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

  New architecture of memory, memory as a Commodity

  Who are we then, and how could the ex Bloc have taken its chances after ’89? What were the alternatives? Which way could we have gone? Many of the new ways of thinking about public space after the end of the Cold War we owe, as many other things, to Germany. After the reunification, there was insistence on and political programmes stressing the building of new “spaces of memory”, which were to be devoted to the ‘mutual’ history of West and East Germany. In this, already the ‘post-ideological’ trend was brought to the public. A prolific “architecture of memory” in Berlin remodelled the city purged by war, demolishing old and setting up the new buildings, in so doing created a logorrhoea of signs, a new center that had to fill the space full of voids, and the memory of Nazism still contained in the pre-war buildings. Yet, what the new authorities of Berlin did was to get rid of the memory of the DDR first.

  When radically rebuilding its representational spaces, in 2002 the German Bundestag (itself, with its transparent copula designed by Norman Foster, an aesthetic just as much as political statement standing as the symbol of the New Germany) decided to demolish the 1976 DDR symbol Palast der Republik and in its place reconstruct three facades of the baroque 18th century Andreas Schluter Hohenzollern Palace. Though the demolition took place, the reconstruction still hasn’t occurred due to lack of money. The Schlossplatz, still a void in the capital center, symbolizes divided German attitudes.

  The last two years of protest, the Indignados/15M movement, were significantly more active in the western part of Europe, despite being still more affluent. Yet it’s interesting to see how Berlin, a city among the most politically active, with a long tradition of protest, behaved in this. Attending several Berlin demonstrations, including the May Day, it struck me how ritualized and predictable they were. Organized mostly by the antifascist/anarchist movements, current Berlin’s culture of protest seems misguided and abortive, just as the recent ‘anti-hipster’ movement comprised locals (often also imported, but pregentrification), who blame international creatives and ‘hipsters’ for gentrifying their city. Their theatrically aggressive demonstrations can be compared to student demos in London, which were peaceful, but met with brutal police methods, with the famous ‘kettling’ for hours and truncheons.

  1.9 The wall by the Gdańsk Shipyards comemmorating the 1980 strikes. Above it, rising is the new European Solidarity Center, with auto-rusting symbolic facade

  One of the reasons for that may be mishandled mythologization of Berlin, which is currently bringing more damage than good to the conditions in which politics can be made. As its public space has been neutralized since reunification, Eastern memory has been all-but-wiped out in what is in most respects an Eastern city. An inconvenient capital, it has become an illustration of a model post modern city, where ‘past wounds’ were to be evoked by architecture, not left as wounds. The two palaces– two memories competition took a different turn, when the DDR curiosity was provoked by such films as Goodbye Lenin though. It’s partly the hedonism of Berlin, the 90s party mood, in which the hedonists would precisely side against demolishing the DDR “eyesore”. Against this is the recent politics of the city, which stopped seeing the clubs as a magnet good enough for the investors and recently is known for letting the most famous clubs shut down.

  It’s time Eastern Man felt dignified again, for decades identified with what is the worst about civilization, without shame for what has been. Yet memory is a monster that goes its own peculiar ways. One of the reasons we didn’t quite ‘get over’ communism yet (it keeps coming back in our debates, if only negatively) can be found in the popularity of various parks devoted to the relics of iconography of communism. On one hand, despite those relics, we get the appraisal for our good behavior – you were naughty, but look at you now, you got rid of the old symbols, now you’ve got membership in the EU, a capitalist economy – maybe you’ll eventually even be like one of us.

  Poland is one of the few countries that resisted the temptation of establishing a Park of Memory, unlike nearly every post-communist country: there’s Szoborpark in Budapest; Grutas Park near Vilnius, Park of Fallen Memorials in Moscow. They enjoy ambivalent, yet stable tourist interest, yet in the latter the whole idea seems strange, as Moscow to this day has gotten rid of few of its memorials, save for Comrade Stalin. In Poland we have no major Museum of Communism. Does this mean we got over it, or rather that our recent history has been erased?

  One could analyze this by comparing the political activity in the post-2008 crisis around Europe. There’s no doubt that my generation, born in the early 80s, were among the most depoliticized – we were born around the era where the biggest popular dissents were brutally crashed around the world. Solidarity in Poland, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua or the miners in the UK, they were all part of the same popular rebellion against the crashing of the post-war consensus. The recent wave of protests is very unusual, and not accidentally is done by people younger than the 80s generation. This younger protest is mostly untouched by nostalgia, although in any of the groups protesting in Moscow, Petersburg, Ljubljana or Zagreb you could probably find both people interested and disinterested in the past. The fight is the most vivid in the areas where, for historical reasons, the left and communism were less suppressed and are less an object of trauma, like in ex-Yugoslavia.

  In his 1996 book Twilight Memories, Mapping the culture of Amnesia, the German critic Andreas Huyssen is trying to sum up what was left after the transitional time of 1989-1991. He observes an increase of the work around ‘memory’, which, not surprisingly revolves around maintaining amnesia. Until today, we talk endlessly of the past, but the wrong parts of the past, we could say. This growth of the post-history in the world has increased, interestingly, since the early 1980s, which you could attribute both to postmodernism and neoliberalism. Years of patrimony, devoted to specific events or artists commemorated usually in the most safe, ‘heritage’ way paved the way to something we know today as “Keep Calm and Carry On” austerity nostalgia, retrograde aesthetics and heritage culture. This waning of the notion of history and denial of historical consciousness, partly a result of the Fukuyama ‘end of history’, is standing in shocking contrast to the current reality of the crisis, with daily news about the economic collapses of countries.

  Widespread debates about cultural heritage, and the compulsory plans for a museum (of modern art, of memory, of war) show we are haunted by another loss that may come. It was Adorno who wrote on the “freezing of memory in the commodity form”, which provokes this weird amnesia. Huyssen is suspicious of the German left voicing their fear about the “unreconstructed easterners”. Yet it’s true that the demise of the DDR was a “revolution without the revolutionaries”, therefore it didn’t have elites who could after the unification take up the discussion with the politicians from West Germany. How different it looked in Poland. Was Poland harder to bring down because we had so many prominent anti-communists and strong opposition?

  Huyssen’s book is an already prophetic insight into the future of Europe. The popularity of museums we observe today is yet another aspect of that cult of memory, but strangely enough, only the memory that is suitable for the authorities and the leading intellectual current. Huyssen focuses on Germany and observes how in East Germany, unlike in Poland or Czechoslovakia, there’s a lack of discussion over the ‘civil society’ among the ex-East German intellectuals, who gave up their task of democracy and civil society. Also, the extensive Stasi surveillance and the short period of opposition makes the transition different than in Poland. In 1991 the mood of nostalgia kicked in - on one hand, there were those mourning social security and demise of social regulations that used to cover every aspect of life. On the other there’s the nostalgia of intellectuals, who still unrepentantly believe communism was a better way to organise the state. They often were the same who were criticizing the limitations of the ‘really existing socialism’. In Germany more than anywhere b
ecause of unification, there emerged the notions of underdevelopment.

  From the Eastern-Western battles over memory, we see how the ‘new’, posttransitional version of history triumphed over the real memories of the place or even the people who used to live and work there. If there’s a place in the post-communist Poland in which we can see in a nutshell the results of the capitalist transition and which is currently suffering similar ‘museification’ at the cost of the real people who live there, it’s the Gdansk Shipyards, the legendary site where the union Solidarity was started, and then, as it is told in every history book, eventually overthrew communism. As we speak, a great museum is being built there, in the vast, so called ‘post-industrial’ space. The shipyards were privatized, asset stripped and gradually sold to foreign investors, who very recently ultimately stopped the very small ship production. Now a great EU-financed building grows there, designed in corten steel, which is to create a ‘living monument’ – designed to look like a rusting ship, which is supposed to be surrounded by hypermarkets and entertainment edifices, now halted because of lack of money.

  Just like the other crucial ‘spaces of memory’, the International Solidarity Center is designed to evoke the melancholy of disappearance by its very form. But isn’t it too much, one may say, given that it not only symbolizes the disappearance of work and of the industry, but also of the hands that used to put them into motion? The district around the building is among the most deprived and poorest in the whole of Gdansk, the Lower City, with people living in rotting, dissolving council flats from 70s. It’s a strange thing with memory these days, where the more we focus on artificial concepts, the easier it is for us to neglect the existence of real people.

  Ashes and Brocade

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

  Had to get the train

  from Potsdamer Platz

  You never knew that I could do that

  Just walking the dead

  a man lost in time

  Twenty thousand people cross Bösebrücke

  fingers are crossed just in case

  where are we now?

  David Bowie, ‘Where Are We Now?’ 2013

  Drang nach Osten

  Where does central/eastern Europe exactly lie? Already when trying to describe its name, we have a problem, before even starting to try to determine its geographical leanings. For central-eastern Europeans, before the World Wars there were often hardly such things as nations. When in the 1930s there was a census carried out on the Polish lands, the answer to the question of ‘Nationality’ was nowhere near certain: when asked to put ‘Nation’, the largest amount declared ‘Polish’, but many declared Jewish, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Belarussian, and about 15% said simply that their nationality was ‘from here’ - a story often repeated by Eric Hobsbawm, the German-Jewish-English historian, a lifelong enemy of national categories. For Jews especially, the question of nationality was a question of their being or not being – particularly in Berlin, the largest city in central-eastern Europe. At least since the Weimar period, Berlin had a reputation as a capital of moral dégringolade: analysing the literature, pulp fiction and iconography of that era, one comes across a place that is pestilent, ridden with poverty and crime, a swarm of lust, murder and decay. At the same time, Nazism rises, offering the so-desired simple explanations for the visible decline. It’s the Jews, and the Jews come from the East.

  2.1 Concrete desert. A view from the Stasi HQ in East Berlin.

  Still, the eastern part of any city is regarded a less attractive, poorer and is usually the more squalid and neglected one. In the Weimar Republic, one of the most popular stories within the expressionist period was Nosferatu: a decaying living dead being, who comes from nowhere else, but – the geographical east. That was after centuries of Germanic conquest of the east, the so-called Drang nach Osten, in which the Teutonic Knights, under the banner of Christianization, occupied and brutally conquered the eastern tribes, and to which, to a degree, Hitler referred in the Generalplan Ost – the Nazi plan to be implemented after the war, where Poland and Soviet Union were to be ethnically cleansed and populated by Germans. Since the Weimar period Berlin was subjected to contradicting narratives. On one side: the blatant anti-Semitism, the Nazi aesthetics of Der Sturmer, anti-modernism, Entartete Kunst. On the other: Neue Sachlichkeit and the vicious caricatures and photomontages of Georg Grosz and John Heartfield, at the same time trying to promote socialist culture with the help of socialist newspapers like Arbeiter-Illustierte-Zeitung, whose caricatures and photomontages became the symbol of that time, and an alternative to the Nazi racism and pseudo-socialism. Berlin was never to shake off this schizophrenia, which it carries until today. Levelled and destroyed, divided into four zones and finally by the wall, it was to remain a sick, shaken place. Theoretically half of it was Western, but in reality it was a small island within the East, always mentally belonging there. Even the German punk, the relentless music of Neue Deutsche Welle or the beginnings of techno, where does it come from? There’s something common about the Germanic music: post-punk, techno and Cold War pop. It’s its piercing restlessness and mercilessness, this didn’t come from under the coat of Goethe, dining at the aristocracy of little German principalities. This came to us from the times of the grim Weimar era taking its toll, from the etchings of Neue Sachlichkeit and Expressionists. More than that: it’s not even German as such, but it’s Prussian and its relentless discipline comes from the East.

  Berlin is an Eastern city, by geography, spirit, architecture and expression. Yet, it remains half-Western, by politics and history. But even this double status does not explain the role it used to and keeps playing in the imagination of the Western hipster youth of the last four decades. Berlin is a model city to describe what has really happened after 1989. After the unification of Germany, the capital was moved to Berlin as a symbol of the new order, reestablishing the pre-split and even pre-Nazi past. It was an element of the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, so called ‘overcoming of the past’, a term taken from the post-Nazi period and the technical solutions the Germans applied in another stretch and twist in their gallery of history-changing concept-making: Modell Deutschland, something ever popular in a country with a lot to ‘overcome’.

  Berlin as capital of Post-DDR melancholia

  In Poland, where the ideology was most obviously forced, it never really succeeded: tensions between the authorities and the society were always enormous, and exploded in a series of general strikes and protests. In Germany the ideological apparatus and disciplining was much higher and much more self-imposed. It is shocking to compare Polish and German parades and ritualistic May Day or anniversary demos, in which participation was compulsory. Until the very last moments of the DDR, East Germany was demonstrating in the full scale paraphernalia, and with mass participation, while the critical mass within the Polish opposition by the late 80s made these rituals more empty than ever. In East Germany, ideology and the regime, precisely because of the closeness of the West, were no joke.

  It’s interesting to what extent the contemporary, supposedly ‘edgy’ youth coming to this parody-of-a capital, sticks solely to the center. Their trips don’t usually extend beyond the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. There you can find the typically ahistorical, uprooted relation postmodern man has with history. The CIA spy base of Teufelsberg in West Berlin, squatted for several years, has by now become so banalized it lauded as an exciting tourist attraction even in Ryanair’s in-flight magazine, confirming that any historical artefact can become banal in contemporary Berlin. Nostalgic parties with an ‘a la DDR’ aesthetic are popular among the youth all over Europe. Warsaw clubs took to this fashion much later, and simply borrowed it. In both cases history becomes meaningless against the ‘right to party’.

  I checked this by visiting the places connected with the regime in the most straightforward way: the Stasi headquarters in the Eastern district of Lichtenburg, and Checkpoint Char
lie, the former border crossing in Kreuzberg. The Mauer-Museum by Checkpoint Charlie is today a pitiful, private but very popular Axel Springer-owned font of Ostalgic souvenirs. By contrast, the Stasi HQ is located in deep eastern Berlin, which to this day is strikingly different from what is a couple of kilometres west. This eastern part of the city strangely gets hardly gentrified and remains extremely sinister: the tower blocks have not been repaired, there are no signs of nice shops or galleries. This part of East Berlin, more than anything, felt like home. Located between grey towers, the HQ immediately brought to my mind every other military museum in Eastern Europe. Time has frozen there. Sad elderly male guards give you tickets with bored expressions on their faces, and the place exudes the typical smell of an old attic, untouched for decades.

  Time frozen – yet, perhaps sometimes to good effect? There was a clear decline in the quality of artistic production on both sides of the Wall after ’89, which proves how the framework of Cold War preserved the modernist approach to making art. Whether teddy boys, mods, popists, new romantics, new wavers, synthpoppers, punks or freaks, young people remained modernists, in their precise and sober approach to art, which was to transform the world, if not powerful enough to change the world around them, then to change the one inside them. They became the ‘explorers of inner space’. This transformation of taste started, if the we’re to agree with Dick Hebdige, with the ‘streamline style’ of the 30s which led to pop-art, from the beginning described with distaste by the upper classes as ‘art of poor taste’. We’ll be understanding pop-art as a complete creation of the Cold War era, made within specific tensions around the fetishism of capital, where youth, even if it becomes an arch-commodity, finds in it nevertheless a way out for itself.