The Fall of the Iron Curtain and the Culture of Europe

Peter I. Barta, Peter I. Barta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135920487
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The end of communism in Europe has tended to be discussed mainly in the context of political science and history. This book, in contrast, assesses the cultural consequences for Europe of the disappearance of the Soviet bloc. Adopting a multi-disciplinary approach, the book examines the new narratives about national, individual and European identities that have emerged in literature, theatre and other cultural media, investigates the impact of the re-unification of the continent on the mental landscape of Western Europe as well as Eastern Europe and Russia, and explores the new borders in the form of divisive nationalism that have reappeared since the disappearance of the Iron Curtain.

1   The Wall has fallen on all of us

Dubravka Ugrešić

The Wall has fallen. It has fallen on everyone, on all of us.

(Anonymous commentator)

Upton Sinclair, author of the novel Oil!, would have stayed half-forgotten as a classic of American literature had there not been a film adaptation of the novel called There Will Be Blood, which momentarily blew the dust off Sinclair’s name. Having seen the movie, I recalled the bookshelf in my mother’s flat and the book cover of the first Yugoslav edition of Oil!, entitled Petrolej. There were pencil drawings all over the cover: these, my mother said, were my first childish scribblings. It was just after World War II, a time of poverty, and the covers of books doubled as drawing pads. Upton Sinclair’s novel Oil!, Maxim Gorky’s Mother and Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy were some of the first titles in the home library of my young parents.

I do not remember whether I have ever actually read Oil! Probably not, but if I did back when I was a student – earnestly dedicated to comparative literature – I dare not have said so. At that time, defense of the ‘autonomy of the literary text’ (or that of any work of art) was sacred to every student of literature, and I certainly saw myself battling on the front line. In my student days ‘literary autonomy’ was closely tied to literary taste. In simple terms, we felt that good writers did not embark on politics and did not write about life in overly realistic terms. Real life was left to bad writers and those who flirted with politics. The fashion of the day was the ‘literariness’ of literature.

Yugoslav writers were never seriously infected with the virus of socialist realism, which of course does not mean to say that there were not those who made compromises. But resistance to the tendency to ideologize and politicize literature, despite the occasional line penned to glorify Tito, lasted unusually long after the enemy, socialist realism, was dead and buried. As a result, there were many good writers who wrote fine books; there were bad writers, on the other hand, who were labeled ‘good’ because they ‘did not get caught up in politics’, just as many good writers were deemed bad because they had no bone to pick with the regime, or at least did not do so publicly; and then again there were bad writers who were deemed good only because they had taken a public stand against the regime. The fine Croatian writer, Miroslav Krleža, long since dead and buried, bears a stigma to this day for his friendship with Tito.

Today, of course, I know that the connection between literature and ‘ideology’ has been around since the beginnings of literacy. The Bible is not only a grandiose literary work, but also a grandiose ideological work. The history of the bond between literature and ideology is long, complex and dramatic. Writers have paid with their lives for the written word. The history of relations between emperors and poets, kings and court jesters, those who commission literature and those who comply with the commissions is too gory, episodes of book burning and censorship too frequent, the number of writers’ lives sacrificed for the freedom of speech, for an idea, or even just for a dream is too vast to allow us to take this fatal liaison too lightly. The notion of literary autonomy served too often as an alibi for it to enjoy full validity: when they thought they had something to gain by it, there were writers who stepped into politics; others took on politics even when doing so led to symbolic or real suicide. Some, when they looked to save their skins, sought the shield of literary autonomy, while others paid for their literary autonomy with their skins.

The tension between the two opposing poles – the political engagement of a writer and a writer’s autonomy – was particularly dramatic in the literatures of the former Eastern Europe, and even today, surprising as this may seem, it has still not been relieved, although the context has changed in terms of politics, ideas and culture. Eastern European literary environments were much more rigid than Western European ones. In the Eastern European literary zones, careers were destroyed because of the written word, or conversely the writer was elevated to such high offices of state as president, minister, or ambassador. This is no different today, though it may seem to be different: state institutions continue to play the part of literary patron, albeit a bad and stingy patron, but there is barely any independent territory left. The writer in small post-communist states is still treated as the ‘voice of his people’ or as a ‘traitor’. Why? For the simple reason that communism in transitional countries has been replaced by nationalism and both systems have their eyes on writers. The literary marketplace is too small for the writer to maintain a belief in independence.

There were many Eastern European writers who were not fortunate enough to survive the shift from socialism to nationalism, to reposition themselves nationally, thereby insuring themselves a place on the bookshelves of the national literature. Some tried, and survived a year or so longer, slipping through the needle’s eye. Many of the losers, along with their collected works and mountains of scribbled pages, however, sank into the dust of oblivion. Young writers, and with them the young literary critics and scholars, showed no compassion; they must have figured out that this was not their story. Today, after all, is another age, life is proceeding at a rapid clip and literature is a long-term investment in time, which for most of us does not provide anything more than aching joints and bankruptcy. But it is a kind of lottery that brings the lucky winner the jackpot. The young rush out to buy the lottery tickets and do not ask too many questions.

How is it, for instance, that writers who were dissidents in their communist states are so quick to accept posts in ministries, embassies, or elsewhere in the new democracies? How is it that today, in one way or another, everyone continues to live on government handouts? How is it that those who once pressed so fiercely for autonomy in literature are now demanding that their state institutions finance culture (hence literature), thereby implicitly agreeing that they will not bite the hand that feeds them? Overall, culture in small countries was never viable on the market, nor could it be. That is why writers of small countries, whether they like it or not, are condemned to act as representatives for their country, whether the state be Croatia, Serbia, Estonia, or Latvia. Either that or they are labeled ‘traitors’ and live abroad. One often goes hand in hand with the other. Even international literary stars, who have long since left their home literatures behind and have, along the way, changed the language in which they write, are not immune to the righteous fury of the homeland. The recent incident with Milan Kundera only confirms that the Czech Republic is a small country, and that the model for the traumatic back-and-forth between literature and ideology is unchanged.

Exile is a change of context in the literal sense. Exile implies the personal experience of every exiled writer, which would be difficult to subsume under the binary opposites stubbornly endorsed by literary critics: the writer’s native civilization versus the hosting environment of the country of exile. The terms – émigré, immigrant, exile, nomad, minority, ethnic – are discriminatory, but also affirmative. With these terms, the home base expels the writer, while the same terms are used by the host environment to thrust the writer into an ethnic niche in order to affirm his or her existence. The home base makes assumptions of mono-culturalism, xenophobia, and exclusivity, while the host environment makes assumptions of multiculturalism, cosmopolitanism, and inclusivity, but both essentially work with the dusty labels of ethnicity and the politics of otherness.

Even if I were to write a text about the desolation of frozen landscapes at the North Pole, I would still be generally labeled a Croatian writer, or a Croatian writer in exile writing about the desolation of the frozen landscapes at the North Pole. Reviewers would promptly populate the frozen wasteland of my text with concepts such as exile, Croatia, ex-Yugoslavia, post-communism, the Balkans, Eastern Europe, the Slavonic world, Balkan feminism or perhaps Balkan eco-feminism, while journalists would ask me whether I had the opportunity while up in the frozen wasteland to run into the Yugoslav diaspora, and how I perceived the situation in Kosovo from the frozen point of view. If an English author writes his or her version of a visit to the North Pole, Englishness will not be likely to serve as the framework within which his or her text is read.

This attitude of the host environment to writer-newcomers springs from a subconscious colonial attitude, just when the larger literary world is doing its best to reject this; from a market that relishes any form of the profitably exotic; from always vital relations between the periphery and the centre. Periphery and centre, however, are elastic; I am sure that Serbs feel closer to the centre than Bulgarians, and that Bulgarians feel closer to the centre than the Turks. Feelings, however, are one thing and real relations of power are something else. The real centre of cultural power is America, or rather Anglo-American culture, whose domination marked the twentieth century. We are still looking to that centre with the same fascination today. Anglo-American culture is the dominant field of reference, while, at the same time, it is the most powerful, if not the fairest, mediator of cultural values. In other words, if Chinese writers are not translated into English, it is unlikely that any Serbian or Croatian reader, with the exception of the occasional lone Sinologist, will ever hear of them.

The relationship to a literary text changes, of course, with the change of language. There are many examples of writers who embraced the language of their host-country, yet even by doing so they did not manage to protect their texts from misreading. There is an even larger number of writers who, writing in the language of the host country, seek a special ‘cultural’ (which basically means ethnic or religious) status because only thanks to this will they attain visibility. Overall, an opposition asserts itself here: between the autonomy of the literary text and its critical reception and market evaluation (the market not being without its political aspirations) in the new context of the internationalization of literary texts and transnational literature. This is still the realm of literature as we know it with its traditions, canons, apparatus and institutions, with its system of values. This is a realm where literature (and the same holds true for other cultural texts) is read and evaluated within gender and post-colonial frames; within still existing bits and pieces of theoretical schools and approaches; within cultural geo-politics and its coordinates, such as the Eastern European and the Western European zones, or within the global cultural market dominated by American or Anglo-American language and culture. Here we still know, or at least we know approximately, what it is we are talking about when we speak of literature or culture.

As it leaps from the national to the international level, literature enters its third, unavoidable context: a new epoch of digital revolution and globalization. In that context literature, or, rather, assumptions about it, dissolves, vanishes, or transmutes into something else. True, the bookstores are full of books, the chains are reminiscent of supermarkets, there are more translations of books than ever before, more literary awards than ever, there are writers being lauded like pop stars, there are rich networks of EU cultural institutions, managers, mediators and cultural bureaucracy, there are numerous cultural projects and events. All of this suggests that things have never been better for culture. However, the switch from Gutenberg to the digital era caused a tectonic shift, and the impact is much more serious and complicated than it seems, or than we are able to see, predict and articulate. The whole system, with its codes, meanings and languages disappeared or transmuted into something else. Cultural values and their hierarchy have been destroyed, differentiations and differences between popular and mass culture, and consequently high culture, do not exist today. Intellectuals and experts as arbiters have been pushed to the margins. Authors of works of art are disappearing together with the notion of authorship. A commonly known and often-quoted fact is that the most consulted source of reference has become Wikipedia, an internet-based encyclopaedia, controlled by anonymous kids. There is a parallel culture on the Internet with millions and millions of consumers, people who are not passive but ready to create, interact, change, compile, produce and exchange and, thanks to technology, they do so. Their main source of reference is the vast industry of popular culture. And here is the paradox: thanks to sophisticated high-tech devices we can observe the rapid process of regression and barbarization of culture. This is why new consumers are not able to read classical works of art any more (that the majority of us still consider culture), even if they should like to explore them. That is why we, on the other hand, are not able to communicate with the anonymous artistic product presented mostly on the Internet or TV, but also in the written word, in books. The fact that the celebrated David Hockney uses his iPhone to draw sketches does not slow down but rather speeds up this process.

So, what do we mean when we talk about culture? Are we equipped to answer that question? Add to this that we live in a new, self-centred epoch in which there is a premium on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching and on being read rather than reading. This new status of an author can be best explained by the image of a person who suffers both from autism and exhibitionism at the same time.

Thus we are living in the ruins of the old cultural system. The crash of the system produced a terrible noise to which we are constantly exposed. We can no longer distinguish what it is we are hearing, and even if we hear something, we dare not say and define it. Our language belongs to the old system. There is a vast army of facilitators of that noise – cultural critics, professors, educators, teachers, the cultural bureaucrats, and many others – but nobody knows yet what the gist of the noise is.

The hardest job after the fall of the Wall is not done yet – and this is the competent and relevant evaluation of what has been gained in the process and what has been lost. For this job, we need scholars and thinkers who refuse to think within widely accepted stereotypes, political, ideological, cultural and otherwise. This job should be done on all the ‘sides’: the Wall has fallen on everyone, on all of us, as an anonymous commentator noticed a long time ago, with a tinge of melancholy in his voice.

2 Twenty years after the Curtain fell

A personal account by an Austrian

Gabriele Matzner-Holzer¹

For forty years, until 1989, Europe, and particularly Central Europe, had lived in the shadow of the Iron Curtain, divided into hostile and heavily armed ideological blocs, more than once on the brink of hot war. Austria, where I grew up, had the good fortune to end up on the right side, that is to say, to the west of the dividing line that had been drawn though Europe by Allied agreements during and at the end of World War II. It remained occupied by the four major Allies until 1955 but it was spared the fate of becoming incorporated into the Soviet empire. This may have been at least partially owing to the deep hostility of many Austrians to communism: even under Soviet occupation Austrian communists could not get a foot in the door. More likely though were geo-strategic considerations responsible for this outcome.

In 1955 the Allies left Austria and the country declared its permanent neutrality. This option was not open to, or acceptable for, occupied and divided Germany. It seemed attractive to many Hungarians a year later though, in 1956: they too proposed neutrality for their country as a way to escape from the Soviet camp. But we know how that revolution ended. Neutrality was not only a useful tool to maintain independence. It also corresponded to Austria’s historical experience of subservience to stronger neighbours and of fighting and losing wars on their side. This is why, even twenty years after the implosion of the Soviet empire, most Austrians still cherish neutrality. They do not want to join military alliances, such as NATO, with which Austria, nevertheless, cooperates very closely.

Neutral states have always been viewed with suspicion, especially by those who are at war. In terms of ideology, economics and politics, Austria has always been firmly on the Western side. Being neutral, the country could and did contribute to easing East-West tensions and to making life more bearable for many citizens in the Eastern bloc. It served as the first port of refuge for Hungarians in 1956 and for Czechs and Slovaks in 1968. Austrian politicians also managed to obtain the release and transit of hundreds of thousands of East Germans and Soviet Jews to West Germany, Israel, the United States and elsewhere. Overall, probably about two million people from the communist East were able to leave their countries and start new lives thanks to Austria. As part of the team of the Austrian prime minister Bruno Kreisky in the early 1980s, it was my task to draft letters to communist rulers asking them to exercise restraint, release prisoners and allow people to emigrate. This was called ‘quiet diplomacy’; had it been ‘loud’, it would surely have been less successful. Kreisky would, for example, draw the attention of Erich Honecker, the East German leader, to the plight of an East German musician incarcerated for his unruly lyrics, and politely ask for his release on humanitarian grounds. Austrian politicians would, on occasion, request information from the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about the confinement of a Russian poet in an insane asylum. Such enquiries signalled to rulers in the Communist world that acts of intimidation and mistreatment did not go unnoticed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Coming from a small and neutral country, not suspected of potentially harbouring aggressive or hostile intentions, such messages often succeeded, at least in the longer run, to ease the suffering of innocent individuals. In the same manner, even before Kreisky’s term of office, Austria had been instrumental in enabling the emigration of many Czech and Slovak intellectuals and artists after the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ in 1968. Many of them settled in Austria, enriching its cultural life and continuing to annoy the communist regime in nearby Prague.

From early on, Austrians established and maintained close ties both with the officials, but also with representatives of civilian society in the Eastern bloc: dissidents, writers, academics and church leaders. Austrian intellectuals, artists and clergy visited, or invited, their dissident counterparts or supplied them with information unavailable to them at home. All this had to be done more or less clandestinely and some Austrian diplomats and politicians were complicit in such activity. The aim was not to overthrow any regimes but to improve conditions for creative and critical people who had to live under communist rule. In doing so, old familial and cultural relations, originating in centuries of shared history within the Habsburg Empire, were being put to good use. This access endowed Austria with special expertise that is valuable to this day. The role the country played over the decades earned it respect on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

With effect from 1968, when the Czechoslovak experiment in democratic communism was eliminated by Warsaw Pact troops, it was evident for the more clear-sighted that the Soviet system was fundamentally doomed. It had largely lost hearts and minds. The commitment of the Soviets in 1975, in the Final Acts of the Conference on Security and...