Cold War Cultures

Perspectives on Eastern and Western European Societies

Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, Thomas Lindenberger, Annette Vowinckel, Marcus M. Payk, Thomas Lindenberger

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780857452443
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia europea

The Cold War was not only about the imperial ambitions of the super powers, their military strategies, and antagonistic ideologies. It was also about conflicting worldviews and their correlates in the daily life of the societies involved. The term "Cold War Culture" is often used in a broad sense to describe media influences, social practices, and symbolic representations as they shape, and are shaped by, international relations. Yet, it remains in question whether — or to what extent — the Cold War Culture model can be applied to European societies, both in the East and the West. While every European country had to adapt to the constraints imposed by the Cold War, individual development was affected by specific conditions as detailed in these chapters. This volume offers an important contribution to the international debate on this issue of the Cold War impact on everyday life by providing a better understanding of its history and legacy in Eastern and Western Europe.

Part I

MEDIATING THE COLD WAR

Radio, Film, Television, and Literature

Chapter 1

EAST EUROPEAN COLD WAR CULTURE(S)

Alterities, Commonalities, and Film Industries

Marsha Siefert

At one end of Budapest's Freedom (Szabadság) Square stands a tall obelisk topped by a five-pointed star, with a dedication in Hungarian and Russian to the Soviet “heroes” who died “liberating” Budapest from Nazi occupation in 1945. It is surrounded by a person-high metal barricade, which was put up after the monument was defaced during the October 2006 demonstrations against the Hungarian government, on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1956 revolution. Across the walkway, for several months in 2008, stood a two-story tent, erected by a Hungarian nationalist organization and topped by a Hungarian flag. In front of the tent were three large wooden crosses, the taller middle one with two cross-pieces; on the highest cross-piece was nailed a map of pre-Trianon Hungary, with the lost territories colored in black. The sign in English and Hungarian proclaimed that the Hungarian flag had stood in that place and had been unlawfully torn down after 1945. Just a few paces from the monument and its constructed response, also on Freedom Square and enclosed by a person-high metal barricade, is the United States Embassy.

Symbol elision, juxtaposition, and overload are not unusual in “Eastern Europe,” even after the twentieth anniversary of the fall of communism. Such abundant referents challenge any attempt to generalize about a cultural past in a part of the world so filled with boundary changes and so saturated in human tragedies. For this essay, which attempts to grapple with ways in which to approach the topic of Cold War Culture in this region as a whole, the assemblage on Szabadság Square links politics to culture, past to present, Europe to the Cold War, one superpower to another, while forging the longer-term historical trajectories so critical to differentiating the nations included in the Cold War geopolitical term “Eastern Europe.” To speak of cultural commonalities, however, seems to go against the very heart of scholarship from this part of Europe since the fall of the Wall. Scholars from Hungary and Poland, Romania and Bulgaria, the emerged or reemerged countries of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, the former Yugoslav republics and the Baltic states, have rein-vigorated national continuities in historicist terms. If Cold War Culture is mentioned, scholars from post-Socialist countries often see it as a limiting lens through which Western scholars interpreted everything, suppressing national specificities and reducing cultural products to the political. East European efforts to reclaim four decades of culture from ideological evaluation have revitalized the study of postwar music, art, film, and literature, with new themes of memory and everyday life and re-evaluated examples of aesthetic achievement.

Yet now, twenty years on, as most of these nations have become part of a new European aggregation, it may be possible to ask whether the new scholarship on the Cold War, and especially Cold War Culture, has anything to offer in thinking about the East European Cold War experience, without being either dominated or limited by that approach. This chapter will begin with some thoughts about how culture was linked to the Cold War in classic Anglo-American texts, and what happens when Europe is introduced into this equation. Particular attention will be paid to “Eastern Europe,” which in Cold War symbolic geography includes countries today considered part of Central and Southeastern Europe. Next, the East European organizations and institutions created for cultural exchange and dissemination will be described in terms of their participation in bilateral and transnational relations of cultural import and export. Finally, the film industry is used to explore the implications of this approach, because during this period making films in Eastern Europe without state participation would have been technologically and practically prohibitive and because films were such an important component of Cold War cultural diplomacy. Overall, the goal is to give “the East” a place in the elaboration and critique of the concept of European Cold War Culture.

Cold War + Culture

The Cold War is no longer what it used to be. The years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union have seen increased scholarly attention to the Cold War's origin and ending. One result is that the time frame has broadened: looking specifically at U.S.-Soviet relations, some date the start of the Cold War as early as 1917, from the American intervention in the Russian Civil War.¹ Others have assessed Russian-American relations across the Revolutionary divide.² A central figure in this reexamination is Joseph Stalin, the Soviet ruler most identified with building the Soviet state during the 1930s and the postwar reconstruction of Eastern Europe. Obvious ideological continuities are evident in the persistence of Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, however any change in Stalin's policy and behavior following the dissolution of the wartime alliance might be construed.³

In the so-called cultural turn in scholarship on Cold War political and diplomatic relations,⁴ especially as “soft power” has become an important explanatory factor in the rise of the United States after 1945,⁵ the Cold War has been discursively related to culture in at least two ways. When “culture” is an adjective, the “cultural Cold War” hearkens back to Christopher Lasch's 1967 essay in The Nation, in which he used that term to discuss the CIA-backed Congress of Cultural Freedom (CCF).⁶ After 1991, a new generation of scholars has revisited the history and the operation of institutions designed to “fight” the Cold War. The activities of the Ford Foundation and the Congress of Cultural Freedom, which published Encounter, Preuves, and Der Monat, along with the later cultural exchanges negotiated between governments, are identifiable manifestations of the cultural Cold War.⁷ So too are the Western publications of dissident writings and the crises that arose in the process, from the Nobel prize awarded to Boris Pasternak to the well publicized defections and espionage scandals. The intertwining of high politics and high culture is a theme in contemporary accounts of its early decades.

In the context of the United States, using “Cold War” as an adjective to culture enlarges the frame to include cultural products—extending to attitudes and practices—specifically directed toward the domestic audience, sometimes called the Cold War “home front.”⁸ American Cold War Culture is often topically identified with books or movies that specifically address Cold War concerns, from the arms race to the space race, and include representations of “the Other,” from spy films to science fiction, the Communist enemy within as well as in the East.⁹ Everything from Hollywood to the evening television news, from serial music to abstract art, has been analyzed as Cold War Culture.¹⁰ Thus in the U.S., the institutional structures that were created during the Cold War for exporting culture are related to, but not coterminous with Cold War Culture, much of which was produced for domestic consumption and within a commercial context. Two influential books written before the Cold War was “over” and “won” use a broader understanding of culture, with a small c. As exemplified by the table of contents of The Culture of the Cold War, Stephen Whitfield lists not cultural categories, like film or music, but verbs of activity and agency. His chapter titles, like “Seeing Red,” “Politicizing,” “Assenting,” “Informing,” and “Dissenting,”¹¹ emphasize that Cold War Culture includes practices of cultural interpretation as well as cultural products. Lary May argues persuasively that American attitudes, as well as cultural products, created after 1945 were inflected by the Cold War and by a paradigm shift in America's perception of its own role as “leader of the free world.”¹² Everyday life and its representation are part of the renewed interest in Cold War Culture.

However, the concept of Cold War Culture, even in the American case, has not been without its critics. Sometimes, for example, the Cold War seems to become a loose temporal marker for the 1950s, or for postwar America. In other cases it is used as an overdetermined metaphor that infuses cultural practice without adding to its understanding.¹³ Reviews of the “Cold War Culture industry” remark on book titles using Cold War Culture as a marketing tool rather than an examined concept. Sometimes Cold War Culture is used to argue about something else entirely—for example the way the Hollywood Red Scare and the Vietnam War are used to critique the present,¹⁴ or to express moral outrage over particular sets of values or assumptions now proven wrong.¹⁵ Because culture, especially consumer culture and popular culture, has been credited with “winning” the Cold War, the nature of this culture's effects on “the Other” are often presumed or too baldly stated, with more attention to the message than to how it was received and interpreted.¹⁶ Finally, focusing on the cultural product—the films or the blue jeans—can obscure the “big ideas” and political stakes of the Cold War enmity.¹⁷ Cultural transfer, whether of American Cold War Culture or its conceptualization, can no longer be treated as self-evident.

Decentering America and Adding Europe

Adding Europe to the concept of Cold War Culture immediately invokes the bilateral West-East frame, as patently manifested by the symbolic geography of a Europe divided into West and East. In its simplest form, the term “European Cold War Culture” could apply to European domestic cultural products and practices similar to those identified by American scholars and commentators. But the attribution is complicated by Europe's role in the bilateral context, because in the matter of culture, Europe set the standard of achievement and value. Both the United States and the Soviet Union had traditions of cultural enlightenment and saw themselves as latecomers to the cultural contest in European high culture.¹⁸ In this contest, the USSR pressed its advantage, reminding Europeans (both West and East) of its long and passionate commitment to and influence in theater, literature, dance, and music. The Soviet Union also shared with Europe the tradition of state sponsorship of the arts, and so the exposure of the American dependence on covert financing of their cultural projects abroad was more damaging in the lie than was government presence in the cultural sphere. Also, American efforts at exporting high culture in the early Cold War were demonstrably less successful than earlier Russian efforts in Western Europe. American CCF officials privately saw the 1952 Paris Festival “Masterpieces of the Twentieth Century” as a chance to counter “the traditional European misconception of the United States as a country lacking in culture, a misconception consistently exploited by Communist propaganda.”¹⁹

Thus for Europe as a whole, and especially in Western Europe, it is sometimes difficult to separate what scholars label as “Americanization” from American Cold War cultural diplomacy.²⁰ Americanization is considered a longer-lived phenomenon. Victoria de Grazia, for example, addresses consumer culture as a twentieth-century phenomenon dating from 1914, bringing American products and techniques to Europe.²¹ For the American film industry, the European market was intertwined with the rise of the Hollywood studio system, dominated by moguls of European origin, and exporting movies made for the domestic U.S. audiences was always part of the international marketing plan.²² European reception of American Cold War Culture is part of a longer history of entangled cultural values.

European scholars have endeavored to introduce a more nuanced picture of the relationship between the United States and Western Europe by using the concept of “Westernization,” which emphasizes the emergence of a transatlantic community of values. Here, cultural transfer is less about imposition and more about cooperation among the Western European countries, and importantly differentiates among the postwar histories of the many national and interest groups.²³ This European reinscription of “the West” into postwar culture, along with the national studies of the reception of U.S. culture in Europe,²⁴ affirms that generalizing about Europe or even Western Europe is fraught with qualifications and exceptions.

Europe is also a part of the enlarged spatial conception of the “global Cold War.” The Cold War context certainly affected the way in which the postwar decolonization of European empires as well as the proxy and covert wars between Communists and anti-Communists that took place on “Third World” soil. But the Cold War did not determine the outcome.²⁵One of the key words of Cold War theoretical discourse—“modernization”—also has a longer history, related to processes of technological development and urbanization that cut across the Cold War divide.²⁶ As Cox argues, especially beginning in the 1970s, Europe played a much more active role in the diplomatic and political as well as cultural life of the Cold War, especially through the European Community, than the America-centered narrative credits.²⁷ Overall, then, reinserting Europe into the cultural Cold War narrative also makes sense. Gienow-Hecht affirms: “In the case of…Europe, cultural relations and exchanges had been in place before, both on the level of high and popular culture. The Cold War highlighted, formalized and politicized these ties. It triggered programs to finance individual interactions that would otherwise not have been taking place. But it did not inspire new cultural affinities.…These had been in place before and they remained in place thereafter.”²⁸ These European...