Oltermann suggests that to the Stasi “the sonnet was the algorithm that would guide East Germany’s population…gently into freedom.” Later he expands on this idea of “the good poem as a miniature model for the good society”:Ī state with steady feet and a perfectly calibrated rhyme structure would learn to wind its way through the corridor of history to the steady beat of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, just as the sonnet unfurls down the page.īut the GDR never had steady feet and was felled by its own antitheses in 1989, only a short way down that corridor. Art was a weapon in the struggle against the ever-vigilant class enemy. Most were from the elite Feliks Dzerzhinsky Guards Regiment, named after the ferocious founder of Lenin’s security police, the Cheka, and writing poetry was anything but a hobby for them. This view was solemnly accepted by the Circle of Writing Chekists, selected members of the Stasi-the East German secret police-who wrote poetry and met once a month to read and criticize one another’s verse. According to Philip Oltermann’s The Stasi Poetry Circle, he “believed that sonnets structurally mirrored the Marxist view of historical progress,” the materialist version of Hegelian three-stage dialectic from “an idea, the thesis, to a contradiction of that idea, the antithesis, to a solution that resolves the tension between these two ideas, the synthesis.” Thrilled by his discovery, Becher wrote that “the sonnet makes its content life’s law of motion…statement, contrast and resolution in a concluding statement.” The poet Johannes Becher, once East Germany’s minister of culture, compared the essence of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to a sonnet.

William Shakespeare’s best-remembered sonnet compared someone to a summer’s day.

The Black Sea by Neal Ascherson