'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.