Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (2 page)

The dissolution of communism in the countries involved led to a social desert, in which people are more than others immersed in the capitalist “state of nature”. We reproduce this state abroad, while our culture is nearly wholly disinterested in debating the schizophrenic state we live in. I decided to write this book because of the daily, habitual sense of shame I felt, for not belonging to any of the groups: neither feeling a part of the successful creatives, promoting our “culture” abroad, nor really having that much to do with the working class majority and without a real possibility of reconnecting with this lost social class. Seeing the depoliticization of my own class back in Poland, people of my generation unwilling to recognize their position and the unpopularity of politics, I took
refuge in emigration, soon after the capitalist crisis that started in 2008.

That’s why I decided there’s a sense to revisiting this blackened era, both to reveal it for myself and to see how much there is to learn or take from it. We often behave like the 50 years before 1989 didn’t really happen. Anyone who lived in that era is made to publicly criticize it, even if there were positive sides to it. We have to go beyond the ritual war between security of jobs and flats and lack of democracy in one system, or free speech and the uncontrolled free market, but also with a large danger of poverty, unemployment, lack of education and a crippled welfare state on the other. There’s no doubt that the communist ideology, as it was practiced between the years 1945 and 1989 is dead. But we know the current ideology is dead as well, with the catastrophic lack of clue what we should do about it.

But another reason I had to write it is because despite my growing politicization, I couldn’t find myself in the narratives carried on by the Western left. I or anyone from where I was, hardly feature in the current discussions on the left. Because it turned out, the left had little clue about post-communism, about the post-communist transition or even problems of underdevelopment. The Western left seemed to have lost interest in us and then hasn’t noticed the strange conundrum of people like me, for whom the Western-Eurocentric themes of “1968”, Italian autonomism or accelerationism bore little relation to our experience. We may all live in “post-industrial” reality, a lost generation with no chance of a job. Yet we grew up in very different conditions. A Stasiek from Opole or Vlad from Timișoara are still less well off than a Dai from the Rhondda Valley, as the latter may still benefit from some residual welfare state. Even if mining towns in Silesia are in some ways facing similar trouble as those in South Wales, there’s still a reason why people are migrating from Silesia to South Wales and not the other way round. In Poland or Czechoslovakia 1968 meant something radically different: anti-Semitic
purges and Soviet invasion. I can’t see any current debates in the Western left telling the story of the several countries, which in an act of socio-economical experiment, were trying an alternative to the West, and for some time they were even succeeding. At the same time, we started to be pervaded by the same problems, of the new far right movements and hostility towards migrants, yet nobody was seeing any connection.

To me, there still exists something like “values of the West” and the “East” and I realized that living in affluent Western Europe. I also learned that I definitely do not want to belong to those Western values, shaped by the global capitalism. As capitalism is of course now reigning completely in Eastern Europe, it is at least still combined with certain forms of the older life, both in the memory of the pre-’89 past, and the existing, appalling poverty we deal with, unheard of in the West.

I was born 1983 and I never really lived through the problems within communism that older generations had to. No crossing of the Wall, no scary officers, no parents interned by communists. Still, I observed the dramatic changes in the social fabric after ’89, when at the very beginning of the 1990s I went to a state primary school, attending it mostly with working class children from the tower blocks in the area, and then, in 1998, went to a private elite high school, conducted by people from the former democratic opposition. In the new Poland they decided that the best way of educating children was to create schools for elites who can afford a significant fee every month. The contrast between the way children could learn and how they were treated in both schools was rather astounding. Still, hardly anyone from my former high school mates, now mostly in secure jobs, sees this as problematic.

The attempts at reviving the leftist politics in the Former East have been happening especially in the last decade: we have the contours of an independent left for the first time since the interwar period. Significant amounts of cultural activity are carried out by left-leaning groups, of which Krytyka Polityczna is very prominent.
In Croatia and Slovenia it is the Right to the City initiative, responsible for the first anti-austerity protests there in 2012. Russia had a revival and brief unification of the left efforts which emerged during the protests on Bolotnaya Square in 2011, where the Left Front was formed - and last but not least, the influence of intellectual and artistic groups, like Chto Delat from St Petersburg, and Voina, who are trying to establish a new left without necessarily condemning or dwelling on the communist past.

Still, the percentage of the population identifying their political and social position with this movement is nearly nonexistent. ‘Manifa’, the feminist demo on International Women’s Day in Poland, that has 14 years of tradition, had pitiful numbers in 2013 - and this in a year that saw some of the biggest attacks on women’s rights since 1989 (an enduring ban on abortion, restrictions on contraceptives, the rejection of civil partnerships in Parliament), showing that nobody is identifying this abuse of their rights with the possibility of political action. Instead, within post-communist countries, citizens increasingly don’t vote, with numbers often below 50% during elections. Post-politics rules over the minds of Poles when there’s nobody to vote for, with over half of the society not even participating in the democratic processes.

As the historical project itself is rejected, we observe the aestheticization of the communist period. And the greater the aestheticization, the bigger the political passivity, almost without exception. In this book, I’m going to focus on the ways politics is feigned in between the former East and West, in the form of popular Ostalgia, a specific “vulturism”, a dubious sympathy for communist culture and the symbols of the past without any political investment, uprooting them and rendering them meaningless. In recent years we have seen how popular art exhibitions bringing back the legacy of the communist years, with
Cold War Modern
in 2008 at the V&A in London, Star City in Nottingham Contemporary and Ostalgia in new Museum, New York, could often obliterate the politics and social situations the featured
countries live in now. These aesthetics-of-communism shows have spread across the world, including some progressive institutions in the “former East”. Yet in the mainstream of these countries themselves, it remains a highly unpopular topic. If there are ideas for ‘Museums of Communism’, they are usually for creating a highly dubious freakshow out of it.

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 magazines. 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.