Iron Curtain (59 page)

Some of these occasions were deliberately designed to push older holidays out of the way. In Poland, May 1 came into direct conflict with May 3, the anniversary of the signing of the country’s first democratic constitution in 1791. In Hungary, March 19, the anniversary of the 1919 communist revolution, clashed with March 15, the anniversary of the revolution of 1848. Illegal celebrations of the “wrong” holidays became a feature of public life and a form of low-level opposition in both countries for many years.

There were rewards for participation in the “right” holidays: May Day celebrations often included free sausages for those who marched in the parade. But the behavior of the celebrants at all of these events was also carefully
observed. According to an inspector who attended several commemorations of Mátyás Rákosi’s birthday in 1950, the results were sometimes mixed. At one meeting of the Young Pioneers, a Hungarian child, overwhelmed by the intensity of the
propaganda, broke into tears and cried that “he had no father, but even if he had a father he would love comrade Rákosi more.” But at another meeting, a child was overheard telling another that “I wish Rákosi had never got out of prison.” The remark was reported to his school director, who spoke to the child’s parents as well as to the parents’ employers. Both children were expelled from the Young Pioneers and presumably had to find other ways to occupy themselves after school.
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Special plans were made for round-number anniversaries. Rákosi’s sixtieth birthday in 1952 was marked by a specially commissioned biography, which was rapidly translated into several languages, as well as multiple ceremonies and a special exhibition containing photographs of the leader as a young man, paintings of events in his life, and gifts presented to the leader from his grateful people, including elaborate peasant embroidery, ceramics, carvings, and dolls.
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Bolesław Bierut’s sixtieth birthday in 1952 also required the
publication of a biography, as well as a special poetry anthology. Pledges were made to honor him with extra output at factories, and congratulatory letters were sent from around the country. Elaborate ceremonies were held, including at two factories that had decided to name themselves after the leader. A mountain village (Bierutowice) did the same. At the main ceremony in Warsaw, Bierut’s photograph was placed between busts of Lenin and Stalin.
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Equally elaborate plans were laid to celebrate Walter Ulbricht’s sixtieth birthday in 1953. Three volumes of his speeches were due to be published, two busts were to be carved, prints of his portrait were to go on sale in shops, a special issue of
Neues Deutschland
was to contain congratulatory articles and messages, he was to be named an honorary citizen of Lepizig, and a grand dinner was to be held for him in the evening.
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Alas for Ulbricht, Stalin died before this festival was to take place and most of the events were canceled after East Germany’s Soviet advisers complained of the extravagance. (One of them snorted that Lenin had celebrated his fiftieth birthday by “inviting a few friends to drop in for dinner.”)
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But the regimes planned celebrations with more universal themes as well. Parades, floats, spectacles, and speeches were also dedicated to older or more universal cultural figures, with an aim to winning over a wider public and appealing to national pride. When the German communist party realized
that August 28, 1949, was not only the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, one of Germany’s most revered writers, but that Goethe had fortuitously been born in Weimar, an East German city, the party, the Culture Ministry, and even the Stasi launched an almost frantic effort to claim this aristocratic Enlightenment figure as a kind of proto-communist. Meticulously, they planned an elaborate festival designed to show the West that communists cared more about high culture than did capitalists, to show their own people that communists were true German patriots, and to involve as many different kinds of people in as many events as possible.

Their ultimate intention was not just to organize high-brow literati but to inspire mass enthusiasm. In a speech to the Central Committee in February 1949, one cultural bureaucrat explained that the Goethe celebrations would “contribute to the democratic education of our people” and also have a “propagating effect” across the borders: “In this eastern zone we don’t want to be just an economic and political example but also a cultural model for a [future] unified Germany.” The party, he conceded, would not be able to “keep silent about the contradictions in the life and work of … this greatest of all Germans”—unfortunately, Goethe had been skeptical about the French Revolution, and indeed revolutions in general. Still, “if you look at Goethe’s work you can see that he always worked toward [Marxist] dialectical materialism, without realizing it.”
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The
Soviet military administration approved, and indeed they had some background for this kind of work.
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The USSR had adopted a similarly hagiographic cult of Pushkin, the nineteenth-century Russian poet who would surely have found the Bolsheviks horrifying.

Cultural festivals were nothing new in Germany. But everything about this one seemed exceptionally lavish, especially given the poverty of most East Germans at the time. Celebrations kicked off with a Politburo decree on March 8. This was followed by lectures in the National Theater; recitations of Goethe’s poetry; performances of Goethe’s plays; conferences on Goethe’s legacy; commemorative speeches on Goethe’s greatness; and a festive week in Weimar.
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A special event was held for young people, organized by and for the
Free German Youth, including a long speech from Honecker and an even longer speech from
Grotewohl—the published version was eighty pages—which called on German youth to “complete the great work of Goethe.” A Goethe Prize was presented to the writer
Thomas Mann, whose controversial appearance in Weimar was considered a major propaganda
coup for East Germany, even though he made a point of giving exactly the same speech at West Germany’s Goethe festival in Frankfurt.
East German radio took the opportunity to trumpet his presence, broadcasting best wishes to Mann from “young pioneers and workers,” as well as thanks from various dignitaries, including the mayor of Weimar (though Mann later wrote to the mayor and pointedly declared himself happy to be both an honorary citizen of the city and a genuine citizen of the United States, as he by then was).
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The aesthetic highlight of the festival was the Free German Youth’s torchlight parade, a truly dramatic spectacle: hundreds of young people carrying blazing torches marched through the darkened, crowded streets of Weimar, finally gathering at the Goethe–Schiller monument where they laid their torches on the stones. This event raised some eyebrows in both East and West Germany, if only because the
Hitler Youth had been fond of torchlight parades too.
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Nevertheless, the entire event was rated a major propaganda and educational success, and similar festivals were planned in its wake. A Bach Year followed in 1950 (the great composer had lived for many years in the East German city of Leipzig) and a Beethoven Year in 1952 (trickier, as he was born in the West German city of Bonn), as well as a Karl Marx Year in 1953 and a Schiller Year in 1955.

In Poland, musical enthusiasts began planning their own festival, a
Chopin Year, right after the war’s end. At first, the prewar Chopin Institute was in charge of the events. But by the time it actually took place, also in 1949—the hundredth anniversary of Chopin’s death—the festival was firmly under the control of an “honorary committee” of which Bierut was the ceremonial president. Almost as lavish as the Goethe Year, the Chopin Year celebrations included
publications of new editions of Chopin’s music; a new scholarly biography; a new popular biography; collections of essays on Chopin; photo albums; and repairs to the composer’s birthplace in Żelazowa Wola. For the masses there were “workers and peasants” concerts, recordings specially designed for factory cultural centers, and radio concerts.
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Every county formed a “Chopin committee.” Most important of all were the national Chopin competitions as well as the traditional international one, the first to take place in Poland since the war. Talented pianists from around the world duly arrived in Warsaw, and throngs turned out to see them.

The emotions experienced by Chopin’s admirers were complicated, as they must have been for Germans who loved Goethe. On the one hand, Chopin was a true national Polish hero, whose music had been restricted
by the Nazis and had been played at hundreds of secret wartime concerts. Millions of people were genuinely overjoyed to hear it celebrated again. On the other hand, the regime milked the events for as much popular support as possible, and many had doubts about the competition’s conclusion. The judges declared two winners: a Russian and a Pole.
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Even more mixed emotions accompanied celebrations of the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet, who had written a number of notably anti-Russian works. Some of his poems were read aloud and some of his plays were performed. Others were banned, however, and the regime found it hard to get the same enthusiastic crowds as for Chopin.
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National culture was not the only focus for mass events, however. Sporting events were very high on the communist agenda and had also been thoroughly monopolized by the state. The German communists had systematically eliminated noncommunist sporting groups by 1948, declaring them “a form of illegal children’s activity.”
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The only legal sporting clubs in East Germany were state-run sporting clubs, and these acquired an almost paramilitary seriousness. Sports, one
Free German Youth directive declared in 1951, could help turn children into “healthy, strong, and strong-minded human beings, who love their fatherland and are prepared to work and to defend peace”—in other words, soldiers.
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In 1952, the German Young Pioneers were likewise told to “strengthen your bodies for the building of socialism and the protection of our fatherland.”
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The
Hungarian youth movement meanwhile launched a campaign to “be prepared for work and battle,” promising to procure sports equipment in schools and to reconstruct a new stadium for the use of young people and children on Margit Island, in central Budapest.
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The communist parties also understood very early on the
propaganda value of international sports competitions. In subsequent decades, the East Germans in particular would become famous for their brutal sports training academies, their use of performance-enhancing drugs, and their militaristic assault on the Olympics. But the use of sports in
communist propaganda predates the infamously masculine East German female swimmers. As early as 1946, two party sports journalists, a Czech and a Pole, conceived the idea of the Peace
Race, an international, Prague-to-Warsaw bicycle competition. The first competition took place in 1948, and enthusiasm was mandatory: well in advance of the event, Czech and Polish communist leaders instructed local party leaders along the race’s route to mobilize spectators. The Peace Race, they explained, was meant to “attract the attention and interest” of people who were unmoved by “other means of
propaganda”; to demonstrate the “rise in living standards of the broad masses and the growth of the national economy”; and to be a “symbol of brotherly cooperation between peace-loving nations, and Polish–Czech friendship in particular.”

In the early years of what became an annual race, the cyclists launched the event by marching in a May Day parade on May 1. The race itself began on May 2. Sporting commentary emphasized the “collective” nature of a bicycle race, during which individual performers were sometimes sacrificed for the glory of the team. To lend the event more credibility as an “international” competition, cyclists from the Soviet Union and the other People’s Democracies were invited to join, and, in 1952, the route was lengthened to include East Germany. The organizers intended the Peace Race to compete for prestige with the Tour de France—a competition that Czech, Polish, and German communists denounced as vulgar and commercialized—but they never quite succeeded, not least because the Peace Race never could offer similarly attractive prizes.
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The history of the race also illustrates how the politicization of a sporting event could backfire. One competitor in the Peace Race complained that once the riders entered Czech territory, the Czech media ignored the “internationalism” of the contest, coverage “acquired elements of Czech chauvinism,” and cyclists from other communist countries were booed. This was not an isolated incident. In the early 1950s, Rákosi once had to explain to
Yuri Andropov, the Soviet ambassador in Budapest, why Soviet sportsmen were booed during an international athletics competition in the city, even when they won. Delicately, Rákosi explained that this was just “fans’ fever”: naturally Hungarian spectators thought of the USSR as their most important opponent, and they cared most about contests that involved Soviet sportsmen. This didn’t please Andropov, who worried that the booing could “serve as a pretext for journalists of capitalist countries to create a false picture of the feelings of the Hungarian people for the USSR.” All Rákosi could offer in response, again, was more ideological education: the Central Committee, he promised lamely, would “take all necessary steps to strengthen the education of Hungarian sportsmen.”
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Culture and sport, singing and dancing, mass rallies and meetings all had their place in the High Stalinist calendar. There was one event, however, that combined them all. This was the World Festival of Youth and Students,
a biannual meeting held first in
Prague in 1947 and then in Budapest in 1949. Although these first two festivals were extravagant productions by the standards of the time, the third festival—now renamed the World Festival of Youth and Students for Peace—held in
East Berlin in 1951, far surpassed them both. The East Berlin youth festival might even be said to mark the zenith of High Stalinism: at one of the tensest moments in the Cold War, it provided a focus for Soviet and Eastern European propaganda, and it put East
Germany on display on an international stage for the first time.