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

  Any ambivalent feelings about the communist past are understandable, yet in the New Europe there’s no time for subtleties in remembering it. More progressive thinking groups, historians, experts, are now trying in their own way to both restore the memory of the neglected communist past just as, perhaps, they see it as an attractive way of promoting the culture of their still slightly exotic countries abroad, using the positive conjuncture created by the likes of Cold War Modern.

  I don’t want negate the prevailing legacy of the Cold War. On the contrary – I believe the years between the Yalta congress and the fall of the Iron Curtain, and in particular the 80s, with Solidarity, Martial Law and the slow way to what they used to call “freedom”, provide a foundational, mutual “great narrative”. I want to tell the story of the relations between the East and West during the Cold War, from a perspective that was not present enough equally in popular historiography and in the exhibition trend, where the current politics, social reality and clashes will come to the foreground. The Cold War provided a mutual frame and narrative for both sides. It runs contrary to the popular belief that we’re more “together” now in the New Europe. It is like the Croatian writer Dubravka Ugresic said in a recent interview on Yugoslavia: the dissolution of the federation on national lines actually meant the loss of identity and cultural legacy for Yugoslavians. In turn, it’s the differences in wealth that are more openly dictating the mutual relations in Western Europe, with countries now like Greece, Ireland or Spain told to “get better” by those better off.

  This book should read like my coming to terms with being from the former East and what it means to me, as well as the discoveries I made on my way. The typical view of the migrant is that everything is better in the new country. For me, a migrant not forced economically, equipped only with cultural capital, I looked at it from the beginning with mixed feelings. In fact, economically the contemporary West has never had so much in common with the East as it does now. Our economies may differ in scale, and though Polish propagandists like to imagine that in the near future they’ll overtake the UK, the British economy is still 70% bigger than the Polish - but in the current critical state they all function more similarly than before. This is the world of post-Fordism, a stream of cheap labor, flowing from one country to another, all equally fucked despite differences. It is perhaps this disgust with what the West did with all its opportunities, political chances, stock and philosophy that motivates this book.

  Those years between 1945 and 1989 require a living and lived cultural history, where personal engagement and experience is not a curse, but a value. Many memoirs and accounts have been produced since the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc, and mine wants simply to ask the question - where are we now, after 23 years? If the Soviet Union 23 years into its existence wasn’t called post-tsarist, why are we still defined as “post-communist”, and why is it relevant? Did history take a slower pace, or was it finished, as Fukuyama said, after 1989?

  The title, Poor But Sexy, is a slogan taken from Berlin’s mayor Klaus Wowereit, now part of the city’s strategic promotion. After the fall of the Wall, Berlin became a depopulated, empty city, scaring potential dwellers with its voids and destruction, the new policies after the capital was moved there from Bonn hoped to use the poverty of Berlin as an attractor. The city had low rents, but little real industry - and with the banks staying in Frankfurt am Main, a new reason for visiting Berlin had to be invented. The failure of it as a traditional capital, a center of financial and political power, was turned to an advantage. City authorities realized they could solve the problem by advertising the city as cheap, but attractive: with cultural and historical capital. Hence, Berlin the creative city emerged, attracting expats to the clubs, galleries and the spirit of a dangerous je ne sais quoi. The city became more vivid, but at what cost? There appears a new pressure on some of the poorest areas of it, which at the same time are the most attractive, like Mitte, Prenzlauer Berg, Kreuzberg, Friedrichshain. Subsequently, what the city boasts of so much - the rebel spirit - is what suffered. The squats are being removed and evicted, as the city becomes so successful that they let it roll out: privatize more and more, so that even the main attractors, like techno clubs, have to be eventually evicted. ‘Poor but sexy’ is that appeal - Berlin’s authorities wanted to prove it’s possible to live solely on the creative capital. Yet, it only concerned selected parts of the city. The peripheral Berlin remains untouched. Nobody goes to the West Berlin districts of Gropiusstadt, Hansaviertel, or the tower block estates like Marzahn in the east. Somehow this didn’t work in Prague, which was after ‘’89 the favorite Western expat Eastern hang out. To realize the dream of a nice European city, Prague was too really alive as the Czech Republic’s capital, not enough of a hipster playground.

  The geographical logic of the East and West still has an impact. Somehow this fashionable drang nach Osten nearly universally stops in Berlin. Berlin is usually the farthest people go to the east, and then stop. Yet, this policy, this “poor but sexy tactic”, has since inspired and dominated many other cities to the east of Berlin, even if in much poorer countries. Keen on attracting foreign investment, cities allow low rents for Western capital, gentrify the poorer areas, capitalize on the fictitious creative capital.

  We’ll look at what led to this. From politics to art and artistry, the artistic creation on both sides reveals how much the two Blocs were intimately dependent on each other and closely tied up together - with the lack of objective information and censorship they had to fantasize and dream of each other. This is when the Iron Curtain becomes a “dream factory”, a dreamland, without which culture as we know it would never emerge. From LIFE magazine to computer technology, from visual arts to fashion, from fashion to politics, and from pop music to national elections, the spirit of the Cold War is everywhere.

  The first chapter, ‘Welcome to the House of Fear’, will bring us to the present: the world we currently live in, supposedly with no more borders, no more divisions, equal. But still the miasma of the past seems to determine our lives. We will see how the past of the two camps affects the present and in what ways: politically, in social structures, in individual and collective attitudes. We will discuss the politics of memory and changing geographies, and how we neither dealt with nor should simply deal with the past. The second chapter, ‘Ashes and Brocade’ will tell the story of Berlin, Warsaw and Moscow as spaces of a magical Cold War transformation: where the Cold War anxieties of the seemingly “safer” Western world were bringing hordes of young people to the land crossed by Walls and secret police, while their Eastern counterparts, with the image of the West censored or known only partially or from legends, also participated in this dream, by imagining life outside of the Iron Curtain. The third chapter, ‘O Mystical East’, will deal with the even deeper dreamlands, with the psychology of the East vs. West and will psychoanalyse the “Mystical East” and the myths around Easternness: geographical, gender-related, religious and philosophical. We’ll analyse the inferiority/superiority complexes between the two. What does it mean mentally to be from the East? Is the West “normality”? We’ll revisit the Romanian depressive ex-fascist Emil Cioran. Here, we’ll get to the guts of the area’s traumatized history. Chapter Four, ‘Socialist Realism On Trial’ will analyse the premises around the realism vs. avant-garde debate, which was crucial to the development of art in the two Blocs. What was (is) socialist realism in the Communist East and what were its philosophical and historical conditions? What was or were supposed to be its opposite in the West? What is their legacy in today’s art? Is realism possible at all? Does realism have a special political power we may need today? The last, fifth chapter, ‘Applied Fantastics’, will deal with the Cold War era competition between the East and West and the ever-scary specter of ‘Americanisation’. Nikita Khrushchev vs. John F Kennedy, noble existentialism and jazz contra pop-art & Elvis, socialist vs. capitalist fashion, radiophonic workshops, world exhibitions, material culture, aspirational magazi
nes. It’s a little primer on the “communist civilisation”, from the usually unknown side. We’ll analyze what it meant to be an artist under socialism, and what are the hidden conditions of “free creation” under capitalism/ socialism.

  Past and present will get mixed up, forgotten memories will come out with the force of the repressed, like on the Paulina Ołowska painting on the cover. If your joy is a Joy Division, and you dream to the sound of Depeche Mode, you’ll follow me.

  Welcome to the House of Fear

  Introducing the New Europe

  ‘That’s the problem with you Americans. You expect nothing bad ever to happen. When the rest of the world expect only bad to happen. And they are not disappointed’.

  Svetlana Kirilenko, The Sopranos

  There are arguments that the “post” in “post-communism” should be treated like the “post” in “post-colonialism”. But the question arises: who of whom? Who was the colonizer and who was the colonized is not always as obvious as it would seem. By all accounts, many of the post-communist countries, despite the 23 years of “democracy”, still display the elements of traumatic and obsessive behavior typical of post-colonial countries. But because things were happening so fast between the late 80s and first few years of the 90s, today it’s hard to say if this trauma comes entirely out of the communist years, or is an effect of the brutal capitalist shock therapy most of the eastern Bloc underwent.

  History has made a strange circle. As 2012, a year of intense protest in Eastern Europe (Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia) has shown, only now are people acting out the clumsily put together capitalist democracy of the early 1990s. It started on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow in late 2011. Still nobody dares to call it a class war: sometimes in the public discourse there passes a word on the “excluded”, which is quickly dismissed as evidence of “populism”. Political scenes all over the bloc nearly universally got divided into nationalism and neoliberalism, often complementary.

  What we were to become was the “New Europe” - as the Hungarian low-cost airline Wizzair puts it, ‘Wizz off to New Europe!’ As a term it has been used several times in history: it emerged in the 90s, as a name for the group of countries who had “successfully beaten communism”. It was the name that American Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld gave to those (mostly East-) European countries that supported the Iraq war. It gained an even stronger meaning in 2004, when the first slot of the “former East”, Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, joined the European Union. Since then especially, the new breed of Polish politicians have been stressing how much it meant that Poland had become “a normal European country”, which has become the main government slogan ever since. We were “normal” (and even the “second Ireland”), when we were taking large sums of direct European subsidies, and we were normal when applying neoliberalism. When we entered the EU and some were saying ‘welcome to Europe’, some in the media were outraged: But we were always the center of Europe! This constant indignation hides a tremendous lack of self-confidence in confrontation with the former West. We know that the more politicians talk about “becoming a normal country”, the farther we are from really becoming it. But what is really the benchmark we could compare ourselves to?

  The “Polish Miracle”

  It is of course the West, like in the good old days, that we’re supposed to model ourselves on. What followed the fall of the decaying communist economy around 1989 in most of the East, was the express adjustment to Western capitalism, where features like conformity to all that’s new and the rejection and despising of everything associated with the old regime (like collectivity, for instance), were the ticket to a career. The American scholar Elisabeth Dunn in her breakthrough monograph Privatizing Poland described the very beginnings of Polish capitalism as being exemplified by the many previous state-owned factories which were gradually taken over and privatized by Western owners, who mostly laid off all the previous staff. The more they felt connected with the old system, i.e., showing inclinations for defending the collective ethic, the more likely they were to go. 1990s Poland was a territory of brutal, fast class-making, where the previous mostly classless society had to quickly acknowledge the delicate but crucial rules of distinction. Among them was the cherishing of objects and status-symbols. The new managerial class were presenting their oversize cell phones with seriousness worthy of a Catholic mass. Yet what was happening was christened as the “Polish miracle”, Polnische Wunder, by Germany. Poland had its international debt cancelled, unlike many other countries in the Bloc, the foundation of the strong economic growth it has enjoyed in the last few years. It has registered strong if massively unequal growth, largely down to emigration, German-owned factories, and EU subsidy for infrastructure projects like Euro 2012 stadiums, railways and motorways. A patronising coverage from our western neighbour never ceases, as just before Euro 2012 began Der Spiegel greeted us with headlines like: “Germans used to think of Poland as a country full of car thieves and post-communist drabness. On the eve of hosting the European Football Championship, however, the country has become the most astonishing success story in Eastern Europe. Relations between Berlin and Warsaw have never been better” (May 25th 2012). This is only the tip of the iceberg, as the very same article also greeted us for being “desperate” to join the Eurozone (in the middle of its greatest crisis) and for being “cosmopolitan and courageous” (in the East? Wow, amazing! etc.).

  1.1 Land of sleaze and glory, Eastern Europe becomes the capital of grot

  As we joined the normal countries, we were told, there would be free speech, a free press and free debate, all of which were prevented during the years of communist oppression. But in practice, this free liberal debate became a strange unison. Whenever someone in post-communist countries wanted to criticize the style of capitalist transformation, their voice was either ridiculed, or made inaudible. Media, especially the liberal newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza, played an enormous role in this. But first of all, we were completely astounded by something like “the media” at all. I remember the sacred feeling of awe that accompanied our first watching of the “new” post-communist telly, new jingles announcing commercials, the new design of the national TV News.

  But I’d be rather careful with that regular element of any former East citizen’s memory, that is the awe inspired by the Western supermarkets with all the goods in the world displayed on their shelves. I never lived enough under this system to see much of the difference. I also observed the growing wealth of my middle class- becoming parents, who started working for a Dutch company, how our life on an enormous People’s Republic tower block estate and everyday rituals were becoming increasingly that of the (petit) bourgeoisie, and how we moved to a semi in the suburbs.

  What Poland was then can be most efficiently told by one picture: the opening of the first McDonald’s restaurant in the center of Warsaw. It collected all the intellectual elites of Warsaw, who hurried there to eat their first Big Mac. You can see in the picture the legends of intellect, writers, and poets, overwhelmed by sitting on the plastic chairs. This was America, this was the dream. The ribbon was cut by no one else but Jacek Kuroń, a former leftist legend of the opposition, who gave a little speech. I’d give a lot to hear what he had to say to the first people in the Bloc who were to sink their teeth into the legendary quality buns. That this is what we were fighting for, and, finally, we got it? Were those the horizons of the members of Solidarity, was this what people sat in prisons for? As for myself, I loved McDonald’s and it was only in my teens that I grew too sophisticated and learned to despise it. This is another stereotype about ‘People’s Poland’ anyway, as it transpires that in the late 1970s McDonald’s was negotiating with Edward Gierek’s government to open bars in Poland, but it was the political crisis (i.e., Solidarity), that got in the way!

  The magic of the Western commodity and its nearly metaphysical influence on the post-communist psyche is one of the big topics of this book, which will be discussed in later chapters. In here,
I only want to briefly mention this wonderful world and the role Western brands played across the Bloc. Western goods were of course sporadically available in the East, as smuggled, as packages from family and friends in the West, or in carefully supplied single brands, like Pepsi-Cola, which were readily available.

  It was partly a story communist countries knew all too well, rehearsed since the 1920s even, if you’ll look at advertisements in early communist Russia. The problem of the desire for goods is already problematized in Mayakovsky/Rodchenko’s collaboration over the famous Mosselprom Moscow department store advertisements. Wary of commodity fetishism and its discontents, when advertising goods they also created unique ads for “products to come”, products that neither did, nor could have ever existed. As the cookies of Mosselprom stood for the greater projects of socialism, those to be, 80s communist countries were populated by kiosks and fairs where complete substitutes of goods, like stickers (omnipresent “West” cigarettes or Snickers) were standing for the heavens of the capitalism to come, that in the end will be produced by the (post-) Soviet industry and economy. They’re what Christina Kiaer, historian of Soviet art, using the phrase of child psychologist Winnicott, called ‘transitional objects’, which help to adjust to the reality principle. The dream object for the Russian avant-garde, though, was the object which will be so rich in meanings, so intricate, so evocative in its industrial form, that it’ll change the sensory apparatus of man forever, inducing an awakening from the phantasm of commodities. The dream of late Soviet citizens was the opposite of these high ambitions – they unsophisticatedly wanted exact Western goods and were waiting for their materialization. Somewhere in between them were the expectations of Walter Benjamin, who in the Moscow Diary of his visit in 1926 describes his acquaintance with the window dressings, and seeing the lacquered black box from Mosselprom calls it a “Soviet Madonna With Cigarettes”, seeing there, on that display, the future collective.