East germany

Readers of The Spectator World probably think they are quite au fait with the culture wars. J.K. Rowling, Joe Rogan, even Dr. Seuss — writers and celebrities who have been canceled quickly roll off the tongue. But what if “cancellation” had more dramatic implications than just a Twitter account bursting with notifications? In 1975, the unpublished poet Annegret Gollin encountered a rather different kind of culture war: she was arrested at a music festival and told that she could either spend two years in a prison cell or become an informant for the Stasi. Gollin chose to become an informant, but was a brilliantly ineffective one — she told over a hundred of her friends that she was supposed to be spying on them — and she ended up in prison seven years later.