Iron Curtain (75 page)

As in the West, the clothes were associated with music. Like their Western European counterparts, the
bikiniarze
, the
jampecek
, and the others started out as jazz fans, despite—or thanks to—the young communists who went around smashing up jazz records. Once it had been forbidden, jazz music became politicized. Even to listen to jazz on the radio became a political activity: to twiddle the dials of one’s father’s radio in an attempt to catch different stations through the static became a form of surrogate dissent. Radio Luxemburg was weirdly popular, as were the jazz programs on
Voice of America later on. This would remain a dissident activity until the communist regimes collapsed forty years later.

In their clothes and in their music, the youth rebels of Poland or East Germany had a lot in common with American rockers and zoot suiters, as well as British teddy boys. But because of the nature of their regimes, their fashion choices had a much deeper political significance than they would have in the West. From the authorities’ point of view, these young hipsters were by definition implicated in black market trading. How else could they have obtained such unusual clothes? They were also by definition admirers of American-style consumerism. Like Western teenagers, they wanted possessions. In particular, they wanted possessions the communist system could not provide, and they went out of their way to get them. One former Hungarian
jampecek
remembered the lengths to which he went to get hold of the thick-soled shoes:

The regime also suspected that admiration for Western fashions implied an admiration for Western politics. Very quickly, the press began to accuse the youth rebels not just of nonconformism but of propagating degenerate American culture, of plotting to undermine communist values, even of taking orders from the West. At times the youth rebels were called saboteurs or even spies. Perversely, this kind of propaganda had the effect of making these inchoate groups seem, and eventually become, more powerful and more important than they might have been otherwise. One Polish newspaper described American pop culture as “a cult of fame and luxury, the acceptance and glorification of the most primitive desires, the filling of a hunger for sensation.”
¹²
Other official media equated the
bikiniarze
with “speculators, kulaks, hooligans, and reactionaries.”
¹³
Jacek Kuroń reckoned that this sort of language actually drew young people to jazz, to “Western” dancing, and to more exotic forms of dress. He argued that the
bikiniarze
became a genuine countercultural movement only after the press began to rail against them: “They were told, ‘You are
bikiniarze
,’ and they responded, ‘We are
bikiniarz
e.’ And that gave them the political program that they’d been missing.”
¹⁴

Sándor Horváth, a Hungarian historian who has studied the
jampecek
movement in depth, argues along similar lines that the Hungarian youth subculture was created by newspaper propaganda and not vice versa. In addition, he speculates that the crusade against the
jampecek
was probably inspired by the Soviet drive against “hooliganism,” which took place at the same time. He even questions whether the
jampecek
really existed, in the beginning—or whether the communist authorities, needing something against which to define themselves, had in fact invented them, deriving their description from the “Westerns, gangster films, dime novels and comic books” that made their way across the Hungarian border. In order to promote the character of a “good” communist they needed “bad” capitalists, and the
jampecek
fit the bill.
¹⁵

Once they had been defined as outlaws, these fashionable groups began to attract people who really were looking for a fight. In Poland, there were frequent, serious squabbles between
bikiniarze
and
zetempowcy
(a nickname derived from the Polish acronym of the Union of Polish Youth, ZMP), as
well as between the
bikiniarze
and the police. In 1951, a group of young people from a Warsaw suburb went on trial for alleged armed robbery.
Sztandar Młodych
, the official youth newspaper, described them as “young bandits serving American imperialism,” and claimed they had been dressed in the characteristic narrow trousers and thick-soled shoes. One young communist activist wrote in to
Sztandar Młodych
to complain that he too had been convinced that “admirers of the American lifestyle are hostile to People’s Poland” after having been beaten up by a group of young “hooligans” dressed as
bikiniarze
. He had been wearing his red Union of Polish Youth tie.
Krzysztof Pomian, at the time a Union of Polish Youth leader in Warsaw, was also once attacked in a park and beaten up by people he never saw. A schoolmate was arrested for the crime, but later was freed.
¹⁶

The reverse was also true. Young communists, sometimes in tandem with the police, hunted
bikiniarze
in the streets: they would catch them, beat them up, cut their hair, and slash their ties. More than one “official” youth dance party was ruined when
bikiniarze
began to dance “in the style”—meaning the jitterbug—after which they were beaten up by their “offended” peers.
¹⁷
Kuroń himself remembers being told by a local party secretary that since the “
bikiniarze
and the hooligans” hadn’t been persuaded by the press, the radio, and the comic caricatures of themselves in posters and books, it was time to get a group of young, healthy workers and go after them: “From that moment, whenever
bikiniarze
jumped onto the dance floor, the young communists hauled them off and beat them up.”
¹⁸
Similar situations occurred in Hungary too.

In East Germany, the problem of youthful rebellion was made more acute by the undeniable influence of American radio, which was available not just on crackly, distant Radio Luxemburg but right next door on RIAS (Radio in the American Sector), which was broadcast directly from West Berlin. West German sheet music was also available for dance bands, and to the great consternation of the regime it was very popular. At a German composers’ conference in 1951, an East German musicologist denounced this “American entertainment kitsch” as a “channel through which the poison of Americanism penetrates and threatens to anaesthetize the minds of workers.” The threat from jazz, swing, and big band music was “just as dangerous as a military attack with poison gases,” since it reflected “the degenerate ideology of American monopoly capital with its lack of culture … its empty sensationalism and above all its fury for war and destruction … We should speak
plainly here of a fifth column of Americanism. It would be wrong to misjudge the dangerous role of American hit music in the preparation for war.”
¹⁹

In the wake of this conference, the East German state took active measures to fight against this new scourge. Around the country, regional governments began to force dance bands and musicians to obtain licenses. Some banned jazz outright. Though the enforcement was irregular, there were arrests. The writer
Erich Loest remembered one jazz musician who, when told to change his music selection, pointed out that he was playing the music of the oppressed Negro minority. He was arrested anyway and went to prison for two years.
²⁰

The regime also sought alternatives, though tentatively. Nobody was quite sure what progressive dance music was supposed to sound like, after all, or where it was supposed to be played. At the
German Academy of Art, a learned commission of musicologists came together to discuss the “role of dance music in our society.” They agreed that “dance music must be purposeful music,” which meant it should be only for dancing. But those present could not agree on whether dance music should be played on the radio—“merely listening to dance music is impossible, the listener will forget what its purpose was supposed to be”—and they feared young people would ask for “boogie-woogie” instead of “real” dance music anyway.
²¹

In May 1952, the Culture Ministry tried to solve this problem with a competition and prizes to be given to composers of “new German dance music.” The competition failed, as none of the entries were deemed sufficiently attractive by a committee that was probably looking for a modern version of Strauss’s Vienna waltzes. As the new “Dance Commission” of the Central Committee complained, much of the work submitted was based on unprogressive, uneducational themes such as sentimental love, nostalgia, or pure escapism. One song about Hawaii, the committee declared, could just as well be set in Lübeck.

Much of the time, young East Germans responded to this sort of thing with howls of laughter. Some bands openly mocked letters they had received from party officials and read them aloud to audiences. Others simply flouted the rules. One shocked official wrote a report describing the “wild cascades of sound at high volume” and the “wild bodily dislocations” he’d heard and seen at one concert. Inevitably, there were escapes as well. One band, a particularly notable “propagandist for American unculture,” caused a sensation
by fleeing to the West and then immediately beaming its music back into East Berlin on RIAS.

In truth, the problem of Western music and Western youth fashion never went away. If anything, both became even more alluring after the first, sensational recording of “Rock Around the Clock” reached the East in 1956, heralding the arrival of rock and roll. But by that time, the communist regimes had stopped fighting pop music. Jazz would become legal after the
death of Stalin, at least in some places. Rules on leisure clothing would relax, and eventually Eastern Europe would have its own rock bands too. As one historian notes, the battle against Western pop music was “fought and lost” in East Germany even before the Berlin Wall was built—and it had been “fought and lost” everywhere else too.
²²

For adults who had to hold down jobs and maintain families in the era of High Stalinism, flamboyant clothing was never a practical form of protest, though a few professions did allow it.
Marta Stebnicka, an actress who spent much of her career in Kraków, put a great deal of effort into designing interesting hats for herself in the 1950s.
²³
Leopold Tyrmand, the Polish jazz critic with the narrow ties and the colored socks, was an adult style icon too.

But adults who couldn’t or wouldn’t dress up could still play pranks. They could also tell jokes. So ubiquitous and so varied were the jokes told in communist regimes that numerous academic tomes have since been written about them, though the use of jokes as a form of passive resistance in a repressive political system was nothing new. Plato wrote of the “malice of amusement” and Hobbes observed that jokes often serve to make the joke teller feel superior to the objects of his humor.
George Orwell observed (as quoted above) that “a thing is funny when it upsets the established order. Every joke is a tiny revolution.” In the communist regimes of Eastern Europe, where there were so few opportunities either to express malice toward authority or to feel superior, and where the desire to upset the established order was both strong and forbidden, jokes flourished.
²⁴

Jokes also served a wide variety of purposes. The Soviet dissident
Vladimir Bukovskii probably expressed their main function most precisely when he pointed out that “the simplification of the joke exposes the absurdity of all propaganda tricks … In the jokes you can find the thing that has left no trace in the printed sources: the people’s opinion of events.”
²⁵
Certainly jokes
allowed the joke teller to refer aloud to otherwise unmentionable truths, such as the fact that the Soviet Union bought Polish coal and other Polish products far below the international market price:

Negotiations are going on between Mao and Stalin. The Chinese leader asks the Soviet leader for help: “We need a billion dollars,
fifty
million tons of coal, and a lot of rice.” Stalin turns to his advisers: “Dollars, okay. Coal, okay. But where will Bierut get the rice?”
²⁶

Also the fact that the Polish army, in the 1950s, was led by a Soviet general with a Polish surname:

Why did Rokossovskii become a marshal of the Polish army?

Because it’s cheaper to dress one Russian in a Polish uniform than to dress the whole Polish army in Russian uniforms.

Or the fact that even artists had to be forced to conform under communism:

What is the difference between painters of the naturalist, impressionist, and the socialist realist schools?

The naturalists paint as they see, the impressionists as they feel, the socialist realists as they are told.

Or the fact that supporters of the deeply unpopular regime were too embarrassed to admit it:

Two friends are walking down the street. One asks the other, “What do you think of Rákosi?” “I can’t tell you here,” he replies. “Follow me.”

They disappear down a side street.

“Now tell me what you think of Rákosi,” says the friend.

“No, not here,” says the other, leading him into the hallway of an apartment block.