'The Stasi and the censors never felt that they had really understood Neumann’s novels or deciphered what he was saying in them. Their training assured them that all creative writing conveyed a sociopolitical message, and they suspected that Neumann’s message—hidden in cryptic prose crammed with strange allusions and enigmatic comments—was a hostile one. But they never decoded it. This was because there wasn’t any message. Neumann’s fiction was certainly opaque, but the truth was that the literary sentinels of the GDR were stupid—sometimes comically so.'

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2023/02/09/sonnets-for-the-state-stasi-poetry-circle-oltermann/