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

  The musician Felix Kubin, involved with the German techn-odance/electronic scene, founder of a label called Gagarin Records with many established links to the previous Neue Deutsche Welle, used post-89 Germany’s combination of smugness and schizophrenia as an occasion for subversive performances. At the start of reunification he and his friends formed Margot Liedertaufel Honecker, which proported to be the choir of a DDR youth organization Freie Deutsche Jugend, who made surprise ‘patriotic songs’ performances to an unsuspecting public. They saw the hurrah-optimism of the new unified Germany as hypocritical, designed to sweep the old crimes under the carpet. In one improvised flash mob that interrupted some yodelling corporate events in a supermarket, the group, dressed as poker-faced East German Komsomol, bewildered the public, claiming they were really supporting a DDR renaissance. In the early 90s seeing East Germany’s characteristic yellow compass and hammer or the two shaking hands could have been equally scary as a swastika. Symbols, uniforms, performances, all aimed to disclose Germans’ uneasiness in confronting anything other than the artificial ‘model reality”, stripped of anything historically uncomfortable.

  Thus, the foundations of modern Ostalgie were established. The term was coined in the 90s after many in the East firmly voted for the PDS, the former communists, in elections - an act, at once of anti-capitalist politics and ideological emancipation. ‘They want to tell us our lives were all a waste’ – went the typical comments of the ex-DDR citizens – ‘and that was the happiest time of our lives.’ Disappointed by the character of post-unification Germany, people refused to suddenly reject all their past, as if in another, twisted-capitalist version of communist era ‘self-criticism’. Despite being ‘masters of the world’ in memory, Germans still, until this day have problems with dealing with the post-DDR reality, and the greatest example of that is the position of Berlin itself, a failed capital.

  This Berlin, that we tend to consider a vibrant Cold War city, was initially anything but. The Year Zero saw it completely destroyed, and the social fabric, not even mentioning the cultural one, had to be seriously resurrected. And as Berlin was basically an extended prison back then – divided into sectors controlled by four different national powers - it was an international playground for the victorious forces. Post-war Berlin deserved a lot of spanking from those with which it is supposedly most associated. On the brink of famine, in ruins, it was called by Brecht, upon his arrival, a “heap of rubble near Potsdam” an “etching by Churchill based on an idea by Hitler”, where he could smell “the stinking breath of provincialism…”

  But the competition was launched, and Stalinallee, finished in 1957 (later renamed Karl-Marx-Allee in the early 60s by Khrushchev, who renamed the streets and took all the Stalin statues down), the gigantic Stalinist architectural complexes, and the Hansaviertel, built by all the big Western names, from Corbusier to Gropius, made this torn city’s fabric an ideological battleground. Yet people didn’t want to live next to a prison, where the third world war could start any moment. The city slowly became more and more fractured, with the Berlin Blockade in 1948, and fear of Soviet totalitarianism – upon workers strikes in 1953 the Russians sent in the tanks - until, finally in 1961 the wall was erected. Those easterners who had managed to relocate to the West populated a city largely abandoned, a situation that led to the arrival of waves of Gastarbeiter, mainly from Turkey, since the 70s.

  2.2 Unsalubrious work conditions of a Stasi functionary.

  The East-West distinction still has an impact in spatial thinking. Berlin, always a part of eastern Germany, was always inspiring mixed feelings in the west. The first post-war German chancellor Konrad Adenauer had a lifelong repulsion towards this city, in his opinion, too ‘Eastern’. It was only Willy Brandt, who started to take the bad associations away from Berlin again. Yet, with cultural workers leaving for Munich, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Frankfurt, before the slow re-emergence of the New German Cinema of engaged directors, like Kluge, Fassbinder or Schlöndorff, of Serielle/Elektronische Musik with figures like Stockhausen, writers like Heinrich Boll, Gunther Grass, playwrights Peter Handke, Peter Weiss, it really was the way Kraftwerk described it in interviews: Germany was a cultural desert, and initially the only culture there was straightforwardly American, clubs didn’t have other music to play. And Berlin? In the opinion of the robots, it was ‘just a museum.’

  This museum started provoking culture within its rubble. Feminist filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger describes living there in the early 70s, in districts like Kreuzberg: desperately poor, full of refugees, but still with immense artistic ferment. Berliners themselves created a culture based on trash valued positively, art growing upon political tensions, with the Neue Deutsche Welle in particular, and since the late 70s a defeatist response to the country’s ultimate civil death after the killing of the RAF’s members. For guests from the outside, those tensions – the Wall, the wars, Nazi past, ruins - were an antidote to the blandness of living in their respective countries. And the electrifying knowledge of the Bloc round the corner was everywhere.

  What I’ll be calling ‘Berlinism’ is the twentieth-century phenomenon of the German capital as a dreamland for both easterners and westerners. Arguably, it starts after First World War, when the Weimar era turns it into a capital of all sorts of debauchery and transgression, in culture, politics, literature, art, music and theatre. What built Berlin’s reputation is a combination of German expressionism and cheap rents. Arguably the first Anglo who set foot there solely with the wish of participating in the cool was Christopher Isherwood, who came there in the 1920s in the search of forbidden homosexual carnal pleasures; for not only was Berlin permissive, it was also cheap. Years later, the writer recalled in his memoirs: I wish we went to Paris, but Berlin had the boys. So Berlinism means the conscious use of this ambiguous cultural capital, made of sweat, camp and danger. The current career of the city is a complex coincidence between its history and the decline of cities as we knew them, through the disappearance of their industry.

  Thirty years after the war, the characters of Wim Wenders’ early films are shipwrecks of this post-industrial world, raised on the scraps of American pop culture, giving up their life for the sake of a certain form of American dream. Hence their uprootedness, solitude, abandonment, their Quixotic relations with the world and Weltanschauung. Those West German easy riders long for something more than their flat life. But what the hero of Alice in the Cities discovers is the artificiality of his American dream. Not only that, but the little girl he meets in New York and then drives around the Ruhr, Alice, is in every respect a child of Wenders’ post-hippie depressed generation, mature too early, all-too-understanding of her elders’ neglect and decrepitude. Looking at her sage little face, we see Christiane F., the famous author of the teenage drug addict memoir, a few years earlier. When Wenders’ characters feel let down by their American dream, they start to look inward, to Germany itself. By this time, he wasn’t the only one.

  I could make a transformation

  Is there concrete all around or is it in my head?

  David Bowie, ‘All the Young Dudes’

  The 1970s were the era of defeat. As the 60s were extremely intense in terms of political and social change, from the early 70s the flux went steady. David Bowie, who debuted in the late 60s, marked this change when he invented Ziggy Stardust in 1972: no more real heroes, from now on the most desirable thing was to be fabricated. What is genuine, authentic, is boring. The only hero that really matters, is pure artifice, cut out from the comic books, movies and dressed in everything that’s glamorous. Bowie more than anyone contributed to the cherishing of artifice in pop music, realizing the idea of a “hero for a day”, only following the course mass culture had been taking for decades. Was he conscious of that? Some of his lyrics of the era mark the mourning of the depoliticization of his generation: in the lyrics to the song ‘Star’, he mentions “Bevan (who) tried to change the nation”, and posing himself instead as someone who “could make a trans
formation as a rock & roll star”. Facing the growing nihilism of his generation, he still believes that as a star of artifice, he can carry on their political task. ‘All the Young Dudes’, a song he wrote for Mott the Hoople in ’72, reeks of the youth’s disappointment and disillusionment, forming a kind of “solidarity of the losers” anthem. Bowie, always too erratic to make any firm political commitment, was rather in love with various dubious figures, “cracked actors”, (the inspiration for Ziggy was a forgotten singer who was believed to be a combination of god and an alien), necromantics like Aleister Crowley, Kenneth Anger’s satanism, Fascist dictators. He was, nevertheless, obsessed with certain elements of modernity. He was driven to German culture, especially the Weimar period, expressionism, Neue Sachlichkeit, theatre, Brecht. His first break-through hit concerned a man lost in space, after all, and the space age gets a strongly melancholic treatment from Bowie, as his character Major Tom is rather terrified by the silence of space. Another obsession, as we will see, was Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.

  Bowie’s fixation with ‘totalitarianism’ applied to both sides. At one point he planned to stage an adaptation of the Soviet-Czech comic book Octobriana, about a socialist she-devil super-heroine - a samizdat publication, that was circulated between creators only through the post. Bowie could only have learned about it from its 1971 American edition. On the other side, his dalliance with the far right was something more than just the famous Sieg Heil he made to fans in 1976 at Victoria Station. It’s not an accident pop bands are very rarely left-wing, and Bowie’s reaction to the economic crisis of the 70s was to imagine becoming a right wing politician who’ll “sort things out”. ‘I believe strongly in Fascism’, Bowie said; ‘the only way we can speed up the sort of liberalism that’s hanging foul in the air is to speed up the progress of a right wing tyranny. People have responded always more efficiently under a regimental leadership.’ Bowie recognized, if only half-consciously, the appeal and meaning of the pop idol as a dictator. In Peter Watkins’ film from some years earlier, 1967’s Privilege, a young, cherubic, mega-popular singer is hired by the fascistic authorities, who use his popularity to ensure their control over the masses, in a truly Orwellesque, Big Brother-like take on the police state (which here has much more to do with Nazi Germany than communist states). Yet Watkins’ scared, weakened, traumatized singer, terrified of the masses, couldn’t have been further from Bowie, who relished in fame.

  So Bowie’s fascination with Germany and Berlin was only partly expressionism – much of it was also quite simply, fascism. He became a chief Schwarzkarakter for Rock against Racism, whose magazine pictured him next to Enoch Powell and Hitler. The press deemed his Thin White Duke look ‘more Nazi than Futurist (sic)’. He also caught the attention and sympathy of the National Front, who in an article called “White European Dance Music”, said that ‘Perhaps the anticommunist backlash and the aspirations towards heroism by the futurist movement, has much to do with the imagery employed by the big daddy of futurism, David Bowie. After all, it was Bowie who horrified the establishment in mid 70s with his favorable comments on the NF, and Bowie who might have started an “anti-communist” music tradition which we now see flourishing amidst the New Wave of futurist bands’. Who might the NF’s publicist have meant as the “futurist movement”? It was the growing synthpop and New Romanticism that was emerging from the post-punk bands. Punk by itself might have evoked a resistance towards the establishment, but by then it was dissolving. Although we are used to seeing industrial/synthpop/postpunk as ruthless modernists, the bands were actually rarely openly left wing. The political message, if any, was rather vague. Bands dwelling on the space age came often from dispossessed areas, which they then made topics for their music, but the result didn’t have to be politically sound. It was this later, new romantic period that brought Bowie to the left, with the stern words about ‘fascists’ on Scary Monsters.

  But even if we treat those remarks as just the drugged out delirium of a coked-up degenerate, which they were, it can’t be denied they had an influence on popular music. If you take the whole fascination with the Germanic in post punk bands, like Siouxsie and the Banshees or, omen omen, Joy Division, the twisted outpourings of their leaders weren’t just simply teasing their parents. They were flirting with the outrageous (Siouxsie), against the war generation, or they were openly right wing, like Ian Curtis. They had little to do with the struggles of Baader-Meinhof that ended tragically few years back. Curtis was confusing his obsession with Hitlerism with another obsession with a concentration camp prisoners (Stephen Morris has said in an interview that Joy Division were supposed to look like Nazi camp victims) or wider, the idea of the underdog, which tapped into their Bowieesque Eastern Bloc fantasies, like that of ‘Warszawa’, an eternally concrete, sinister city. Yet Bowie’s image of contemporary Berlin must’ve been seriously twisted, if he thought he could find shelter there with another drug addict, Iggy Pop, in a place that had already become one of the most narcotics-dependent places on earth. West Germany and West Berlin had for years been a territory of political dysphoria. The New Left’s legacy was melting. In a context of pseudo-denazification, militancy reached its peak around 1968 and the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg. By 1976, when Bowie moved to Berlin, it had become the armed terrorism of RAF, the Red Army Faction.

  Oh we can beat them, forever and ever

  If you look at any footage of the West Berlin in 70s, you see a murky city, gravitating around the Wall. Living next to a prison, even if theoretically you’re not the prisoner, you can develop symptoms of suffocation. Knowing people can be killed over an illegal crossing of the Wall, not being able to walk all of your city, imagining what there can be on the other side. Rainer Werner Fassbinder felt shame for the post-war West Germans, for the way the West stuffed their mouths with consumerism and told them to shut up. During his 1978 film In a Year of Thirteen Moons, he punished the viewer with a ten minute sequence of rhythmic murder and quartering of animals in the slaughterhouse, a senseless death that is then wiped out and put into neat plastic boxes. Half of his films are acerbic commentaries on the situation of the left, until they start to look more like funeral elegies. Fassbinder was friends with Holger Meins, who was a cinematography student when he joined the RAF. He later died in prison after a hunger strike. In May 1976 Ulrike Meinhof committed suicide or was killed, followed by Ensslin and Baader. In the 1981 film Christiane F. Wir sind Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo, when Christiane and her boyfriend Detlef have awkward, clumsy teenage first sex, it’s on a lair of bloodied, dirty sheets cobbled together in their drug den. Poor kids, they and their teen friends have all their injections, trips, they hunger, shake, ejaculate and overdose under one and the same face of Ulrike Meinhof torn out of a newspaper.

  One of the reasons the punk generation reads dystopias like Nineteen-Eighty-Four and A Clockwork Orange as if they were their lives, and looks longingly towards the communist East in their aesthetics, is their depoliticization. The generation of their grandparents was the one who survived the war, believed in socialism, was changing the world, joined political parties. Earlier, to piss off your parents, you’d join a Communist Party. By the 70s, those who wanted to change the world were discredited and all they had left was the aesthetics. A generation or two before, people believed in the modernist ideal for living: built estates for collective life, in which neighbors were to meet in the patio and socialize. The 1960s and 70s also marked the crisis and decline of the nuclear family. In the regress towards private life and individualism, with a growing number of divorces, this generation was paying for the necessary experiment of their parents by not having anything in return for what they’d given up. The counter culture as a resource/channel of political culture also began to decline. What was left were the drugs. Berlin since the 70s started having an enormous population of drug addicts.

  2.3 Perils of European melancholy

  The 70s were an era of abandoned children, with no more support in institutions. Christia
ne F. Wir sind Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo (this sentence has the same structure as the “Wir Sind Helden”, we are the heroes), the 1981 film, opens with a murky shot of Gropiusstadt, the most infamous block estate in Berlin, by then decaying from social and material neglect, plagued by crime and violence, which brought more and more arguments to a new class of politicians who deemed the ideas of modernism ‘bankrupted’. The infamous St Louis estate Pruitt-Igoe was taken down in the mid-70s. Groupuisstadt is scary, but wasn’t meant to be. Former Bauhaus director Walter Gropius designed it as a quite modest, low-density estate. Later, with migration from East Berlin rising, it was rebuilt several times to cram the new population in growingly lesser quality flats. Christiane hates Gropiusstadt, where she lives with her single, always-at-work mother, who is always absent, unless she is fucking her dodgy boyfriend. The only company and community she finds is in the night clubs and friends, who are all into drugs. She goes to the Sound, the famous disco club, labelled as “the most modern discotheque in Europe”. She starts lightly, takes speed and coke, but the whole thing is about “H”. H is her obsession, a gate to a different reality, where she can communicate with her idol, Bowie. Seeing her friends all drowning in H, she thinks this transgression is the only way to belong to their community.

  Bowie, when a Thin White Duke, had cocaine as his toxin of choice, the typical drug of someone who insists they have the full “control” over their habit. The first half of the film is basically a Bowie fan story. Christiane has all his records (which she, when the first part ends, symbolically sells to get money for drugs). Bowie is the god for her post-political generation, who recreates politics as spectacle. In the film, he’s present everywhere, as music or endlessly repeated image: his music oozes out in clubs, at the Zoo station, where the young addicts gather at their alternative home; they hear him, when they forget themselves in the drug haze. He looks at Christiane and others from posters, like Big Brother from the LP covers, in their dreams; his concert, central to the film, is the EVENT she waits for. It is her most intimate company, it accompanies the kids, when they prostitute themselves, and when they inject the drug and go on a trip, he IS that trip and that drug and that malaise.