Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West Read online

  First published by Zero Books, 2014

  Zero Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach, Alresford, Hants, SO24 9JH, UK

  [email protected]

  www.johnhuntpublishing.com

  www.zero-books.net

  For distributor details and how to order please visit the ‘Ordering’ section on our website.

  Text copyright: Agata Pyzik 2013

  ISBN: 978 1 78099 394 2

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publishers.

  The rights of Agata Pyzik as author have been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Design: Stuart Davies

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

  We operate a distinctive and ethical publishing philosophy in all areas of our business, from our global network of authors to production and worldwide distribution.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  1. Welcome to the House of Fear

  Introducing the New Europe

  The “Polish Miracle”

  The new middle classes and their Bible

  A Tale of Two Cities, or On The Real Meaning of Borders

  The strange silence of liberal Poland

  Communist Ghosts in the Closet

  Post-politics of nostalgia

  Toxic Ruins

  You can scream here

  Sexy and Unsexy Countries

  Post-transitional cruelty

  Dark art for dark times

  New architecture of memory, memory as a Commodity

  2. Ashes and Brocade

  Berlinism, Bowie, Postpunk, New Romantics and Pop-Culture in the Second Cold War

  Drang nach Osten

  Berlin as capital of Post-DDR melancholia

  I could make a transformation

  Oh we can beat them, forever and ever

  Mauerszene

  Fear in the Western World

  A Totalitarian Musical

  Stilyagi of the New Era

  They walked in line

  Europophilia

  Depeche-Mania

  System to fight the SYSTEM

  Goodbye, Berlin

  3. O Mystical East

  Eastern European Orientalism

  To despair is to be Romanian

  Not Really White

  Misbaptized

  Poland as a post-colonial country

  The Polish Uncanny

  The chimeras of Sarmatian melancholia

  Catastrophism

  Living with phantoms

  4. Socialist Realism on Trial

  Post-post-modernism, avant-garde, realism and socialist realism in our time

  The real in the new reality

  Critical art, Engaged art

  An “impact on reality”

  The New National Art, or the New Socialist Realism

  From avant-garde to realism (and back again)

  Inside Socialist Reality

  We were men of marble

  Soap operas about late capitalism

  5. Applied Fantastics

  On the “catching-up” revolution in the Soviet Bloc

  Learning modernity from the east

  We will bury you!

  The Meaning of the Thaw

  Was there a proletarian culture?

  Aspirational magazines of Socialism

  A Festival of Youth

  You and Me and Things: Socialist Objects of Desire

  Does it matter? It doesn’t matter! An invitation to destruction

  Give me all that I want!

  Lost in Contradictory Images

  Afterword

  Acknowledgements

  Further Reading

  For Owen

  Who controls the past, controls the future

  Who controls the present controls the past

  George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

  A cheap holiday in other peoples misery

  I don’t wanna holiday in the sun

  I wanna go to the new Belsen

  I wanna see some history

  ’cause now I got a reasonable economy

  Now I got a reason, now i got a reason to be waiting

  The Berlin Wall

  Sensurround sound in a two inch wall

  Well I was waiting for the communist call

  I didn’t ask for sunshine and I got World War Three

  I’m looking over the wall

  And they’re looking at me!

  Well they’re staring all night and

  They’re staring all day

  I had no reason to be here at all

  But now I gotta reason it’s no real reason

  And i’m waiting at the Berlin Wall

  Claustrophobia there’s too much paranoia

  There’s to many closets I went in before and

  Now I gotta reason, it’s no real reason to be waiting

  The Berlin Wall

  Gotta go over the Berlin Wall

  I gotta go over the wall

  I don’t understand this bit at all…

  Please don’t be waiting for me

  The Sex Pistols, ‘Holidays in the Sun’

  Introduction

  When at some point in writing this book I went to Housman’s, the renowned socialist bookstore in King’s Cross, London, to make sure I had everything I needed for writing on the legacy of the Soviet socialist times, I had a shock. The shop’s cellar, clearly neglected, presented a real dustbin of history: piles upon piles of books, torn, dusty, and clearly untouched for decades, all on the now obviously unwanted subject of Soviet socialism. Years of magazines, brochures, journals, political analyses of events that used to light up the nations, now presented the possibly most undesired moment of history. Is it really all over? Now, as I once heard from a Polish friend in London, we’re “all free and happy”. Moreover, those of us, who were lucky and entered the club of so-called normal countries (i.e., entered the EU) could “help” those others less lucky, like Belarus, Ukraine or Russia, to achieve this ideal of democracy.

  But could anyone seriously come to such a conclusion? The Big Change, promised after ’89 didn’t happen. Instead, we developed political and cultural polarizations that are dividing the public sphere in most ex-communist countries. Every day, dozens of cheap flights carrying a migrant workforce from Poland and elsewhere in Eastern Europe are launched back and forth from the British Isles; and every day, racist articles in the gutter press seem to tell a different story. Three decades ago Eastern Europe was on everybody’s lips because of communism, revolutions, invasions, workers struggle. Now Western newspapers, if they write about us at all, it’s because we comprise an “eastern danger” to the British job market, or they praise us for “growth”, i.e. successful austerity measures. The respective countries are described mostly with disappointment, as they didn’t exactly become what they were supposed to, rather becoming a liability to the initially so open European Union. As all the force of the liberal governments in those countries was at best aimed at erasing that there was ever communism in there, the reality confirmed that over 23 years after the collapse of the Wall we’re still defined by the past, in economic, cultural and every other respect lagging behind the ideal that is Western Europe. As the EU now suffers the biggest crisis since its inception, there emerges a space for a discussion over whether Club Europe or Club West are really the be
st possible worlds.

  The relationship the West, by which we mostly mean Western Europe and the United States, has with the former Bloc still often brings to mind the Cold War era hostility. Indeed, to use the concept of the popular liberal pundit Edward Lucas’ book, The New Cold War (with the subtitle “And how to win it”), prefaced by Norman Davies and recommended by Anne Applebaum no less, spreads the popular opinions on the former East (specifically, Russia) as still dangerous to “our” democracy. Association with the “East” is still nothing positive or to be proud of: for that reason we even designed the term “Central Europe”, a geographical manipulation, to drag us more to the West, or more like, away from the East, as much as we can.

  Although Russia, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary, have all become capitalist, and often to an extreme degree, it seems that they have not become so enough, or not enough for Western standards. In the criticism of Russia especially, while public opinion rightly points out the censorship, homophobia, mistreatment of political prisoners and other abuses of democracy, there is rarely a criticism of the economic turn Russia has taken after 1991. In the criticism of the previous regime, rarely is it mentioned that since the beginning of the 1990s there were over 2.5 million ‘excess deaths’, mostly as a result of poverty and its malaises, like alcoholism, causing a drastic lowering of life expectancy, from 63.5 for men in 1991 to 58.6 ten years later.

  All of the post-socialist economies underwent a massive collapse, but what we mostly get as a response is a shrug of the shoulders: ‘it had to hurt’. As we can see though, especially since the capitalist crash in 2008, there has been a growing tendency to discuss the socialist and communist project again, to shyly come back to reading Marx and classics of Marxism, which slipped from public debate a long time ago. Such discussions happen not only in narrow academic or leftist/activist circles, but are discussed at large by prominent economists, like Paul Krugman, who are openly critical of the way the Former East is currently beating recession and crisis with drastic austerity measures. Still, in the former East itself, this debate barely exists. We still pursue the already obsolete model of “creative capital”, bankrupted elsewhere, privatisation and credit bubbles, still discuss the “information society”, while the dismantled health care and lack of jobs are leaving more and more people below the poverty line. We tackle the crisis with austerity, with no discussion about the alternatives.

  0.1 Center of Warsaw, capital of ‘a regular European country’. Gigantic adverts cover the modernist pavilion, with the Leszek Balcerowicz installed ‘register of public debt’ over the Sin Strip Club

  So yes, the East is still more beastly than the West, but perhaps it has become more so during the ‘transition’, finally fulfilling all the negative stereotypes the West had about it while it was ruled by its decaying communist parties. The Western New Left, when it arose in the 60s, had abandoned looking to us as a source of inspiration a long time ago already, when we were mired in the post-50s and 60s stagnation – they preferred to look at Asia and Latin America’s revolutionary communism instead, and today there’s no doubt they remain places to look towards. But maybe there was a different reason why all those copies of Labour Focus on Eastern Europe were rotting away forgotten in the basement. Today we’re not in a great need of a new theory, but rather find ourselves incredibly passive. The half-rotten papers at Housman’s presented the rise and decay of one of the biggest grass-roots oppositional movements in history, Solidarność, today a shadow of what it once was, plagued by its right wing factions and disdained by the rest of Polish society and the governing parties it created, who are now more likely to send police with truncheons than support their strikes. Yet we feel that something has changed since the Russian protests in late 2011, that Eastern Europeans, from silently accepting their inferiority have finally risen, tired of living in countries of which the Western commentators say “they have the love of despotism in their blood.”

  The dissolution of communism in the countries involved led to a social desert, in which people are more than others immersed in the capitalist “state of nature”. We reproduce this state abroad, while our culture is nearly wholly disinterested in debating the schizophrenic state we live in. I decided to write this book because of the daily, habitual sense of shame I felt, for not belonging to any of the groups: neither feeling a part of the successful creatives, promoting our “culture” abroad, nor really having that much to do with the working class majority and without a real possibility of reconnecting with this lost social class. Seeing the depoliticization of my own class back in Poland, people of my generation unwilling to recognize their position and the unpopularity of politics, I took refuge in emigration, soon after the capitalist crisis that started in 2008.

  That’s why I decided there’s a sense to revisiting this blackened era, both to reveal it for myself and to see how much there is to learn or take from it. We often behave like the 50 years before 1989 didn’t really happen. Anyone who lived in that era is made to publicly criticize it, even if there were positive sides to it. We have to go beyond the ritual war between security of jobs and flats and lack of democracy in one system, or free speech and the uncontrolled free market, but also with a large danger of poverty, unemployment, lack of education and a crippled welfare state on the other. There’s no doubt that the communist ideology, as it was practiced between the years 1945 and 1989 is dead. But we know the current ideology is dead as well, with the catastrophic lack of clue what we should do about it.

  But another reason I had to write it is because despite my growing politicization, I couldn’t find myself in the narratives carried on by the Western left. I or anyone from where I was, hardly feature in the current discussions on the left. Because it turned out, the left had little clue about post-communism, about the post-communist transition or even problems of underdevelopment. The Western left seemed to have lost interest in us and then hasn’t noticed the strange conundrum of people like me, for whom the Western-Eurocentric themes of “1968”, Italian autonomism or accelerationism bore little relation to our experience. We may all live in “post-industrial” reality, a lost generation with no chance of a job. Yet we grew up in very different conditions. A Stasiek from Opole or Vlad from Timișoara are still less well off than a Dai from the Rhondda Valley, as the latter may still benefit from some residual welfare state. Even if mining towns in Silesia are in some ways facing similar trouble as those in South Wales, there’s still a reason why people are migrating from Silesia to South Wales and not the other way round. In Poland or Czechoslovakia 1968 meant something radically different: anti-Semitic purges and Soviet invasion. I can’t see any current debates in the Western left telling the story of the several countries, which in an act of socio-economical experiment, were trying an alternative to the West, and for some time they were even succeeding. At the same time, we started to be pervaded by the same problems, of the new far right movements and hostility towards migrants, yet nobody was seeing any connection.

  To me, there still exists something like “values of the West” and the “East” and I realized that living in affluent Western Europe. I also learned that I definitely do not want to belong to those Western values, shaped by the global capitalism. As capitalism is of course now reigning completely in Eastern Europe, it is at least still combined with certain forms of the older life, both in the memory of the pre-’89 past, and the existing, appalling poverty we deal with, unheard of in the West.

  I was born 1983 and I never really lived through the problems within communism that older generations had to. No crossing of the Wall, no scary officers, no parents interned by communists. Still, I observed the dramatic changes in the social fabric after ’89, when at the very beginning of the 1990s I went to a state primary school, attending it mostly with working class children from the tower blocks in the area, and then, in 1998, went to a private elite high school, conducted by people from the former democratic opposition. In the new Poland they decided that the best way of e
ducating children was to create schools for elites who can afford a significant fee every month. The contrast between the way children could learn and how they were treated in both schools was rather astounding. Still, hardly anyone from my former high school mates, now mostly in secure jobs, sees this as problematic.

  The attempts at reviving the leftist politics in the Former East have been happening especially in the last decade: we have the contours of an independent left for the first time since the interwar period. Significant amounts of cultural activity are carried out by left-leaning groups, of which Krytyka Polityczna is very prominent. In Croatia and Slovenia it is the Right to the City initiative, responsible for the first anti-austerity protests there in 2012. Russia had a revival and brief unification of the left efforts which emerged during the protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011, where the Left Front was formed - and last but not least, the influence of intellectual and artistic groups, like Chto Delat from St Petersburg, and Voina, who are trying to establish a new left without necessarily condemning or dwelling on the communist past.

  Still, the percentage of the population identifying their political and social position with this movement is nearly nonexistent. ‘Manifa’, the feminist demo on International Women’s Day in Poland, that has 14 years of tradition, had pitiful numbers in 2013 - and this in a year that saw some of the biggest attacks on women’s rights since 1989 (an enduring ban on abortion, restrictions on contraceptives, the rejection of civil partnerships in Parliament), showing that nobody is identifying this abuse of their rights with the possibility of political action. Instead, within post-communist countries, citizens increasingly don’t vote, with numbers often below 50% during elections. Post-politics rules over the minds of Poles when there’s nobody to vote for, with over half of the society not even participating in the democratic processes.

  As the historical project itself is rejected, we observe the aestheticization of the communist period. And the greater the aestheticization, the bigger the political passivity, almost without exception. In this book, I’m going to focus on the ways politics is feigned in between the former East and West, in the form of popular Ostalgia, a specific “vulturism”, a dubious sympathy for communist culture and the symbols of the past without any political investment, uprooting them and rendering them meaningless. In recent years we have seen how popular art exhibitions bringing back the legacy of the communist years, with Cold War Modern in 2008 at the V&A in London, Star City in Nottingham Contemporary and Ostalgia in new Museum, New York, could often obliterate the politics and social situations the featured countries live in now. These aesthetics-of-communism shows have spread across the world, including some progressive institutions in the “former East”. Yet in the mainstream of these countries themselves, it remains a highly unpopular topic. If there are ideas for ‘Museums of Communism’, they are usually for creating a highly dubious freakshow out of it.