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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

from The Spectator. And this week my guest is the journalist and writer Philip Alterman,

whose new book, I was going to say his first book, but I writer Philip Alterman, whose new book,

I'm going to say his first book, but I'm not sure it is your first book, is called the Stasi Poetry Circle, the creative writing class that tried to win the Cold War. Now most of us

don't see a creative writing class as being able to win or affect the world at all in any great way. So winning the Cold War is quite an

ambitious task for such a thing. Tell me how you found out about this poetry circle and how you

started to pursue it. Sure. So I think it was in about around 2015, I basically moved from London to Berlin for The Guardian,

where I now head up the Berlin office that we have here.

And I'd known the story, or I knew that there was a poetry circle in this Darcy since about 2006, which is the year that the film

The Lives of Others came out. And in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, there was an article

at a time, which is mainly about the film, but it mentioned sort of in passing. There were some

of the elements from the film that were actually real, Stranger Than Fiction, and that there was actually, you know,

the Stasi had his own poetry circle.

I mean, they'd meet once a month and read out their poems to each other.

Yeah, the rough outline was in this article.

And so in about 2015, I ordered up a copy of an anthology that the Stasi produced. I got hold of a reprint. So just as I moved to Berlin,

I got hold of this booklet. And I was so intrigued by it that I just wanted to find out a little

bit more. So the sort of basic structure that I could ascertain from the early stage was there was a group of

Starzy employees ranging from quite young new recruits, essentially still in their training.

Essentially, they were just young soldiers, as well as others were border guards,

not all of whom were part of the Starzzi, but some of those who worked at the important

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