In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I examine Philip Oltermann's book on the curious episode in which the East German secret police established a creative writing workshop--the "Writing Circle of Chekists." Why did they do it? Excerpt:
Alongside their propaganda and surveillance missions, they had another goal: to understand poetry. Genuine collectivists, who view privacy as anathema, can never really understand poetry—at least, not lyric poetry—because it is such a direct expression of the evanescent and ineffable creative spark within the human mind, something collectivism can never truly reach. One of the best anti-communist poets, E.E. Cummings, expressed that point in his own quirky way in his classic “Jehovah buried,Satan dead,” which bitterly satirized communist states where “Souls are outlawed” and “dreamless knaves on Shadows [feed].” The result of communist regimentation, he wrote, is that
Boobs are holy,poets mad,
illustrious punks of Progress shriek;
when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,
Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:That last phrase—“Minds nothing can”—was not only Cummings’s way of saying that a country that outlaws individual aspiration will also obliterate creativity, but also his way of expressing the essential crudity of communism, which views man as a mechanism to be manipulated, categorized, and put to labor, rather than as a unique creature of infinite potential. East Germany’s rulers, who never lifted their eyes from the dingy concrete of the police state, could hardly comprehend such potential. And that made it impossible for them to grasp, let alone counteract, the attractions of the free world’s culture.
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