Poor but Sexy: Culture Clashes in Europe East and West (35 page)

Cinemas were now full of films where heroic, beautiful proletarians (though with a rather characteristic muscular beauty) were reclaiming not only the themes and medium up to then reserved for the upper classes, but were also introducing a completely new aesthetics to that medium. But could we, at any step, call it a proletarian culture? Or was it rather another propagandistic way to keep the people out of the streets, to prevent any social dissent? From the beginning it was artificial: never being the real, spontaneous culture of workers, socialist realism was imposed on them from the start. But then we’d have to answer the question, what is the ‘real’ proletarian culture? A similar example is the way the ‘folk culture’ existed in PRL – in the form of orientalized, exoticized mass produced ‘folk art’, like that stocked in the national chain
Cepelia
, who sold examples of Polish folk art, relying on a patronizing, compromized vision of the Polish countryside.

Last but not least, proletarian culture couldn’t really be dominant, but constituted a certain façade: PRL wasn’t exactly a dictatorship of the proletariat, but a clandestine rule of the bureaucracy, which only gave the surface impression of letting the working class govern: the workers were a rising class within PRL, yet with no actual power, except perhaps briefly for the workers
councils of 1956. The only real revolution that happened in Poland was the one forced without the participation of Poles at all, at least according to the ‘lost revolution’ thesis of the Freudian thinker Andrzej Leder, expounded recently in
Krytyka Polityczna.
The social revolution was the erasure of two social classes: Jewish labor and Jewish entrepreneurs destroyed by the Nazis, and the Polish landlord class destroyed by the Soviets. That’s why it could never be acknowledged. As they themselves had not carried out this revolution, the mentality of most post-war citizens was determined by the countryside, and they took that consciousness to the city with them when Poland urbanized and industrialized. Yet, for political reasons, this goes completely unacknowledged by Polish society, making it impossible to gain any sort of social class-consciousness. That’s why we prefer to choose myths about ourselves: noblemen, landowners, the myth of the intelligentsia of interwar Poland.

This analysis would be attractive, if it was at least trying to present the point of view of all classes: yet eventually it’s just another analysis from the point of view of the bourgeoisie. There are many erased histories within the post-war period, and the Holocaust was not discussed enough in PRL, and nor were the pogroms started by Poles themselves. Yet this analysis doesn’t want to be compassionate with another ‘other’ in Polish consciousness - the proletarian. It chooses instead to present the masses as inherently primitive, peasant-like, backwards, conservative and reactionary, never public spirited enough to be really ‘collective’. A huge counter-argument against this theory is the existence of Solidarity, the union and the movement, which counted 10 million people at its peak in 1980-81. On one level, Solidarity may have been traditionalist, wedded to patriotism and Catholicism; but it was also based on the premises of equality and self-organization, and really proletarian in its political outlook, at least at first. Solidarity, rather than being the expression of some primitive peasant consciousness, was a collective, civic-minded
and disciplined movement. But before Solidarity, there were many attempts to take culture to Poland’s new working class.

‘I read Polish magazines’, says a character in Edward Limonov’s
Memoirs of a Russian Punk
, set in Thaw-era Soviet Ukraine. ‘And why? Because I am interested in life and in culture’. During the Thaw, Poland had the most open press in the Bloc, in its publication of literature and also in the way its press were unashamedly presenting consumer goods, youth culture and popular culture. People all over the Bloc, like the poet Josif Brodsky, learned Polish just to be able to read uncensored stuff and world literature. The first post-war illustrated magazine designed for the new society in the wholly new circumstances was
Przekroj
(Slant) - the very same which tried briefly in 2012 to transform itself again into a leftist periodical - one of many adventures of the most important popular magazine in Polish history. 1945 was the Year Zero and as the reader should realize, the first few years after the war were a relative relaxation in comparison to what was to come. As early as May ’45
Przekroj
was founded - the first illustrated magazine of People’s Poland, and which consciously embodied the revolution happening in Polish society. If I could describe it in one sentence,
Przekroj
was striving to make a magazine which could be read by all the new social classes of the New Poland, from the new elites to engineers to the kitchen lady, while at the same time smuggling in some of the pre-war charm and aspirations of the intelligentsia and bourgeoisie. It comprised of world news, columns, varying from cuisine to fashion and
savoir vivre
lessons to those serving the preservation of a material culture destroyed by the war. It had a mission, as one critic sarcastically put it, to “civilize” the nation, with the whole formation of its readers (circulation 500,000, and each copy was read by several people) considered “the civilization of Przekroj”.

Visually,
Przekroj
embodied the social formation it tried to represent. And together with it went a style connected to the cultural ideal and ambitions they promoted - a combination of the pre-war intelligentsia’s artistic aspirations and the new post-war democratization and homogenization of avant-garde and high art.
Przekroj
employed several graphic designers whose roots were in the pre-war avant-gardism, of course condemned as “formalism” in the Stalinist period.
Przekroj
took up what we could consider ‘liberal’ positions, yet the meaning of liberalism highly depends on the political context, and meant something else to what it did after 1989.
Przekroj
editors tried to discreetly ‘educate’ and raise the
nation, publishing suggestions and various kinds of advice, which was mostly incredibly mundane and, read after the years, reflects the dramatic shortages and grinding poverty in the early PRL. The first two decades after ’45 were an era of special austerity: there was not enough good quality food, or food as such, housing was in a dramatic state, including people living in the “caves” left after bombings, crumbling infrastructure, no clothes or of very poor quality, not even mentioning care for their aesthetics or fashionability, and, of course, the already mentioned “social revolution”, which meant that the traditional codes of behavior, of
savoir-vivre
, traced from the bourgeois society, were not only suspended, they were the part of the bourgeois past.
Przekroj
took the task of “recivilizing” the nation in the reality of the implosion of everything that was before, discreetly reinstalling the bourgeois culture.

5.5 Barbara Hoff’s Przekroj fashion column

Advice on cuisine, where various cheap vegetables were “pretend” meat, or how to dress/make up, having neither clothes nor cosmetics, was combined with witty stories, usually written under pseudonyms by the editor Marian Eile and his deputy Janina Ipohorska, both editors and artists established before the war. Wit, charm and delicate persuasion were the weapons of
Przekrój
in their mission. This was conveyed not didactically, which was the norm in the humourless and heavily stylized socialist press, but via tasteful jokes assisted by the original graphic design and lay-out.
Przekroj
dealt with the growing alcoholism, encouraging sobriety and good manners in public places; promoted good health, advocating sport (that inherent element of every socialist politics and ideology, as a “typical entertainment of the proletariat”); and it promoted healthy eating and a less formal, democratic elegance.

The fashion column was one of the most important in
Przekrój
, and was basically a guide to how to do something and create a “look” out of basically nothing. It was initiated by Janina Ipohorska, but a few years later taken over by the young art historian Barbara Hoff, who ended up holding it for the next 50 years and becoming the first “fashion dictator” of Poland. The
nation had to be taught once again how to dress well, and the national clothing and fabric production was so poor that in order to survive in style, one had to live by one’s wits more than ever. At the beginning, as Hoff has described in numerous interviews, this was an impossible task: when she realized there was nothing to write about, she asked the ministry for permission to produce a clothing line of her own. She travelled across Poland to factories, bought fabrics and ordered them to produce her fashionable, modern designs. They were still hardly available, yet Hoffland, as it was called, was, next to Moda Polska (simply “Polish Fashion”) one of the rare examples of the quasi-private, though officially nationalized fashion companies in Poland. Both have survived communism, and Hoff kept designing well into the 90s. You could be sure, that if Hoff wrote about a new style for wearing a shawl in her column, the same afternoon there would already be dozens of girls on the streets trying to copy this style. Her flagship idea was blackening the “coffin shoes” (i.e. light, paper shoes, used as footwear for the deceased) which when colored black could pass as elegant “ballerinas”. As Czech journalist Milena Jesenská wrote in 1929, from a perspective of a fashion columnist,

5.6 The unexpected return of the Thin White Duke in a book cover by socialist fashion dictator Barbara Hoff.

The fashion column is really for people for whom there is no fashion…The average person with an average job and an average salary cannot dress fashionably. She can, however, have superb clothes…It is up to her to
make clothes for herself according to fashion, adapting to it without aping it. In short, the less money she has, the more art it takes to look good…While many people think for a rich person, she must think for herself. The fashion column in the newspaper is for people who love beautiful things and cannot afford them. Only these kinds of people make culture. Only these kinds of people have style: they are innovative, daring and modestly restrained. The desire for things cultivates taste…It is a rare art to look like a good human specimen, without much money or expenditure, through one’s own efforts and the proper organisation of one’s life.

The fashion column in
Przekrój
was doing exactly this: teaching people how to be artists, often how to make clothes on one’s own; how to create elegance out of nothing by paying attentions to details and creating visual sensitivity towards one’s everyday life. The images were accompanied by witty remarks and comments, and in this, those delicate drawings by Hoff still emanate an elegant, dandy austerity which we could look for in vain in today’s chain store driven fashion.

Only after making the everyday palatable, could the higher needs be fulfilled, like the need for beauty, aesthetics and art. In here is some of the greatest merit of
Przekroj
, which relentlessly propagated modern art (in visual arts and music) and abstraction, which extended to publishing “posters” with Picasso or Leger to pull out and hang on the wall in the modest socialist salons, giving away postcards of Polish abstract paintings to its readers or even selling abstract paintings painted by the artists-editors. It also was a vehicle to the post-Thaw eruption of the new, colorful design, associated today with the Festival of Youth in 1955 in Warsaw and Expo ’58 in Brussels.

Yet, if this was a ‘civilization’, then it had to be according to Norbert Elias’s definition, i.e., civilization as something created in the West.
Przekroj
supported the silent, careful rebirth of the ‘cool’ in Poland too. It was creating ‘positive snobbery’ for the abroad, but its sights were ceaselessly always turned to the Seine, not the Moskva. It discreetly cheer-led the birth of the new, casual Western elegance, e.g. in the person of Brigitte Bardot and the new kind of free, careless, self-conscious girl. From the 60s films of the Polish school, like Janusz Morgenstern’s
Goodbye, See You Tomorrow
, or
Innocent Sorcerers
by Andrzej Wajda, there emerges a certain kind of noblesse, even if produced with little money. This is the era when the youth prefer, rather than the rough sleazy American
culture they pretended to have in the ’50s, a noble and stylish European version: they wear black and dark sunglasses, listen to jazz, are sexually liberated, looking like their counterparts in the later
Nouvelle Vague.
Or at least that was the image promoted in the suddenly liberated and West-friendly atmosphere of the 60s. This is the reason for the golden era in culture, art, film and design that ensues. Whereas elsewhere the 60s meant the most hectic time of social revolutions and upheavals, for the Bloc it meant that for the first time, consumerism was noble, as noble as art.