But I'm glad I made the effort to find out a little more about this bit-part in GDR history. show less